The 15th edition of the World Quality Report, published by Capgemini, Sogeti, and OpenText, has highlighted the importance of Quality Engineering (QE) to enhance both sustainability in business operations and value delivery to customers and end users. According to the report, 67% of organisations have incorporated QE at the core of their business operations, to ensure that technological advancements adhere to quality standards.
According to an official release, the report highlights that with customer expectations, interoperability demands, regulations, guidelines, and cybersecurity risks, testing requires an approach that is more rigorous and agile than before. From what it’s understood, the trend of hyper-personalization is also adding to the matter. Based on data from the report, organisations cite higher productivity as the primary outcome driven by AI (65%).
Respondents reported that using AI to improve the reliability of tests (33%) and reduce the number of defects (29%) was no longer their primary focus. It’s believed that continuous testing, inherent in Agile and DevOps4 practices across organisations, has accelerated this trend. However, concerns related to security, privacy, and biassed outcomes are required to be addressed, with 31% remaining sceptical about the value of AI in QA. Seemingly, this year’s edition of the report also confirmed sustainable IT as an interest area for quality teams. Reportedly, the majority (97%) has shown to think that QE is an element in driving the sustainability agenda in their organisations and over half (55%) highlighted benefits on the environmental aspect of sustainable IT. However, for most respondents (63%), the priority over the next 12 months is expected to remain understanding of how to monitor and report on green metrics within their QE testing processes. To keep up with the digital environment, 70% of organisations cited that they are valuing a central Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) over traditional project level QA practices. Notably, respondents showed prioritising development skills for quality engineers, such as SQL/Python/C#/Java (42%) and CI/CD (39%), over traditional testing skills such as automation (28%) and performance tooling (24%). Despite the rise in quality automation, the report has acknowledged challenges, with an average of 27% of organisations still grappling with legacy systems and the application landscape.
“The World Quality Report aims to provide insights on the trends and developments in QE. It intends to shed light on the role of quality within sustainable IT and the opportunities for applying AI solutions, notably the potential of generative AI applications. It’s considered interesting to see the role AI can play, particularly in generating test cases and automating quality procedures, but also on the importance of quality practices to enhance value delivery to customers and end users. However, to ensure AI’s reliability within QE long-term, organisations should take a gradual, incremental approach,” Mark Buenen, global leader, QE and testing, Capgemini Group, commented.
