Testing and the CIO What are the key QA business drivers and challenges that CIO's are facing?

The Information Technology profession faces an increasing number of challenges whilst delivering advanced solutions, in ever shorter timescales, to extremely demanding business users.

At the CIO level, a mixture of restricted budgets, aggressive timescales, and businesses seeking a competitive advantage through new technologies, increases the pressure and risk associated with managing these high profile initiatives.

At Original Software, we understand the challenges that face CIOs. And we have made sure that our solutions can help CIOs initiate dramatic improvements in software quality and business confidence.

Executive boards are challenging CIOs to conceive and deliver strategic initiatives that in turn will provide competitive advantage and future business benefits. These will involve projects such as:

• Re-engineering existing systems
• Implementing new technologies, especially web enablement
• Upgrading core vendor packages to current releases
• Delivering business driven enhancements and new systems
• Legislation mandated enhancements
• Controlling outsourced developments
• Corporate compliance

Common Project Risks

With such projects there are many issues to be overcome and pitfalls to be avoided on the route to success.

• Limited resources
• Finite budget
• Fixed deadlines
• New technologies
• Quality
• Control
• Compliance

A Common Factor

Whilst searching for strategies that help to deliver success, a familiar recurring bottleneck can be identified; testing. Testing is often performed manually and accounts for a substantial proportion of an application development project budget.

When all the testing elements are added together (Unit, System, QA, Regression, UAT) it could be as much as 80% for a re-engineering project, but is never smaller than 30%. What would be the impact on a typical project if this activity was halved, or even reduced by 80%? Can some simple and effective measures focused here have a dramatic and positive impact on the success of key projects? The answer is yes.

Why spend time and money on automation? Find out here!

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