Date
02/09/2016
PDF
Research sponsored by Vector Software, a leading provider of innovative software solutions for robust embedded software quality, reveals that as the world around us increasingly becomes more dependent on products whose functionality is controlled by software -- and the demand for improved product quality and regulations become more stringent than ever -- software testing is an industry in the midst of incredible transition.
The Vector Software Annual Software Testing Technology Report was designed to capture the thoughts of industry leaders across the embedded software testing industry to discern:
• What trends the market is actually embracing
• What users are interested in learning more about
• What projects the market plans on addressing in the near future
• What capabilities are of interest to users
The purpose of the research was to learn about what the embedded software testing industry is focusing on now and what its concerns may be in the near future.
Selected highlights from the findings are:
- Continuous integration and continuous testing are critical concepts of interest. Other than the overall term of “embedded software test,” respondents of the Vector Software Annual Software Testing Technology Report were most familiar with the terms continuous integration (CI) and continuous testing. This aligns well with the overall industry shift toward increased quality as continuous integration requires isolated code changes to be immediately tested and reported when added to the larger code base.
- Some surprising results came in terms of respondents’ familiarity with the term “technical debt.” About 45% responded that they were “very unfamiliar” with the term (which represents latent defects introduced during system architecture, system design, or system development), and its overall weighted average score for familiarity came in at just 2.33 out of 5. A large majority of respondents (nearly 80%) indicated that they were potentially planning to address bug and defect tracking with their next project. This finding is not surprising given the many studies that have shown that the largest component of software cost is often not the original development, test, and manufacturing, but the post release maintenance cost.
- The growth in the Internet of Things (IoT) has had a noticeable effect on the software testing industry. This is likely due in large part to the fact that because IoT enables the interconnection of the physical and virtual world based on interoperable communication technologies, essentially every electronic device will have network connectivity – and that means every manufacturer of electronic devices will also be in the software business.
- The top capabilities that respondents are interested in are: regression and system testing; code coverage; automated C, C++, Ada dynamic/unit testing; and automatic test case generation.
The research also generated findings of interest on a wide variety of key topics including code quality and testing analytics (with responses broken out between specific audience segments including management, developers, and testers/QA team). The full report includes more detailed information on the impact of automated testing of legacy code, the effects of continuous integration and change-based testing, technical debt, the Internet of Things, and much more. The complete report is now available for download on Vector Software’s website.
