Business Benefits of Improved Maturity in Software Infrastructure Testing by IT Operations

Earlier this year, Research Edge and StackSafe published our third IT Operations Research Report: Testing Maturity. Other reports in this series have focused on key problems faced by IT operations teams, the business impact of change management maturity, and testing maturity across applications and operating systems.

In a previous blog post, we discussed the challenges of the unfortunate middle.

Today, we want to focus on the “Test Leaders” and how improved testing maturity leads to clear business advantages.

Testing maturity in the report is measured according to the following criteria:

• Does the organization maintain a staging/testing environment representative of production?
• How thorough is the organization at testing changes?
• What % of changes to the production environment are testing prior to rollout?

So what does being a “Test Leader” mean? The business benefits of improved testing maturity include:

Reduction in Number of Unplanned Downtime Incidents

Test leaders exhibit significant less unplanned downtime incidents per year than those in the unfortunate middle including:

• 30% less downtime incidents on an annual basis than the “Unfortunate Middle”.
• 33% lower rollback rate, (changes that have to be rolled back due to problems that can’t be resolved in production)

Reduction in Percentage of Changes that Cause Problems in Production

“Test Leaders” are much better at identifying problems during testing and minimizing the delays in releasing changes to software infrastructure including:

• 22% lower problem rate (the percentage of changes that cause problems in production).
• 21% lower delay rate (the percentage of changes causing significant delay is 21% lower for Test Leaders).

Improved Testing Efficiency

Test Leaders are more efficient testers.

• On a per test basis, Test Leaders exhibit a 17% reduction in IT Hours spent per test than respondents in the unfortunate middle.

Improved Smoothness in Change Management Process

Test leaders see significant improvements in the numbers of respondents who view their change management process as “smooth all the time”.

• 100% increase in reported change management process smoothness compared to the unfortunate middle.

Business Benefits of Improved Testing Maturity

The business benefits of improved testing maturity by IT operations teams seem clear. By investing in building representative staging and testing environments for the multi-tier business applications and testing the impact of as close to 100% of changes as possible across the entire software infrastructure stack, IT operations teams can:

• Reduce downtime
• Reduce number of problems in production caused by changes
• Improve testing efficiency
• Improve smoothness in the change management process

Downloading the Report

You can download a full copy of the IT Operations Research Report: Testing Maturity here.

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Filed Under: Change Impact Analysis, Change Management, Downtime, IT Operations, IT Operations Research, Testing