Testing times for UK businesses

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Failure to place enough emphasis on application performance testing is costing UK businesses millions of pounds each year, according to research.

A third of organisations admit that the resulting performance issues are hitting them financially to the tune of more than £1 million, with 15 per cent suggesting the loss to them equates to £2 million-plus.

Almost 90 per cent of organisations don't have adequate testing processes and procedures in place, claims the study of 100 IT directors, which was conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of technology integrator Morse.

"Organisations simply aren't managing the risks of going live with new applications," said Chris Reid a managing consultant at Morse.

"With so many businesses neglecting performance testing, it's not surprising that so many are encountering application performance problems."

This means businesses are often left in a firefighting situation when the application fails to live up to expectations, either having to take it offline or buy more hardware and computing power to bump up performance.

Buying additional hardware may eliminate the problem in the short term. But it is a costly approach and potentially just masks the bigger issue of needing to escalate testing up the agenda, according to Reid.

"Sometimes people don't fully understand how users will actually use the system," added Reid.

"If they press a button that takes two seconds to operate as opposed to 20 minutes, you suddenly see them pressing it 10 times an hour. So the whole use of the system changes and it can get clogged up as users are doing more in less time."

Reid said that UK organisations must apply the same importance to testing any IT implementation, not just those involving applications, to avoid problems elsewhere in the chain.

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