More than half (60 percent) of respondents in the North American ‘Business Benefits of Service Virtualization’ study conducted by CA Technologies claim that customer-facing applications are delayed as a result of endemic constraints within the software development and testing environment including limited access to infrastructure, databases and undeveloped applications.

To compound the situation, applications are often released with reduced functionality, according to 70 percent of those surveyed.

The vast majority of the 200 in-house software development executives and managers from large (US $1 Billion+) enterprises surveyed are aware of the significant consequences that result from endemic constraints across software development and testing. This includes loss of reputation (96 percent) and customers switching to competitors (93 percent).

“North American businesses are under pressure to deliver increasingly complex applications, and at a much faster rate than ever before to keep pace with customer demands,” said Shridhar Mittal, general manager, Service Virtualization, CA Technologies. “Unfortunately, IT budgets are not increasing at the rate of change inherent in today’s highly distributed composite applications. This causes serious constraints to software development, resulting in delays and failures in delivering new software features to market.”

Delays in application development and testing are negatively impacting businesses with respondents reporting reduced functionality (74 percent) and late delivery of new customer facing applications (60 percent). In part, this is due to the increased pressure and demand for highly sophisticated applications, with 66 percent of respondents stating that their approach to software development and testing will have to change as a result of massive growth particularly across mobile.

The pressures highlighted by this independent study point to the need for improved development processes and faster, more effective testing. North American survey respondents also identified the potential benefits of pursuing updated approaches to include increased quality (81 percent), faster time-to-market (76 percent) and reduced costs (71 percent).

Service Virtualization addresses these challenges by enabling teams to develop and test an application using a virtual service environment that has been configured to imitate a real production environment. This provides the ability to change the behavior and data of these virtual services easily in order to validate different scenarios.

“This research follows a European study conducted in July 2012 in which 32 percent of respondents revealed that they were expected to deliver and manage four to seven releases a year compared to 53 percent in North America,” said Ian Parkes, Managing Director, Coleman Parkes Research. “Even more surprising, 75 percent of respondents across North America and Europe reported they were seeking additional budget to pay for more application development man-hours, when we know that additional labor is not in fact the ideal solution.”

According to the study, “These survey results suggest that development managers often bring new applications or services from testing environments into production without complete insight into how their integrated applications might fail. For engineers, understanding failure modes is a critical part of the job, yet according to this study, 69 percent did not have this insight on a consistent basis. This is an alarming prospect for any board giving the green light for new software projects, especially those that impact the customer. It is also concerning that only nine percent have comprehensive insight into how complex integrated applications could break in production."

About the Study

The independent study was conducted by Coleman Parkes Research in September 2012, underwritten by CA Technologies, and includes feedback from 200 in-house software development executives and managers from large enterprises with revenues of more than US$1 billion in the US and Canada. It is the second phase of a similar July 2012 study conducted in Europe.