68% of organizations don’t have an IoT test strategy

Capgemini and HPE examined the state of application quality and testing practices across multiple industries and 32 countries. They discovered that, despite 85% claiming that IoT products are a part of their business operations, 68% of organisations in which IoT plays a role, do not currently have a test strategy for this specific aspect of IT.

Organisations under pressure to deploy new digital products and services are finding it tough to strike a balance between quality and speed of development, particularly when it comes to deploying IoT technology.

This year’s share of the IT budget devoted to quality assurance (QA) and testing has dropped to 31% after a significant and worrying increase from 18% to 35% during the preceding four years. Despite this year’s reduction, there is an overall prediction that spending will increase to 40% in 2019.

Intelligence-led QA and testing will help drive efficiency

Many companies are turning to machine-based intelligence to help cut costs and drive efficiency across the organisation. The growing adoption of digital technologies is consuming large amounts of budget and businesses are finding it challenging to balance innovation with cost, with 48% failing to meet the contrasting demands of handling multiple test environments. To combat this, organizations need greater investment in intelligence-driven QA to identify and predict quality issues before they occur.

Agile and DevOps continue to grow in adoption

This year’s report also reveals an increase in the adoption of agile testing methodologies and DevOps to help businesses roll out new products and services at greater speed. However, 44% of businesses are reluctant to include testing teams in the initial planning phase believing it will inhibit release speed, inadvertently putting the security of the business at risk.

DevOps implementation challenges go far beyond issues with QA and businesses risk isolating the benefits of DevOps if they are unable to break down business silos. In a bid to balance the additional costs of these new technologies, 40% of businesses are adopting predictive analytics in order to automate as much of the testing pipeline as possible.

“Digital transformation provides a huge opportunity for growth, but this can only be realised if customer and other stakeholder engagement is actively enhanced. Organisations must be proactive in breaking down silos between business, development, quality and operations, and use agile and DevOps to focus on customer value and business relevance. To retain a competitive edge, QA and Test organisations must move towards test ecosystem automation, predictive analytics and intelligence-led quality assurance and testing, so that they are able to ensure business outcomes,” said Hans van Waayenburg, Leader of the Testing Global Service Line, Capgemini Group.

As the IoT takes an increasingly important role in business operations, every enterprise must adopt a risk-based test strategy that creates a secure test ecosystem. To do this the report recommends that, businesses invest in as-a-service solutions for testing environment management, data management and test execution, as well as higher overall levels of engineering in their testing teams in order to maintain their system integrity and help boost innovation.