More than half of the IT directors interviewed in a survey
from Forrester Research have admitted that parts of their
department do not adhere to software quality practices defined by
the organisation.In the survey, which questioned 125 senior IT
and business executives in global companies with revenues of
more than $500m, 52% of respondents said some parts of their
businesses are not following software quality procedures
consistently.
A quarter of IT directors said they had not
implemented software quality at all. Among those that had, only 5%
admitted that most of the organisations they worked for were
failing to follow the procedures consistently.
One IT director who moved back to head her IT
department after spending two years in another part of the business
said, "All the rigour and quality processes I had established
before had been ripped out. Now I have to start all over
again."
Software quality is a high priority for IT
directors. Some 82% of respondents in the survey associated an IT
failure with an actual business loss. In fact, 35 out of the 125
surveyed said they had directly experienced material revenue
loss because of application failure.
The Forrester Research study was commissioned
by tools firm Compuware, which introduced a service to tackle
software quality at the GigaWorld conference in Paris.
Through the Compuware Application Reliability
Solution (Cars) the company plans to offer technology, processes
and teams of certified software testers to trouble-shoot
application quality issues in applications at end user sites.
Vange Yianni, technologoy manager at Compuware, said part of the
problem IT directors faced was the time and budget contraints of
software projects.
"Testing is the last stage of a project,” he said. “When time
runs out, testing stops."