My Application – My Testing Maturity

Change management maturity – meaning the measure of success in making and releasing changes to a production environment – is a multi-dimensional challenge. Not only do IT groups achieve different levels of change management maturity according to the practices and guidelines that they follow, but change management maturity is also determined by the type of applications for which IT is responsible.

This preceding statements formed the basis for a webinar presentation that StackSafe delivered in conjunction with Ecora Software, the webinar host. The title of StackSafe’s webinar presentation, “The Influence of Application Selection on Testing and Change Management”, presented research gathered by Research Edge for StackSafe.

The Research Edge study interviewed over 400 IT professionals across the United States regarding change testing and management practices. The companies represented by the professionals included large (1000 to 50,000+ employees generating $100M+ plus annual revenue.

This research indicated some unique differences between IT organizations in regard to the change management maturity level related to the type of application that their organization deemed most critical. So, not only is an IT organization’s change management maturity measured by its practices and methods, this maturity is also defined by the application/s the organization manages.

To set the stage, see below the types of applications that study participants (respondents) found to be ‘most’ mission-critical (acknowledging that lots of applications are being considered to be mission-critical these days):

Respondents identified unique differences in change management practice for six application types, including ERP, Transaction Processing, E-commerce, Web Hosting, Production Systems/Supply Chain Management and Customer Relationship Management.

After evaluating how respondents performed change management for these applications, we noticed some similar characteristics:

Prudent Planners - companies relying on ERP, Production/SCM, and/or Transaction Processing systems that suffered painful impacts when these systems experienced downtime. These companies performed the most rigorous testing of all groups.

ERP companies are likely to test the entire infrastructure stack when testing the impact of a change because they are the most concerned about the complexity of multi-tiered applications. They also tend to have the least downtime per change ratio certainly driven by the fact that their cost of downtime is the highest.

Transaction Processing companies task more of their IT personnel to participate in development as well as testing, likely because the longevity and maturity of TP technology means that IT has a deep base of experience with the system logic and process. TP companies also expressed the most satisfaction with the results of pre-production testing.

SCM companies were the least mature of the Prudent Planners in that they tended to perform component rather that end-to-end testing, and found pre-production testing to be cumbersome. However, they also had fewer production problems due to change than others.

High Stress Environment - companies support CRM and E-Commerce applications. They operate in a more volatile environment with high numbers of emergency changes, and have less confidence in the stability and reliability of changes. There was a strong expressed desire from management to reduce the cost of testing and correcting changes.

Laissez-faire Planners - companies that view website hosting as their most important applications. Over 90% have invested in a staging platform, but only 32% use automated change management tools. More than 50% test the entire infrastructure stack when they test the impact of a change, but only 20% of Laissez-faire Planners test all changes that they must make to production.

We will post a link to the webinar shortly so you can watch it directly, and feel free to contact StackSafe to learn more about our research. Meanwhile, pay close attention to your application type – it might explain why you achieve the testing results that you do.

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Filed Under: Change Impact Analysis, Change Management, Downtime, Testing