Time a Software Quality Conundrum
Meeting the Demands of the Business
No successful business will survive without innovation. Senior management rightly expects information systems to fully and rapidly support their business initiatives; deliver more, quicker, more cost effectively.
It is in front of this corporate backdrop that IT departments are struggling to find ways to improve their application delivery times without compromising on quality. With testing and quality assurance processes accounting for around 40% of total application development time, it is a good target for IT managers to streamline.
Historically, the way IT departments tackled testing was to purchase automated testing products from companies such as IBM Rational, or HP. By automating their tests they should be able to halve the time spent on testing at least - thus relieving the bottleneck of testing. Easy.
Actually, no. 20 years and billions of dollars later, nothing seems to have changed. 40% of application development time is still taken up by testing, and what's more, the vast majority of testing (80% is a very common figure) is still carried out manually.
So what has gone wrong? Well, there's a few things to be honest, first off there is the scripting language these tools are reliant upon. Even before a test is automated in anger a large group of testers have to spend an awful long time building scripts to start with. This could take weeks or even months! Not a great scenario when you face time pressures. Often in these situations it is quicker to do it all manually. Which is ironic really.
What happens when an applicationunder test changes? Well, unless you want to spend days re-writing scripts for your old automation tool, you test it manually. This is why so much testing is still manual, the traditional automation tools are not able to cope with change.
The answer? Next generation test automation from Original Software. With no scripts to write and a self updating system not only are our solutions quick and easy to set up, they will update themselves automatically if your application changes. Now that's easy.
Read more about "Resource" in the Quality Conundrum or read more about "Risk" in the Quality Conundrum. Alternitively click on a segment of the "Software Quality Conundrum Wheel" above!
