Transaction Processing Systems – a Classic Example of Prudent Planners

Posted June 9th, 2008 by Jonah Paransky

As a continuation our recent focus on the business impact of testing maturity by application and operating system, we continue with a deep dive on the state of Transaction Processing Systems.

This review of Transaction Processing Systems is our second look at one of the prudent planner categories that emerged from our recent IT Operations Research Report: Testing Maturity Part II Applications and Operating Systems. We recently covered Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Environments who showed better change management and testing maturity than most.

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Transaction Processing Systems, a classic example of Prudent Planners

Companies that support Transaction Processing Systems are more mature than most for change management and testing maturity. This is reflected in the following key characteristics:

Companies with Transaction Processing Systems have greater IT expertise. 60% handle at least some software development in-house.
Not only do they spend the most on pre-production testing, but they are more satisfied than any other application group with the pre-production testing process.
Interestingly, they are fairly typical in terms of downtime incidents and the problems experienced while making changes to multi-tier applications.

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It should be no surprise that organizations that focus on transaction processing are “prudent planners”. Transaction processing is the prototypical example of an application that is mission critical, with a high cost of downtime.

Even though organizations that support transaction processing are some of the largest companies, with the largest IT budgets, there is still room to improve. A significant number of changes are not tested prior to production release, and a large number of changes cause problems in production. Testing and prudence would seem to go hand in hand in this case.