Transforming testing: Is it worth it?

Most organizations realize that their software testing process is far from optimal, but not everyone’s convinced that fixing it is actually worth all the required time, effort, cost, and hassle. How does investing in testing transformation really add value to the business? And what should organizations prioritize to ensure they get the optimal return on that investment?

That’s exactly what Tricentis commissioned Forrester Consulting to research, and I’m super excited to share the results. Led by Forrester Vice President, Principal Analyst Diego Lo Giudice, the study examined the experience of enterprise-level application development and delivery leaders around the world to learn — quite frankly — whether testing transformations are worth it at the business level. (Spoiler alert: yes, they’re paying off quite nicely indeed.)

The complete report, Modernize Testing to Accelerate Your Digital Business, provides detailed results. Here, I’d like to share just a little taste of what Forrester found…

Impactful digital experiences depend on quality @ speed

Balancing speed with quality emerged as the top strategy for achieving top business goals like improving end-user and employee experience (EX) and accelerating digital transformation efforts. In fact, an impressive 76% of application development and delivery decision makers cited this as a critical factor — above choices like increasing overall enterprise automation, migrating more apps and workloads to the cloud, and adopting low-code development approaches.

Help QA help the business

The impacts of testing transformation extend far beyond the QA organization. Respondents with mature testing transformations reported their top three benefits as (1) improved productivity across application development and delivery, (2) increased business agility, and (3) improved employee experience. Interestingly, these high-level business benefits were touted much more than the QA-centric benefits that are commonly associated with testing initiatives (reducing production defects, cutting manual QA costs, etc.)

Testing challenges remain

The study found that even 56% of leaders sometimes prioritize speed over quality as they race to keep pace with customer demands. This doesn’t seem to be working out too well, given that 49% of them also believe their companies have lost revenue due to poor digital CX.

Leaders stated tooling issues as the top two barriers to further optimizing their testing practices. Specifically, they report being limited by tooling that fails to support all applications (37%) and all testing personas (37%). And even though these leaders have made great strides in test automation (compared to industry averages), there is certainly room for improvement, with 40% of testing remaining manual.

Follow the leaders

How can other companies follow in leaders’ footsteps and achieve impressive benefits like increased business agility and operational efficiency? From a process perspective, leaders prioritize partnering with a third-party testing services provider (45%) to help them modernize their testing, and they focus on improving collaboration between testers and developers (44%). From a technology perspective, leaders prioritize tooling that provides broad, integrated capabilities — embracing multiple testing approaches, embedding into existing processes, enabling both business and technical users, and supporting end-to-end process automation.

Let’s take a deep dive into the research findings

I’m excited and honored to have Diego Lo Giudice joining me for a deeper analysis of the study’s findings in a webinar on September 23. Diego and I will share our perspectives on what’s driving some of the most interesting trends that emerged, predictions on what’s next, and recommendations for ensuring that the time and effort you invest in your own testing transformation pays off handsomely. I hope to see you there!