Capgemini and Sogeti, part of the Capgemini Group, released a new report on Continuous Testing.
Capgemini and Sogeti, part of the Capgemini Group, today released a new report on Continuous Testing. According to the report, the practice of Continuous Testing – the process of fast and efficient validation of software releases in agile developments through highly automated tests – is gaining ground in large enterprises, with almost a third of IT executives (32%) stating that their IT departments had ‘fully embraced Continuous Testing’.
The report is based on 500 interviews with senior-level IT executives from large and medium-sized companies (over 1,000 employees) in industries including financial services, high tech, healthcare and life sciences, telecommunications, media and entertainment, and manufacturing. It found:
Companies must unlock the potential of automation in testing
The study strongly highlights that there is a significant scope to optimize Continuous Testing processes through technology. It found that automation was only being used to execute 24% of test cases, 24% of end-to-end business scenarios, and to generate 25% of the required test data.
Greater use of automation could significantly improve the velocity of testing activities in the agile teams; for example, over a third (36%) of those surveyed said that more than 50% of testing time is spent searching, managing, maintaining and generating test data. The report recommends that to respond to customer and market needs, all enterprises need to take significant action.
Use cases, detailed in the report, include a leading Australian bank, which had over 5,000 builds for more than 100 applications. By harnessing a single platform for automated build and deployment, integrated with testing and automation tools, it was able to reduce build cycle time by 40%, improve time to market and significantly increase environment uptime.
Enterprises need smarter orchestration and enablement for testing
The self-empowerment of autonomous teams resulted for many enterprises in an uncontrolled landscape with a broad diversity in QA and test automation approaches. To regain control, cites the report, organizations need to improve the central quality enablement of the agile teams with clearer QA guidelines and smarter QA technology provisioning. A promising development is to make the test orchestration and execution much smarter via artificial intelligence (AI) technologies which provide “smart” test orchestration. With the addition of machine learning capabilities, systems will be able to automatically determine the tests that are required in the release and production cycles.
The report showed a clear need for improved transparency and orchestration in agile testing. Among the executives surveyed, 35% identified a ‘complete audit trail of testing activities’ and a ‘consolidated test and release pipeline’ as the most important test orchestration capabilities, with 32% highlighting a need for a ‘single-place for cross-team collaboration’ and ‘continuous delivery pipeline visibility’.
The shortage of centralized enablement on technology provisioning becomes most apparent when investigating the challenges with test environments. Teams wasted too much time procuring complete test environments. Four in ten (40%) of the respondents said their teams spend more than half of their time building and maintaining their test environments.
Inter-disciplinary teams require new skills and support
In the last three to five years, the roles of both developers and testers have evolved significantly. According to the report, developers are now much closer to the customer, with a prominent role in shaping the user experience, while testers have moved out of siloed teams to work in parallel with developers and business teams, meaning that they are involved much earlier in the development life cycle. The roles and responsibilities of developers and testers are blurring, but clearly it remains important to have QA and test focused experts in the agile teams.
These inter-disciplinary teams mark a move forward, but also create challenges, details the report. They require every team member to have a holistic understanding of the entire process, with testers needing to upgrade their technical skills. Companies must address the requirement for upskilling and a new, integrated approach to truly achieve Continuous Testing’s full potential.