Digital Testing in Europe

To date, only 18% of all European companies have fully implemented a strategy for digital testing. This was the result of the study "Digital Testing in Europe: Strategies, Challenges & Measuring Success" by the market analysis and consulting company PAC, for which IT and testing managers from 200 large companies in Europe were surveyed.

According to the PAC definition, the term digital testing stands for projects that involve tests and quality assurance measures as well as the associated processes and tools, which relate in particular to the use of new digital technologies, for example in the areas of mobile, cloud, social and advanced analytics.

The study examines how companies ensure that their testing and quality assurance department can support the company's digital agenda.

Until now, these tasks have often been taken on by sales and marketing, which have launched their own uncoordinated development projects, bypassing the CIO and using tools and platforms that are new to the market.

The study, supported by Accenture, HP, TestPlant, Applause and Worksoft, also revealed that 26 percent of companies have formulated a digital testing strategy but have not yet implemented it.

A further 35 percent want to define their strategy in the next few years. More than one in two companies see the creation of a standardized approach to testing different contact channels as the greatest difficulty in implementing such projects.

In second place comes the integration of digital and legacy systems, which 39% of respondents see as a "fundamental" challenge. Over 60 percent of companies use the same team to test digital projects and existing applications.

Almost 23% of companies will spend over 60% of their test budgets on new developments in 2015. This proportion will rise to 27% by 2017. Most companies use a whole range of tools (in-house developments, packages, open source) and approaches (virtualization, testing in production) as part of their digital testing strategy.

Tests in the crowdsourcing model are attracting growing interest. 25 percent of European companies are already working with it, and a further 20 percent are planning to do so in the next two years. Nick Mayes, Principal Analyst at PAC, comments:

"The digital agenda is bringing testing closer to the business and getting companies to make the best use of different tools, methods and external partners. It also forces them to implement changes more quickly."