Sauce Labs, Inc., provider of the world's largest cloud-based platform for automated testing of web and mobile applications, today announced the results of an independent survey titled, "Testing Trends in 2016: A Survey of Software Professionals." The survey, conducted by Dimensional Research, reveals that while 88 percent of organizations say they have adopted agile development, only one in five have fully implemented the five best software testing practices typically associated with a mature agile development process.
The report, commissioned by Sauce Labs, represents the company's second annual "State of Testing" research report, and is designed to better understand current trends in delivering high quality web and mobile applications. Covering topics such as agile software development, modern testing techniques, Continuous Integration (CI), and cross-browser test coverage, the report stems from a survey conducted in December 2015 of more than 520 technology professionals responsible for the quality of software applications.
"Development teams continue to adopt agile methodologies like continuous integration (CI) to build better software faster," said Charles Ramsey, CEO of Sauce Labs. "What is surprising from this report is the revelation that many teams who believe they are practicing an agile testing process are really performing 'fast waterfall' instead. This presents a huge opportunity for these teams to continue to improve their processes, increase their use of automation and accelerate development even further."
In addition to revealing the prevalence of fast waterfall development, the findings also reveal that the market continues its adoption of CI, with 77 percent of respondents citing use of the modern development technique within their teams, up from 70 percent from last year. Importantly, the research also reveals that these teams are beginning to reap the benefits of Continuous Integration, with respondents reporting that implementing CI has resulted in more systematic and rigorous testing, the introduction of more new features for rapid customer feedback and writing code with fewer errors.
Cross-browser testing also remains important with 95 percent of large companies performing some type of cross-browser testing. In addition, Microsoft's new browser released in August 2015 is already grabbing the attention of developers with almost one-third of respondents saying they test their applications on Microsoft Edge. |