Testing and QA remains a significant cost for business change projects at approximately a quarter of the total IT budget. Whilst this cost is already hefty, industry analysts predict a hike in this over the next three years, to approximately a third of the IT budget.

Given the increased pressure on organisations to make cost reductions, remain competitive and continue to improve profit margins, such a substantial increase in spend on testing and QA could have significant repercussions.

The reason behind this increase is the rapid change in the way organisations develop and implement technology projects. The adoption of Agile development methods, DevOps, Cloud computing and the focus on digital technology, added to the increased importance of Customer Experience (CX), are changing the demands on how testing and QA need to be undertaken. This change is putting more pressure on testing and QA being a key stage in solution delivery and a ‘protector of the brand’.

To address the changing landscape for testing and QA, it is essential that organisations review how they undertake it. Organisational change, new methods and process backed by the latest tools and technology will be critical for success.

There are five key reasons how the factors outlined above impact the cost of testing and QA, which include:

1. The shift to Agile and DevOps is creating more cycles and releases
2. Project teams and their supporting test teams continue to be decentralised requiring dedicated resources and tools
3. Co-location of teams is causing a reverse of previous offshoring initiatives
4. The technology is becoming more complex and distributed, with applications fragmented across several platforms requiring more complex test architecture, tools, data and environments
5. Test coverage needs to be at least maintained, if not increased to avoid impacting CX quality but in a shorter space of time

Traditional approaches are full of inefficient testing activities, and these are magnified by the increased test cycles introduced as part of Agile and DevOps. Whilst it is a key principle of the Agile and DevOps methods to automate processes, many organisations have struggled to keep pace, often resorting to many cycles of manual testing because of a lack of expertise and tools to support automation.

The decentralisation of project teams is creating another emerging challenge, “where does the responsibility for end-to-end testing lie?”, Each team is responsible for delivering its specific part, but customer value is derived from all parts working in harmony. Continuous integration testing of applications must be a focus and requires a champion to drive the initiative.

The impact this change is having on testing and QA should not be underestimated: Businesses want to disband their large Test Centres of Excellence in favour of smaller decentralised teams, giving them autonomy to define their own testing strategies, select their own test tools and define what quality means to them. However, the danger is this approach goes too far – without some central alignment, budget control and consistency are impossible to achieve. Some elements benefit from economies of scale, such as procuring test tools (software licences), test environment and data provisioning and it is necessary to accommodate these more cost-effective processes.

To address the changing landscape, businesses will be forced to become smarter at how they approach testing and enable continuous testing. Alongside increasing the automated test coverage, it is important to revisit legacy test processes to:

• Optimise them and align them with the business risks
• Shift testing efforts to the code and API layers where speed of execution is high, and maintenance is lower
• Leverage test data management and infrastructure to remove blockers and enable execution of realistic end-to-end tests without generating false positives.

As organisations implement Agile and DevOps processes, analysts predict that the portion of the testing budget for infrastructure and tools will increase, with less spend on human resources. To maximise this investment organisations should also be implementing platform automation to increase the efficiency in which infrastructure and data can be provided to the test teams on-demand and consistently.

So, the challenge is to adapt to these new processes and technology development, deliver more change for less money, whilst delighting the customer with an excellent customer experience to maintain their loyalty.

P2 Consulting don’t just ‘do’ testing, we ‘think’ about testing. We help you integrate a testing solution in the most efficient and effective way for your business. We look at your organisation, development process, technology environments across all aspects of your change programmes. We don’t just throw manpower at the solution, we consider the most efficient organisation and how technology can be used to optimise the way testing is delivered.

To find out how our Testing Solution can help your business, please email Luke Barfield or call +44 (0) 20 7099 0803 today.