Key issues for respondents to the ‘Spiceworks 2017 State of Functional Testing Report’ included delivering quality at today’s speeds, meeting the new requirements of continuous delivery, and better engagement between business and IT.

Spiceworks surveyed 154 IT testing decision-makers in the US and the UK in a bid to better understand current practices, trends, challenges and perceptions of business process testing.

More than half (53 per cent) of survey respondents reported that they believe making their organisations more agile is critical to defining their testing methodology and two-thirds stated that Q&A and testing are very important to their organisation’s overall strategy. However, the survey found that IT is challenged to keep pace with the rapidly changing requirements of the business due to a lack of visibility into testing processes and reliable production data. There is a very real disconnect between what the business demands and what IT can deliver, according to the survey.

Almost half (47 per cent) of the IT leaders surveyed reported that they do not believe their tests accurately reflect real-life production scenarios. A further 40 per cent reported a need for more business oriented reports.

Almost one-third (31 per cent) of survey respondents admitted that they always test more than needed to ensure quality, creating project delays and higher costs.

“IT-Business convergence is needed to deliver continuous change, but many of the current tools add complexity and fail to merge the two,” said Jake Klein, CEO, Panaya.

He said that Panaya helps align testing with digital transformation to bring agility to the world of enterprise IT.

“We provide real-time visibility into release risk and quality, and enable testing efficiency through machine learning and autonomous testing to close the gap between IT and the business.”

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The “zero-touch” platform has been introduced by software test automation supplier Tricentis and SaaS-based test management provider Panaya.

The platform harnesses machine learning to observe and understand patterns in end user transactions and automatically convert usage patterns into automated and repeatable business process tests. The platform eliminates redundant regression testing and reports changes in the SAP environment that could impact critical business processes.

The platform combines the test automation capabilities of Tricentis Tosca with the cloud-based end-to-end test management capabilities of Panaya Test Centre. The result is autonomous, continuous testing that keeps pace with changes in business processes.

“Tricentis and Panaya co-developed this breakthrough in testing to relieve SAP key users from the burden of manually creating, executing, and maintaining business process tests,” said Wolfgang Platz, founder and CPO, Tricentis.

Jake Klein, CEO, Panaya said that the new platform “addresses all aspects of a modern testing suite including automated process discovery, automatic test execution, manual test acceleration and test management”.

Autonomous SAP testing is expected to solve issues experienced in both automated and manual testing, enabling new or changed SAP business processes to be introduced more quickly and with less business risk.

Platz cited a recent survey of the SAP installed base that found about 72 per cent of SAP installations are currently verified using manual tests.

The platform will increase the speed and accuracy of such installations, eliminating manually engineered scripts and enabling zero-touch test case creation and maintenance. Quality teams will be able to protect critical business processes by observing actual usage patterns from production, reducing the risk of imperfect business knowledge transfer.

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