Software Testing Trends 2014 - Conclusions

The year 2014 is coming to an end and the businesses are working on their budgets allocated for the
forthcoming year. Now the entire industry is very eager to know about the key business areas on QA and
testing areas for the year 2014. Lets go through the findings for the year 2014 from the world quality
report from Capgemini, HP and Sogeti.

2014 Conclusions:
Increased Importance of QA & Testing:
Transformational programs using Social Media, Mobile, IoT, Analytics and Cloud had a significant and
positive impact on the importance of QA & Testing. The quality of the IT solutions has much stronger
and immediate impact on the business results. This has created the awareness in the business and
senior IT executives the significance of the QA & Testing in this digital transformation age. This trend has
pushed the Testing budgets to 52% of overall of project budgets out of which 40% is allocated to Bigdata
Analytics, 27% to Cloud and 17% to Mobile. This clearly illustrates for all the QA and Testing people,
projects and organizations where to concentrate in the near future.

QA & Testing budgets continued to increase:

The proportion of IT budgets allocated to QA & Testing has been continuously increasing. It was 18% in
2012 and has grown to 26% by the year 2014 and will reach to 29%by 2017, predicts Gartner. The digital
transformation initiatives are the one driving the growth and importance of the QA and Testing activities
on the IT spending of the organizations.

Increased Importance of TCOE:

Many Businesses prefer to organize QA & Testing functions with a combination with centralized and
decentralized approaches. Over the last three years consolidating the testing practices under the
umbrella of an industrialized Testing Center of Excellence has been an important trend: the number of
organizations that report having fully operational TCOEs has raised from just 4% in 2011 to 26% in 2014.
These TCOEs are present in organizations in many different forms and are designed to provide improved
governance, control, processes and metrics to help increase efficiency and improve business outcomes.
The TCOE has been a centralized function till now but the future of the TCOE is going to be slightly
decentralized as the businesses are looking for hybrid structure that combine the benefits of a
centralized governance, processes and reporting with decentralized model where the testers are
integrated into project teams and work closely with business.

External Service Providers played a crucial role:

Companies and organizations are increasingly reducing the in-house testing over the past three years. If
we closely look the in-house testing has been reduced to 30% in the year 2014 where as it was 51% in
the year 2012. Most widely used engagement is to share the QA responsibilities of QA between client

and service provider. In this fast paced transformational projects the businesses are levelling off their
offshore testing and increase their investments to nearshore locations. The current distribution of
testers is 59% onshore, 20% nearshore and 21% offshore.

Light on Non-functional testing:

The businesses are looking for more on verifying additional set of requirements alongside functional
validation. The research says Security (59%) and Performance (57%) are the top focused areas for
testing application migration to Cloud. The focus of mobile testing is also emerging for validation of
Security (54%), functionality (54%), performance (51%) and usability (45%).

Testing to be integrated with agile development methods:

The use of agile development methods has become very common across the organizations. It is because
the agile demands faster and more responsive delivery of application combinations. Many organizations
agree that still there we are lacking a proven agile testing approach (61%).

Adoption of cloud based solutions for testing:

The study says that there is a big leap in the cloud adoption for hosting testing applications. Though
there was a decline trend in the year of 2013, the 2014 has shown a significant growth (28%) and is
expected to grow to 25% by 2017. The percentage of testing in the cloud has been increased to 32% in
2014 from 28% and is projected to grow to 49% by the year 2017.

Reduction of the test environment infrastructure costs:

It is a known fact that properly configured and readily available environments are crucial for the success
of a testing project. The research shows that the organizations spent around 33% of their testing
budgets on setting up the test environments. This has given rise to adoption of virtualization and cloud
technologies to reduce the testing infrastructure costs. Alongside of the virtualization and cloud, there is
a need for test data management to reduce the operational challenges. However the research still says
that there is still a challenge in provisioning the testing environments and the tests that are being
automated (28%) which implies that organizations are yet to reach a reasonable level of test
automation.

Recommendations:
Based on these findings from 2014, the following could be the action items which can be tailor made
based on the organizations goals:
1. Streamline QA & Testing processes to fit the new technologies required by the digital
transformation
2. Build organizational specific fully operational TCOEs
3. End-to-End customer experience is the future trend. Focus on all channel experience testing
4. Create structured and focused testing solutions for agile and DevOps

5.
6.
7.
8.

Automate as much as possible thus improve test efficiency and control costs
Head start on automation with TDD
Increase focus on non-functional testing, especially Security and performance
Increase use of cloud and virtualization for test environments

Source: http://www.capgemini.com/thought-leadership/world-quality-report-2014-15