Optimised testing vital for agility and competitiveness

By Thomas Cronje, SA team leader for Application Quality, Compuware

IT organisations must effectively manage their testing efforts during software development to reduce risk and limit the time as well as investment required. They need to effectively balance the demands of quality, cost and scheduling.

The luxury of exhaustive testing is often precluded today by changing business needs, and limited by time and resource constraints as well as cost conflicts.

'Optimised testing' is a pragmatic way of improving traditional application testing. This allows IT organisations to move away from basic quality control that focuses on tactical, single problems towards a more effective mix of tactical and strategic efforts. It improves application quality, maximises development resources and helps deliver applications on time and within budget.

Using the tools associated with optimised testing- including risk, assessment, requirements management and automation - IT managers can make more informed decisions regarding testing, and have the information to back up those decisions. As a result, IT managers can be confident their testing efforts are meeting quality goals while reflecting today's business needs.

The optimised testing approach eliminates business risk and targets testing to business needs. It also automates the right tests and balances testing resources in line with corporate goals.

Using this approach, IT can rise to the challenge of finding reliable, effective ways of delivering new and enhanced applications to the business, while at the same time integrating testing into the whole application lifecycle and reducing development costs.

The optimised testing approach also allows IT managers to subjectively manage and decide which test cases should be excluded to meet certain time frames.

This ability to control some of the testing decisions enables IT to maximise responsiveness to business demands.

Optimised testing gives IT managers flexibility in what and how they test in reaction to a changing business climate.