ITWire

Internationally the situation is even worse – just 31 per cent of organisations test their mobile apps prior to release according to the fourth World Quality Report released today by Capgemini, Sogeti and HP.  Even where testing of mobile software does occur it’s focussed on performance rather than functionality or security.

Indeed respondents acknowledged that security testing was only a priority for 18 per cent of organisations.

Software quality control is the clear victim of organisations’ race to get mobile apps out the door. While the report noted that “Mobile has changed the game for enterprise IT,” it is clear that the maturity now routinely applied to testing of other enterprise applications is missing in mobile development.

Respondents said that 65 per cent of them don’t have the right tools to test mobile applications and 52 per cent report not having access to the right devices.

Nick Finlayson, vice president and head of testing for Capgemini Australia, said that CIOs were increasingly pressured to deliver mobile applications into a fast moving market with multiple different devices. He said that while he would like to see more testing of mobile applications it was not fair to suggest that the lack of testing automatically translated into the market being flooded with dodgy apps.

Overall the survey found that testing budgets internationally tended to hover around 18 per cent of the total software investment which the authors indicated was about the right level. Spending more than that probably indicated a lack of efficiency in quality assurance operations, spending less probably led to inadequate testing, according to the report.

However 3 per cent of organisations still admitted that they had no budget whatsoever available to test software prior to release.

The advent of cloud based testing and testing as a service however is proving an economically attractive alternative to in house testing according to the report. It found that 28 per cent of testing is now conducted in the cloud, with the prediction that this will rise to 39 per cent by 2015.

Testing as a Service is also becoming popular. Only 11 per cent of respondents said they did not expect to use TaaS by 2015, with lower costs being a key driver for most adopting organisations.