News from the Worlds of Software Development and QA — August 2016

Welcome to this month’s news digest where we take a look at a few of this month’s interesting stories from the QA and software development worlds. If you are interested in checking out some technology news from July — including the hottest technologies for software developers — simply follow this link. Hopefully, this month’s digest offers some insights relevant to your daily work.

Outsourced Software Testing Market to Grow

A recent study from Research and Markets noted the global outsourced software testing market is slated to grow at an annual rate of 10.8 percent through the end of the decade. Part of this growth is expected to be driven by a shift towards business outcome-based metrics which is a sign of the continued maturity of the overall quality assurance market as these outcomes are able to be defined more clearly.

The study reported some of these reportable business impacts include: customer satisfaction, client revenue, the length of the QA lifecycle, as well as the overall release time. Yet another Cloud-based service acronym — TaaS (Testing as a Service) — was also noted by the study. As businesses continue to eschew their own in-house IT functions for Cloud offerings, the growth of the outsourced QAaaS or TaaS market makes perfect sense.

SAP developing Software at a Faster Pace

One of the main reasons why enterprises continue to embrace modern software development methodologies and practices like DevOps and Continuous Deployment is to speed up the process of application enhancements and fixes. The German ERP software company, SAP, recently reported they enjoy a software development lifecycle four times faster than only a few years ago. This news was told to the Wall Street Journal.

Company CFO Luka Mucic described the faster nature of their SDLC. “A couple of years ago, SAP would have released a major update to their core business suite modules every two years. Nowadays we are down to half-yearly development cycles,” said Mucic. The use of Cloud-based services, automation, and leveraging modular software designs are the major reasons behind SAP’s process improvement.

No Man’s Sky swaps out their QA Team

The development company behind one of the more popular new videogames, No Man’s Sky, recently brought on a new QA team to help fix some critical bugs hampering gameplay, according to an article in IGN. This science-fiction title available for the PS4 and Windows platforms has garnered a lot of publicity for its open-ended storyline and a massive universe featuring over 18 quintillion unique planets to explore. Yes, that says “quintillion.”

Hello Games, the developer of the videogame, hopes to release a patch addressing some of the bugs and other issues. The new QA team is actually larger than the entire development staff, which makes one wonder how many software testers originally worked on the project. The most egregious bugs involve a player becoming stranded without their starship — a difficult proposition in such a large virtual universe.

A release date for the No Man’s Sky patch is still to be announced.

Keep visiting the Betica Blog for additional insights and news from the software development and testing world.

Posted on August 26, 2016 | Categories News, Quality Assurance | Tags Game Development, No Man's Sky, SAP, Software Development, Software Testing, Testing as a Service