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More than half of the large enterprises (58%) roll out new software every day. Twenty-six percent even do that every hour. At the same time, only one in three (32%) indicates that it has fully embraced Continuous Testing. Companies still have work to do to streamline their testing processes with an agile development ecosystem.

This is evident from the Continuous Testing Report 2019 of Capgemini and its subsidiary Sogeti. To this end, 500 interviews were conducted worldwide with senior IT managers in large and medium-sized companies (more than 1,000 employees) from various sectors.

According to the report, Continuous Testing is gaining ground in large companies, but quality control remains the bottleneck for an optimal application of DevOps and CI/CD (Continuous Integragion/Continuous Delivery). As many as 60 percent of the companies surveyed say they are confronted with gaps in the coverage of software test cases. According to the report, more automation and a different team structure can provide an answer to this question.

Automation

Automation is only used to run 24 percent of the test cases and 24 percent of the end-to-end business scenarios, as well as to generate 25 percent of the required test data. More use of automation could significantly improve the speed of test activities in agile teams, it sounds in the report. Just over a third of respondents (36%) say that more than half of the test time is spent searching, managing, maintaining and generating test data.

The report cites the example of an Australian bank, with over 5,000 builds of more than 100 applications. Using a single automated build and deployment platform integrated with testing and automation tools, it was able to reduce construction cycle time by 40 percent, improve time-to-market and significantly increase uptime.

Smart orchestration

The self-enforcement of autonomous teams has led to an uncontrolled landscape in many companies with a wide variety of approaches to automating Quality Assurance (QA) and testing processes. Companies can regain control by choosing clear QA guidelines for smarter technologies, such as artificial intelligence, for the orchestration of tests. With the addition of machine learning, systems can automatically determine the tests required at a given point in the production cycle.

The next two to three years will be a critical period for Continuous Testing, says Mark Buenen, Global Leader Digital Assurance and Testing at Capgemini. Organizations need to solve the dilemma of transitioning to self-reliant autonomous teams, where quality is everyone’s responsibility, while central quality support and oversight need to be improved to create an agile development environment that can deliver real value in an increasingly complex IT landscape.

Interdisciplinary teams

Finally, the report describes how the roles of both developers and testers have changed dramatically over the past three to five years. Developers today are much closer to the customer and the business, while testers have been pulled out of their silos to work more closely with development and business teams.

These interdisciplinary teams provide their own challenges. It requires that each team member has a holistic understanding of the entire production process. Companies must address the need to acquire new skills and adopt an integrated approach to realise the full potential of Continuous Testing.

It is difficult to take full advantage of the benefits of Agile and DevOps without continuous test automation, allowing organizations to use data and intelligence to accelerate the creation of high-quality software at the pace of digital business operations, concludes Ashok Reddy, Managing Director Enterprise Software Division at Broadcom, who also contributed to the report.

This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.