ANALYST VIEW by Joachim Herschmann

Joachim Herschmann is a Senior Research Director at Gartner, Inc.

Analyst View

BY JOACHIM HERSCHMANN Software quality with digital immunity

Cloud, social and immersive computing scenarios have raised expectations for application quality and delivery. Software and application engineers must deliver working solutions that offer a compelling user experience (UX), contribute to business value and minimize risk to the business. Yet few software engineering leaders feel that they can do that, in part because of antiquated development and testing approaches. Software engineering leaders are looking for new practices and approaches to mitigate these risks, improve software user experiences and deliver business value through applications. Digital immunity provides a roadmap to do so. Digital immunity comprises a set of practices and technologies to develop resilient software applications that offer superior UX. With this roadmap, software engineering teams can detect and respond to a wide variety of Apowerfulvisionstatement issues, from functional security vulnerabilities bugs to and data canhelpbuilddigital inconsistencies. immunity. sof Here tware are e the ngin three steps eering lea that ders responsible for software quality improvement can take to build digital immunity.

Create a vision for digital immunity

The fact that software has been tested creates a false sense of security, leading to the idea that “ we have followed the process, so things must be okay — and if they aren ’t, we can ’t be blamed because we did what we were asked to do. ” That is the wrong mindset. Instead, software engineering leaders must focus on what constitutes a compelling UX. This requires a mindset of innovation and a shift toward building quality into the product.

A powerful vision statement can help build digital immunity by creating a frame of reference for defining the implementation strategy. It helps to align the organization and initiate actions to implement the vision, such as infusing quality in every step of the project process and allocating staff with the required skills for building resilient applications.

Build digital immunity

five key elements of a digital immune system: 1. Autonomous testing. It extends beyond the automated execution of test cases to include fully automated planning, creation, maintenance and analysis of tests. It orchestrates those activities and enables independence and autonomy for them. 2. Chaos engineering. The use of experimental failure or fault testing to uncover software bugs and points of failure, among other weaknesses. A Gartner survey found that 18% of participants were using or planning to use chaos engineering. 3. Autoremediation. A software system or ecosystem is equipped to monitor itself and correct issues automatically without involving operations staff. Examples of issues that can be autoremediated include restarting an application that crashes or reverting a faulty configuration of an application to a previous configuration. 4. Observability. A characteristic of software and systems that allows them to be “ seen ” so that software developers and engineers can more quickly and confidently isolate the root cause of a problem. 5. Continuous validation. The ability to monitor the integrity of data and systems in a live environment with the goal of identifying inconsistencies or anomalous behavior before they create problems for the user.

Replace inefficient testing practices

Faster delivery of customer value through a continuous flow of software deployed in production environments is at the core of DevOps. Increasing velocity requires DevOps teams to identify and remove their greatest constraint to deployment.

In many organizations, testing is the greatest constraint, often because of a high ratio of manual testing. Software schedules for major applications are about 25% longer than they should be, due to poor-quality, expanding testing intervals. Evaluate the current state of manual tests and determine the most effective approach for transitioning these testing assets to increasingly autonomous levels of automated testing.

With these three steps, software engineering leaders can create digital immunity that improves software quality for end-users and in turn, helps deliver upon business outcomes faster. z