QAGuild

Software Testing: Addressing Challenges in the future

Software quality poses a significant challenge for IT organizations, especially when it comes to the quality of custom applications. Software testing is one of the fastest growing segments within the IT services industry. The rapid growth in demand for software testing services has had a corresponding impact on the supply side. The most crucial was the scarcity of skilled manpower In 2006 . Typically, software testing demands following aspects:

• Functionality
• Performance
• Usability
• Security
• Compliance

Though a lot of automated software testing tools are available in the $2 billion global testing tool market, 80% of testing is still done manually. We can overcome the key barriers to adoption are the limitations of tools available today to address customer challenges of simple, automated testing. Better solution can be provided through designing analytical ability, require specialized skills, their overall cost of ownership is extremely high and they are capable of only detecting defects and also fixing them. Additionally, the testing Services industry is expected to face a global talent crunch. So customer’s problems cannot be solved by finding and deploying more people, but they can only be solved only by developing and deploying innovative solutions.

According to Forrester, a large number of IT services companies looking to deliver applications that met the requirements of their customers, either purchased software testing tools or upgraded their existing tools in 2006. But at the current situation customers are highly confused because of the fact that high pitch sales from some of the top brand tools companies. Customers are not getting ROI promised by the sales people of these tools companies, but they are under obligation to use it. These tools and expert resources add up very huge cost to the customers. Customers are in trouble because of the fact that they are unable to get end-to-end simplified solution from the tools provides by the companies or solution providers. On the other hand there are lot of services providers, whose revenues are purely driven by number of resources they deploy into the customer shops. Over a period of time customers started realising the pain of keeping and feeding unproductive resources fails to provide them a good solution. As per the QAGUILD experts, in the future customers will be looking for value added solutions, which will be enabling them through providing them comprehensive testing solutions.

Customers are becoming scapegoat for high end, top brand test tool companies, resources, non-compatibilities, defects in the tools etc. At the present state customers are the looser due to the fact that, using industry standard automation tools and top brand service providers they fail to deliver a long term IT solutions on time with quality due to lack of proactive approach from the Industry standard automation tool companies and top brand service providers. Customers are forced to re-invent the wheel most of the times! And tend to loose focus of their main business.

Top brand industry standard automation tools failed to address very crucial aspects of software testing, i.e performance solutions and data management solutions. According to QAGUILD experts 70-80% of the testing issues and major risks of IT is purely because of wrongly addressing or poorly implemented performance and data testing, because they are time consuming and complex in nature. Emerging test automation solution providers in the market

Facilita provides a cutting edge, versatile, cost effective performance test tool. Facilita offers complete solution for performance, load and stress testing enterprise applications. Their solution emerged from addressing various customer pains and cribs. Facilita expertise covers a wide spectrum of technology and application types including e-commerce, banking and financial services. ‘Forecast’ is a powerful performance automation tool that supports a wide range of protocols and interfaces and can be used for load, performance and stress testing of numerous IT technologies.

Grid –tools an emerging solution provider (UK based) in the area of test data management have developed very innovative and powerful toolsets which simply improve your performance by automating time-consuming data management tasks. Their solutions are rapidly attracting top-notch customers.

Software Test Automation

Software Testing is an integral part of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). More than 40% time is spent on software testing. As software programs are increasing in complexity, testing times only seem to have increased. The activities like debugging, testing, and verification activities can easily range from 50 to 75 percent of the total development cost of software applications.

One of the biggest problems in the software industry is that it is impossible to manually test all possible paths and combinations of paths through a realistically large software program.For instance, in the mobile phone industry alone softwares figure to be in the million to billion range, thereby weakening current manually set up quality assurance gateways.Software testing industry is showing more iclination towards test automation,inorder to reduce the manual testing and increase the efficiency.Most people involved in the testing of software will agree that the automation of the testing process is not only desirable, but in fact is a necessity given the demands of the current market.

Though a lot of automated software testing tools are available in the $3 billion global testing tool market, still 80% of testing is still done manually. Key barriers to adoption are the inability of tools available today to address customer challenges of simple, automated testing. Tools lack end-to-end testing ability, require specialized skills, their overall cost of ownership is extremely high and they are capable of only detecting defects and not fixing them.

The leading top and mid tiers usually offer an integrated test suite comprising test management, functional testing automation and non-functional test automation. The most important fact to notice is that none of the leading players currently have any innovations underway.

Though there are large number of tools available in the market and it being a $3 billion market, only 20% to 40% of testing projects use an automation tool. In a recent Survey carried out by a leading analyst says across 480 organizations in North America and Europe, 51% did not use any automation at all.

-Article by QAGUILD analysts