Published on the 08/10/2013 | Written by Newsdesk

A new study shows testing and quality assurance spending has significantly increased, accounting for almost a quarter of the IT budget…

The fifth World Quality Report, released by Capgemini, Sogeti and HP found that 23 percent of IT budgets are now being spent on testing – up from 18 percent a year ago. The overall quality assurance budget is expected to grow to 28 percent of the total IT budget by 2015.

The report’s authors questioned whether spending a quarter or more of the IT budget on testing was sustainable, and that such significant levels of investment were perhaps required because testing wasn’t integrated early enough into the software development cycle.

The survey of 1500 CIOs – including IT leaders based in Australia and New Zealand – also throws more light onto the popularity of Agile development techniques. It found that Agile is used for some or all development in 83 percent of organisations – although 46 percent report that they still lack a consistent testing approach.

Marcello Martino, vice president Australia New Zealand testing for Capgemini said that in many cases the testing of Agile systems was handled in more of a traditional waterfall manner – when an application was completed. He said organisations needed to realise that testing was “not just verifying something works” but should be integrated into the development cycle in order to improve the way systems were designed in the first place.

What has improved considerably during the last year is the extent to which mobile applications are being tested. A year ago less than a third of mobile applications were tested, today that has soared to 55 percent. However that still means more than two in five mobile apps are being released before proper testing – and even where testing is conducted, resources are often spread thinly as organisations have to make sure software runs properly on the hundreds of different consumer devices still in use as well as emerging devices.

Martino said that for most enterprises mobile application testing was being done at a high pace and could be a “little hit and miss in how it happens.”

You can read the full report here.

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