Published on the 17/09/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
Australian and New Zealand technology leaders are leading the world in terms of their adoption of cloud based quality assurance testing – but there are still gaps in the repertoire…
The seventh annual World Quality Report from Capgemini, which explores quality and testing practices in 11 global markets has revealed that ANZ is leading the world in cloud testing, with half of all applications testing being conducted that way. It reflects a 19 percent increase in the adoption of cloud based testing year on year.
Sudhir Pai, Capgemini CTO and testing leader for Capgemini in Australia, said that this was being driven particularly out of the telecommunications, retail – and to a lesser extent, finance – sectors.
There has also been a significant uptick in the harnessing of Agile and DevOps approaches to applications development in ANZ. According to the survey 44 percent of ANZ survey respondents said that they were using Agile techniques, while 84 percent said that they were using a DevOps approach, driven by the need for rapid digital transformation.
Overall quality assurance and testing investment locally has risen from 25 percent of the IT budgets in 2014 to 36 percent in 2015.
However the bulk of the spending is still focused on maintenance style testing rather than on transformational development testing, suggesting that Australian enterprise has a way to go to be as nimble as it might like to be.
Unlike previous years where costs have been a driver for testing, the report found that this year 68 percent of IT executives felt that high responsiveness to changing business demands was a top priority, followed by customer experience at 67 percent.
“For the last two years there has been a focus on cost optimisation,” said Pai. “There is a shift to the left to test customer experience including mobility.”
Where organisations were still challenged, he said, was in developing and harnessing a robust test data framework allowing valid, but protected, data to be available for testing purposes. He said this was particularly important as organisations moved to test SaaS, cloud and hybrid solutions where there was a need for valid – but not live – data to be made available for testing.
Over the coming 12 months Pai said he expected ANZ IT leaders to continue to invest in and explore Agile testing, particularly distributed Agile testing; to enhance the security testing of applications; and also to explore and enhance the customer experience.
