Application testing costs set to rise to 40% of IT budget

IT spending on quality assurance (QA) and testing has risen to an average of 35% of total IT spend, according to the Capgemini World Quality Report 2015.

The survey of 1,500 people working in organisations with more than 1,000 employees found the proportion of IT spending allocated to ensuring application quality and performance will continue to rise, reaching 40% by 2018.

Digital transformation in business is the key driver for the increased spending on testing and quality assurance.

Capgemini warned that the availability of a budget for application development is urgently needed to meet the increased demands from business as the rapid pace of change continues.

Given that a defect has the potential to go viral in minutes, the survey found that senior managers are more focused on protecting their corporate image and view this as the key objective of QA and testing.

Protecting the corporate image (6.07%) is the most important QA and testing objective for survey respondents.

“Ensuring user satisfaction (5.98%) placed third in this category. Interestingly, the second most important objective is increasing quality awareness (5.99%), which demonstrates how organisations want QA to extend across all roles, from user to architect and from designer and developer to operations manager,” the report stated.

While there was an increase in the proportion of the QA and testing budget spent on personnel in 2014, spending on staff dropped by 5% to 33% in 2015.

Among the reasons for the increase in QA and testing is a continued use of costly manual testing, according to Capgemini. The 2015 survey data found 39% of respondents feel a reliance on manual testing is the number one technological challenge in application development today.

“This is a clear signal that the testing approach is not at the level of maturity and efficiency required to support today’s complex IT operations,” the report noted.

According to Capgemini, organisations more advanced in their digital transformation journey appear to be spending the most on QA and testing, indicating they have made a direct connection between quality and achieving business outcomes.