How Implementing a Modern Testing Practice Accelerates Software Delivery How Implementing a Modern Testing Practice Accelerates Software Delivery

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Digital transformation is near the top of every CIO’s agenda today. To reap the benefits, it’s critical to get new products to market faster. Agile and DevOps methods have ushered in a new era of rapid development and delivery. Yet testing remains a bottleneck.

To achieve the desired speed, it’s critical to align business goals with both testing methods and quality ambitions. Those who do stand to gain a significant competitive advantage by modernizing a critical element of accelerated software delivery that is still often overlooked. This guide explores how CIOs can eliminate traditional testing road- blocks to achieve true digital transformation. INTRODUCTION

A recent survey of 500 IT executives finds 58% of enterprises deploy a new software build daily, and 26% at least hourly. That’s why Agile and DevOps are so important. These are the methods that enable companies to develop and release software on a daily, and sometimes, hourly, basis.

Software is now at the forefront of most companies’ strategies. This game-changing shift, from creating physical goods and experiences to smart software development, is a key element of digital transformation and is now the primary driver of sustainable innovation – even in traditional industries that have made their fortunes outside of technology.

Despite this, software (and what’s required to efficiently create and deliver it) gets surprisingly little at- tention in the C-suite. According to a recent McKinsey article, companies pay a steep price for dismissing software’s importance. This dismissal exposes them to several vulnerabilities:

• Tech-based disruption: According to Salesforce’s State of the Connected Consumer report, 73% of customers say that a single extraordinary experience with one company raises their expectations of other companies. This highlights a tricky reality for businesses: today, you are in competition with every other company, regardless of industry.

• Customer churn: Three-quarters of customers expect companies to use new technologies to create better experiences. We are now entering an era where a company’s ability to provide innovative experiences is as important as the quality of its products. Salesforce found that 84% of customers now consider these factors equally when deciding who to buy from.

• Higher costs and lower margins: Beyond customer experience, software is pivotal in helping opti- mize operations and rein in costs.

These risks should put the constant push for faster software delivery in perspective. But what many executives fail to realize is the power of the right testing approach for increasing delivery speed without compromising quality.

To achieve the desired speed, it’s critical to align business goals with both testing methods and quality ambitions. Those who do stand to gain a significant competitive advantage by modernizing a critical element of accelerated software delivery that is still often overlooked.

This guide sheds light on testing’s critical role in today’s CIO agenda and shares best practices for modernizing testing to enable high quality at high speed. Executives don’t need to write test scripts (and their developers and testers may insist they don’t!), but they must understand modern testing practices to determine the right approach for the company.

tricentis.com 3 EVERY CIO HAS A DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INITIATIVE UNDERWAY

According to a survey of CIOs conducted by Morgan Stanley Research in October 2019, today’s top CIO priorities are:

Cloud Data Warehousing/ AI/Machine Digital Security computing BI/Analytics Learning/Process Transformation Software Automation

You might be surprised to learn that testing has significant impact across 4 out of 5 of these initiatives. Here’s how the right testing strategy can help:

Cloud computing: Enterprises must have strategies for both testing cloud-native applications, as well as for minimizing risk during migration of on-premise software to the cloud.

Data Warehousing/BI/Analytics: There isn’t time to manually test for data integrity as it passes through the data warehouse to other systems. But making business decisions without confidence in the integrity of the data behind them is a recipe for disaster. Automated BI and data warehouse testing help solve the data integrity problem in real time.

AI/Machine Learning/Process Automation: CIOs are investing in AI, machine learning and process automation with the goal of making smarter business decisions. In the testing domain, AI is being leveraged to pinpoint the highest risk areas of an application and the best test cases for addressing them – drastically reducing the volume of testing that needs to be completed before each release.

Digital Transformation: Digital transformation is a must, both across the critical business systems your organization relies on, as well as in the arena of developing software that creates new revenue streams and improves the customer experience. An enterprise-wide testing modernization can unify quality ob- jectives and accelerate testing across both of these areas.

Once the limited domain of testing teams, software quality is now gaining ground as an enterprise-wide priority, driving a transformation that federates the ownership of quality – and places it squarely on the map of CIO priorities. Because of the collaborative nature of agile and DevOps methods, it is also now deeply embedded in the processes of IT leaders, product owners, and development and operations teams.

SPEED & AGILITY: THE KEYS TO DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Agile introduced a radically new concept of software development: iterative builds which accelerate feedback loops, allow faster response to market need and catalyze digital transformation. But agile can only succeed if downstream processes can accommodate the change. Without alignment, testing and operations teams will not be prepared for the influx of smaller and more frequent releases – which can cause delays and impede the end goal of agile efforts.

tricentis.com 4 DevOps has emerged to help organizations realize the goals outlined in agile by connecting development with testing and operations, mainly through the introduction of automation. And automation differenti- ates the most advanced DevOps teams. According to DORA’s 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps report, the most advanced teams “automate everything” by committing to continuous testing, integration and delivery (CI/CD) practices. These elite DevOps teams deploy code 208 times faster, and release software 106 times faster than the lowest performers surveyed. And DevOps practices are catching on quickly. Almost half of all respondents in GitLab’s 2019 survey report using continuous code deployment at least somewhere in their organizations.

THE TRADITIONAL TESTING APPROACH: THE NO. 1 SPEED INHIBITOR

According to GitLab, development teams report that testing represents the most significant delay in the software delivery pipeline – even on DevOps teams.

Recent research from Tricentis and the World Quality Report shed light on this finding. Both reports show that most testing still occurs manually. A majority of organizations automate 20% or less of their total testing effort.

