Companies are looking to embrace new technologies, but struggling with some of the basic requirements of continuous testing, according to the annual Continuous Testing report produced by Capgemini, Sogeti and Broadcom.
The report, based on interviews with 500 decision-makers in corporate IT across different business sectors in North America and Europe, found that 78% of respondents said that “getting visibility throughout the development lifecycle” is a key challenge on the path to continuous testing. That percentage was similar to the results of the 2019 survey, indicating that firms are struggling to bring elements of the software development lifecycle together to create a single source of truth, from release management though to deployment, with integrated tooling, quality checks and metrics, the report authors said.
While more than half – 55% – of respondents said they have adopted a continuous testing approach, many are also struggling to make “shift left” a reality. Designing and maintaining meaningful test cases that align with user expectation was cited by 68% of respondents as a key challenge – many simply find it hard to assess the performance of their apps from an end-user standpoint.
Model-based testing, behaviour-driven development and test-driven-development and in-sprint security tests with predictive analytics were mentioned as focus areas.
And companies are seeking to use new technologies to accelerate these methodologies and to manage testing. More than half -53%, said they will use cloud provisioning for test management; 45% said they will use test virtualization and 37% containerization.
“Besides making test automation a priority, organizations need to think of embedding quality into every phase of their software development lifecycle,” said Sushil Kumar, head of DevOps and Continuous Testing Business at Broadcom’s Enterprise Software Division. “This requires modern, developer-friendly, AI-powered tools that make continuous quality easy to adopt and practice for every stakeholder and every team.”
