IT Operations Research Report: Testing Maturity Part II – Applications and Operating Systems

Today Research Edge and StackSafe released our fourth research report focused on topics of interest to IT Operations teams titled “IT Operations Research Report: Testing Maturity Part II - Applications and Operating Systems“. Over 400 IT operations professionals participated in the study, which focused on software infrastructure testing differences in multi-tiered applications and operating systems.

Past IT Operations research reports have focused on downtime, change management and testing maturity.

Key Findings on Testing Differences in Multi-Tiered Applications:

• Applications heavily influence the approach companies adopt for change management and testing. This is in part due to differences in application complexity, change lead time and downtime costs. Applications driving change management and testing fall into three general camps:
  • Prudent Planners – companies supporting Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Production/Supply Chain Management and Transaction Processing
  • High Stress Environments – companies supporting Customer Relationship Management and E-commerce
  • Laissez-faire Planners – companies supporting Website Hosting

• “Prudent Planners” are generally very large companies, where downtime caused by production problems can be quite expensive. Not surprisingly, most have implemented automated change management and testing procedures. As a result, even though change volume is high, these companies generally have proportionally fewer problems in production stemming from change management.

• “High Stress Environments” such as E-commerce and CRM seem to face more pressure in making changes to multi-tier applications. IT departments supporting E-commerce are often faced with emergency changes that can cause delays and increase tensions within the department. Companies supporting CRM, on the other hand, face more pressure to reduce the cost of testing compared to the average company.

• “Laissez-faire” Planners are less oriented toward automated change management, even though they are most likely to have staging/testing environments in place. It appears automating change management is of less value when the focus is on Website Hosting. These companies may benefit from greater emphasis on scope or frequency of testing.

Key Findings in Testing Differences by Operating Systems

• Increased downtime costs are associated with use of multiple operating systems (heterogeneous environments) and the Unix operating system in particular.
• Companies supporting multiple operating systems have nearly double the cost of unplanned downtime than companies utilizing a single OS to support all system tiers (web, data base, application)

Downloading the Report

A full complimentary copy of the IT Operations Research Report: Testing Maturity Part II Applications and Operating Systems is available for download.

We will be returning in future blog posts to explore these topics in more detail.

Popularity: 14% [?]

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