For the average organization, 80% or more of the testing effort is performed manually. And this effort is not without cost: Testing still represents 23-28% of IT budgets, according to the 2019-20 World Quality Report.

Taken collectively, this data makes it clear that testing stands out as the most significant barrier to achiev- ing innovation. Therefore, it also represents the biggest opportunity for improvement in delivery timelines. So why have more organizations not leveraged testing’s untapped potential?

To put it simply, digital transformation requires a scalable approach to test automation. Below, we’ve outlined the key steps required for accelerating release speed, reducing testing costs and improving software quality.

SCALING TEST AUTOMATION TO INCREASE DELIVERY SPEED AND QUALITY

1. Implement a Tool to Assess Risk A risk-based approach can expose business risks associated with each release, so testing is targeted on the highest-risk areas. This significantly cuts down on the amount of testing that is required and the overall time spent.

tricentis.com 5 Tricentis offers two key solutions for addressing risk: Tricentis Tosca offers a risk-based testing approach that reduces testing efforts by exposing risks to the user experience and/or critical business processes. A risk-based approach catalyzes the benefits of automation. With risk-based testing, testing teams can identify and create the tests that are most important for minimizing business risk – significantly reducing the number of test cases that need to be created and increasing confidence in release readiness. The resulting test suite is perfectly suited for continuous execution as part of the delivery pipeline, and it’s easily updated as the application evolves. And all of this is accomplished without coding or scripting.

Tricentis LiveCompare provides AI-powered impact analysis for updates to SAP and other enterprise applications, exposing the risks to critical business processes posed by any standard or custom change. LiveCompare pinpoints the most at-risk areas that need to be tested, which reduces testing timelines by 85%, on average, while ensuring 100% risk coverage. Any testing gaps discovered are automatically added as requirements in Tricentis Tosca so that automated test cases can be created to fill the gaps.

2. Streamline Test Management, Design and Build Processes It’s critical to implement an agile test management solution that centralizes testing strategy, whether you’re using open source tools, proprietary test automation tools like Tricentis Tosca or a combination of the two. Test management should integrate with each test automation too, as well as with both upstream with agile planning tools like Jira Software and downstream with CI/CD pipeline tools like Jenkins. When it’s integrated across the delivery pipeline, testing can be executed efficiently, feedback can be delivered in real-time, and all stakeholders gain full-scale traceability, from development to delivery.

Tricentis qTest centralizes quality strategies across the organization with modern, enterprise-grade agile test management. Through agile test management, enterprises can manage, design and build test suites for full-scale traceability across the software delivery pipeline, from agile planning tools like Jira to test automation tools and CI/CD tools. Tricentis qTest integrates with any test automation tool or frame- work to enable central management, kick-off and reporting across test automation initiatives, and to offer complete visibility across teams.

3. Automate at Scale Many organizations struggle to scale test automation, either because they lack the required coding skills, or because a proliferation of tools makes it difficult to track ROI and assess overall progress towards higher test automation rates.

Tricentis Tosca’s model-based test automation accelerates automation rates with a scriptless, no- code approach for end-to-end testing – catalyzing an enterprise’s transition from manual to automated testing and enabling any tester to become a test automation engineer. Tricentis Tosca makes it easy for any tester to create automation building blocks, which can be reused across test cases and projects to maximize efficiency and streamline testing across the organization.

tricentis.com 6 With Tricentis Tosca, enterprises can quickly scale functional test automation across hundreds technologies, from mainframe to mobile and everything in between. Tricentis Tosca facilitates testing across IT and development teams, with support for enterprise applications (SAP, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Oracle, Workday, etc.), data warehouses and custom-developed software, including web and mobile applications.

4. Ensure Cross Project Visibility Testing reporting should offer executives a rapid, real-time assessment of release readiness. It should also be able to quickly demonstrate overall progress towards test automation goals, demonstrate ROI and pinpoint areas for improvement – at the project and team levels, as well as for the organization as a whole.

Tricentis Analytics provides portfolio level visibility through a predictive, BI reporting engine to con- solidate, manage, and analyze activities across the Tricentis Continuous Testing Platform, as well as any open source tools in use. With Tricentis Analytics, executives instantly evaluate current and future business risks associated with the health of their applications, enabling them to release faster and with more confidence.

SCALING TEST AUTOMATION TO INCREASE DELIVERY SPEED AND QUALITY

Based on many years of R&D, Tricentis has developed the industry’s No. 1 test automation platform, which effectively addresses today’s most common test automation challenges and enables enterprises to rapidly increase automation rates, reduce testing costs and significantly accelerate software delivery timelines.

EdgeVerve reduced Varian reduced exe- Aegon now executes test cycle times by cution time by 93% automated testing 60%, with continu- and achieved a 35% to verify data integ- ous testing, and now cost savings, after rity across hundreds delivers 30% more replacing manual of millions of records features per release, testing with test au- in just 11 hours – an with a 50% reduction tomation, effort that would in production de- take 84.5 hours to fects. complete manually.

tricentis.com 7 ABOUT TRICENTIS

Tricentis is the global leader in continuous testing and automation, widely credited for rein- venting software testing for DevOps and agile environments. The Tricentis AI-based, automation platform enables enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation by dramatically increasing software release speed, reducing costs, and improving software quality. Tricentis has been widely recognized as the leader by all major industry analysts, including being named a leader in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant five years in a row. Tricentis has more than 1,800 customers, including the largest brands in the world, such as Accenture, Coca-Cola, Nationwide Insurance, Allianz, Telstra, Dolby, RBS, and Zappos. To learn more, visit https://www.tricentis.com or follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

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