Test automation is a key to today’s business success, but businesses are failing to apply it everywhere. A recent report revealed only 75% of organizations don’t have test automation in place at every stage of development, and only 7% of organizations automate test on the mainframe. 

In addition, 82% of respondents don’t believe they will be able to meet the business’ need for speed, innovation and great customer experience without automating more test cases. 

The report is based off of responses from 400 IT leaders, and was conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Compuware. It is designed to examine how organizations deliver innovation on the mainframe. 

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“Given the central role that the mainframe continues to play in powering modern digital services, these manual testing practices are creating a bottleneck. Ultimately, this is hindering the delivery of innovation and preventing organizations from meeting their business goals,” Compuware stated. 

The report also found manual testing continues to drain business resources. For instance, 77% of respondents are finding it difficult to increase quality, velocity and efficiency simultaneously on mainframe application code. Ninety-two percent also found mainframe teams spend more time on testing code than they had previously because of today’s complex application environments. Development teams spend more than half their time testing new mainframe code, features and functionality on average. 

According to Compuware, this is increasingly becoming a problem because if businesses can’t keep up with today’s pace, they are often pressured to cut corners — which can make things worse. 

Eighty-five percent of managers stated its “becoming harder to deliver innovation faster, without compromising on quality and increasing the risk of bugs in production.” Additionally, the concerns with cutting corners include introducing bugs, impacting customer experience, disrupting operations, draining operations team resource, wasting development teams’ time and revenue impact. 

“As customer demand for a constant cycle of new and improved digital services and experiences continues to grow unabated, speed and innovation have become the rallying call for IT departments across every industry,” said Chris O’Malley, CEO of Compuware. “Automation and the shift to Agile and DevOps are crucial to improving the pace of innovation without compromising quality and efficiency, in response to the always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied customers that organizations are striving to serve as a means to growth.”