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Testing an opportunity for Broadcom as firms target continuous delivery

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When IT infrastructure giant Broadcom paid $19 bn for CA Technologies last year, a part of what it acquired was testing expertise. And testing remains the bottleneck in software development says Broadcom’s Sushil Kumar. More efficient test data management will be the key challenge facing firms as they strive for continuous delivery over the next few years, concludes a recent survey – The Continuous Testing Report 2019 – published recently by Sogeti, Capgemini alongside Broadcom. “The report found that 58% of respondents were deploying apps on a daily basis, or even more frequently,” said Sushil Kumar, head of the continuous testing business at Broadcom’s Enterprise Software Division. “But even so, testing remains the single biggest bottleneck to increasing the velocity of deployment. And, in turn, the challenges of maintaining test environments, notably generating test data, are the single major reason for that.” The survey for the report, which was based on 500 interviews undertaken mid-2018, found that 26% of respondents – the largest group – use existing test data for new tests, without changes, rather than using commercial tools or test generators to supply fresh data, for example. This points to inefficient testing and to increased security risks, the reports’ authors concluded. The other side of the same data challenge, the report found, is that the time and cost of test environment management is the number one concern cited by firms. “There is a simple recipe for continuous testing: if you do more testing, and you do it earlier, the better the quality you will achieve,” said Kumar. “The reality is as simple as that. And testing can be a huge factor in creating a user-differentiated experience. Large and small, financial firms face the same challenge of increasing the velocity of software delivery without losing customer credibility.” “We see a huge opportunity in our core strengths in testing: service virtualization, test data management and test change management, and with BlazeMeter [Broadcom’s test management platform], which I would say represents the modern alternative to traditional load testing.” The disastrous online outage at TSB  in April 2018 has been a siren call to banks around the world to improve testing, said Kumar. “The back-story to TSB’s problems was that not enough was spent on testing. The challenge all financial firms face as they become more software-centric is how they improve the velocity of app delivery without losing any credibility with their customers. And the other side of that coin is that testing can be a huge factor in creating a user-differentiated experience.” See here for a link to the report.