InformationWeek

Companies intent on transacting revenue-generating business or offering enhanced customer services online are increasingly turning to automated testing solutions to gain confidence in their IT systems, fully understand how applications will behave under real-world conditions, uncover and rectify issues, and systematically manage growth.

The worldwide market for automated software quality tools, including mainframe and distributed environments, reached $931 million in 1999, a 23.6% increase over 1998 figures, according to recently published research from International Data Corp. And the market is slated to grow to more than $2.6 billion by 2004.

Dick Heiman, IDC's research director and analyst, says the widespread growth in the adoption of automated testing solutions is being fueled by the steps that businesses are taking to leverage the Web. "The old paradigm of forgoing a structured quality initiative in exchange for faster deployment--with plans to address quality issues with application updates--doesn't fly in the Internet economy."

Kevin Gallagher, VP of research with Newport Group Inc., an IT research and reporting firm, agrees. "Businesses must know how applications will perform and behave once they're open to the Web," he says. As businesses move from having isolated front-end Web applications to integrated Web-enabled enterprises, with multiple application interdependencies within or between businesses, the issue of testing is especially crucial, says Gallagher. "It's a simple matter of mitigating business risk, maintaining integrity, and gathering knowledge and confidence in the IT systems that are so heavily relied upon to transact daily business."

Business acceptance of automated testing as a mainline business practice hasn't come quickly or easily. For traditional client-server environments, it's been more common for testing efforts to be shortchanged in exchange for more development time or faster deployments.

Internal conflicts that result in poor communication between developers and testers have also contributed to weakened efforts, along with a loss of focus on the fact that both facets of IT must work together to achieve the end result. Too often, automated tools have been shelved due to inadequate test process support, lukewarm business management support, and staff turnover.

However, in the ever-widening Internet economy, much is changing. According to Brian Chase, quality assurance manager for Thomson & Thomson, a provider of legal research, "Today, automated testing tools are viewed as a necessary purchase and we have annual budget allocations for them." Initially approved for purchase on the heels of the company's Y2K testing efforts, Chase says "we've proven that automated testing solutions work to help us deliver our Web-based product to market sooner, with more accuracy and less user-found errors. In turn, business support continues to strengthen."

The equation is simple: Application performance and transaction precision equate to the efficient business services that lead to customer satisfaction, which ultimately boils down to revenue. So it goes that IT managers and business executives are speaking the same language--bottom-line revenue--and, therefore, the business investments in automated testing solutions are more easily justified and understood.

GlobalFulfillment.com's senior VP and chief technology officer Phil Wilkerson is an industry veteran of test-process engineering and test automation. Wilkerson worked to maintain the quality of the systems that support Levi Strauss & Co. and Gap Inc. before taking on his post at startup GlobalFulfillment.com, a Los Angeles provider of fulfillment solutions for retailers.

With the unique experience of obtaining business management buy-in for automated tools in closed client-server environments and open, Web-enabled enterprises, Wilkerson says the growing volume of business via the Web has increased business support for test automation. "There's more education about automated testing at the business level, and a greater awareness about the consequences that result when things don't work," he says.

Further, because Web application delivery cycles are so much faster than with traditional client-server or legacy systems, the potential for errors is greater, creating, in turn, a greater need for testing.

CIO Nathan Harper of Guild.com Inc., an online source for purchasing contemporary art, also recognizes a major upward shift in the business value that automated testing has gained as a direct result of doing business online. Harper received no business resistance to his request to purchase automated tools and consulting services for the E-commerce startup.

"The recognition of the value that automated testing brings to the business has changed enormously," says Harper. "In the old days, we were writing applications for a set number of users. We knew things like how many database connections were needed and what the maximum load requirements were for the system. Building to known requirements was tough, but at least it was manageable and quantifiable. The problem with the Internet is the surge activity."

For example, according to Harper, Guild.com averages 10,000 daily site visitors. Advertising campaigns typically cause traffic to spike to five or six times the daily average. And when Time magazine named Guild .com a top art site just before Christmas, traffic surged to nearly 20 times the daily average.

"These types of scenarios are difficult to plan and test for," says Harper, "so we need to use the tools in order to know ahead of time what will happen when these types of traffic surges occur. Will performance slow, will it grind to a halt? How much business could we potentially be losing? How much frustration are we causing our customers and, as a result, how much damage to our business reputation?"

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