Value-Added

Applications are the Business

T.Srinivasan Managing Director Mercury India

Today, IT faces an array of challenges unlike ever before. And none are greater than delivering enterprise applications that run the entire business. These applications enable the critical business processes that make everything work. In a way, it’s simple: Quality of application determines the quality of business. Delivering what’s required, however, is not simple. Companies must manage complex quality processes involving many different roles and teams, with members often scattered around the globe.

Does IT Quality Matter?

Whether IT quality matters or not, it costs the industry a lot. Quality control and quality assurance activities such as coding and testing account for up to 55% of IT maintenance costs even on supposedly commoditised platforms like PCs. IT organizations have significant numbers of dedicated and part-time employees verifying and managing quality.

Resolution of quality problems, once an application is in production, is another significant item in the overall IT systems operation cost. Studies have shown that Mission critical applications can cost businesses $100,000 per hour when they suffer unplanned downtime. Also improved IT processes, testing and training, could help avoid 80% of this downtime.

As we have seen, applications are indeed the business and their quality issues directly impact revenues generated through the business processes these applications are supposed to automate. We all know that quality costs a lot but what are we paying for?

Why Demand Quality?

Often issues with the IT-based business systems and services prevent users from accomplishing what they want to, or are being asked, to achieve in their job. These issues could be functional (application design) or non-functional (application delivery) problems, which objectively block use of certain application functionality or subjectively impacting user performance and efficiency.

The more users are affected, the more attentive company management becomes to the issues and the more pressure is produced on IT to remove these issues or, in other words, to improve the quality. The frequency of such issues may trigger initiatives or projects focusing on quality improvement.

Unfortunately, quality is a degree of excellence and an absolute number of defects does not allow us to grade this clearly. The next logical step is to benchmark the quality of various projects, building a set of historical statistics to judge quality of a current system over time in comparison with the past successes and failures.

The challenge remains that defect quantity does not always correlate with the resulting customer perception and experience, because the way each problem manifests itself to the various users can also vary.

In an Ideal world, we could expand our quality testing efforts discovering more and more defects and removing all defects prior to deployment in the production environment so the customer does not face any problems using the tested business systems. This though may translate to such huge costs and time-to-market that the company cannot accept these efforts without failing its business goals.

An IT testing strategy is not about merely validating an application’s functionality anymore but about its ability to accomplish the underlying business processes which are being automated by the application.

Service Level Agreements and quality of services should not focus on the technical parameters of network and server availability - but on the business productivity of IT applications. Monitoring of business systems should measure user experience on top of the infrastructure metrics, to pre-empt the impact of system issues on the business driven service levels.

Various commercial and academic organizations have tried for years to identify quantifiable attributes of IT quality and to set target metrics clearly grading IT quality. The result is a wide range of metrics and methodologies available in the market with the vast majority of IT organizations still being blamed for the low quality by their customers.

Despite the headline grabbing contention that IT does not differentiate business, it is clear that IT’s ability to automate business processes is more important than ever. However, to truly ensure that IT does matter, requires a consistent, process driven approach to application quality and testing.