Cloud software updates outpace testing capacity for 75% of US enterprises, study finds

Three-quarters of US enterprise IT leaders have said updates to business-critical software are arriving faster than their organisations can effectively test them, according to new research from enterprise software testing company Original Software.

According to The Enterprise Software Testing Gap report, 92% of respondents said the shift to cloud-based software has increased the amount of testing their organisations need to perform, with more than half describing the increase as significant. 

The firm also found from surveying 500 senior IT decision-makers across industries including financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare and supply chain that more than a third said their organisation are still largely reliant on manual testing using spreadsheets, documents or email, while only 6% reported having highly automated testing across most of their software systems.

Rethinking testing for resilience

Carl Andrews, CEO of Original Software, said the way organisations test software has not kept pace with changes in enterprise IT.

“Enterprise software has changed enormously, but the way many organisations test their software hasn’t changed at the same pace. You cannot keep adding testing workload without changing how it is handled,” he said.

“Core business processes can run across ERP, warehouse, payment, finance and customer systems. A seemingly minor change in one application can have consequences somewhere completely different.”

The research also found that only 48% of respondents said they were fully confident their existing testing approach would identify critical issues before they affected business operations.

“A vendor can test its software, but it cannot test your business,” Andrews said. “It doesn’t have your exact configurations, integrations, data or end-to-end processes.

“I’m not saying the answer is to slow down software updates – the answer is that IT leaders need to change how they are currently approaching testing so that they can keep pace and not leave the business, and themselves, exposed. 

“That means planning earlier, automating repeatable processes and treating testing as part of business continuity rather than simply another stage of an IT project.”

Balancing automation and human expertise

Andrews said organisations should focus on automating repeatable testing rather than attempting to remove business users from the testing process. But he was cautious to stress that automation doesn’t mean everything is handed over to AI. 

“Business users understand how these processes work and remain essential to testing. The opportunity is to stop asking them to manually repeat the same tests every time an update arrives,” he said. 

“Start with the processes the business cannot afford to have fail and progressively automate the repeatable testing around them. As software change accelerates, testing needs to become a strategic capability for resilience.”

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