More than half of IT directors interviewed in a survey from
Forrester Research admitted that parts of their businesses did not
adhere to software quality practices defined by the
business.In the survey of 125 senior IT and business executives in
businesses with revenues of more than $500m found, 52% of
respondents said some parts of their businesses were not following
software quality procedures consistently.
Some 25% of IT directors surveyed had not implemented software
quality at all. Among those that had, 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 high on IT directors' priorities, with 82%
of respondents in the survey associating 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 new service to tackle software
quality at the GigaWorld conference in Paris.
Through the Compuware Application Reliability Solution (Cars),
Compuware 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, technology 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. When
time runs out, testing stops."