This study shows the importance of automation and QA for app performance and quality, and that many plan to increase testing investments in the coming year.
It was good speaking with Subu Baskaran, Senior Product Manager at Sencha about the results of a worldwide survey of more than 1,000 QA and development professionals responsible for web applications. Conducted byDimensional Research, the goal of “The State of Web Application Testing” was to gain insights into current attitudes and common experiences regarding the testing of web applications.
Software bugs have been a pervasive issue in application development since its inception. Throughout the years, end-users have shown an increased demand for more data-intensive applications and a more sophisticated and flexible user experience across the board, making QA and testing a vital step in the application development process.
According to Subu, companies are reluctant to put in the time and money upfront in production. They are still waiting for bugs to be found in production even though it’s much less costly and time-consuming to fix bugs in development than in production.
Nearly three quarters (73 percent) of survey participants plan to increase their investment in testing within the coming year. The majority of respondents (42 percent) cite the reason being that end users are demanding higher quality. Other reasons include the need to improve time-to-market, reducing overall costs, response to quality issues, and overall development budget increases.
Summary of key survey findings:
98 percent report business-impacting quality issues.
53 percent say their business-impacting quality issues occur at least monthly.
99 percent say quality issues have direct business impact including customer satisfaction (79 percent) , damage to reputation (59 percent) , and cost to fix problems (58 percent) .
94 percent face challenges conducting adequate QA.
79 percent automate testing, but only 8 percent have a mature test automation practice.
Only 52 percent have a clear process for frontline staff to flag urgent quality issues.
44 percent do not hold employees accountable for business impacting quality problems.
73 percent will increase testing investment in the coming year.
Testing investment increases occurring because of customer demand, improved time-to-market, cost reduction, pressure from business stakeholders, and more.
Are these results consistent with what you are seeing in your business?
