Software Development Failures Plague North American Enterprises: Study

According to a recent study from CA Technologies, software development constraints and failures continue to hamper North American enterprises.

Service Virtualization addresses these challenges by enabling teams to develop and test an application using a virtual service environment that has been configured to imitate a real production environment. This provides the ability to change the behavior and data of these virtual services easily in order to validate different scenarios.

"Service virtualization (or SV) is the automated practice of capturing and simulating any system or service IT teams depend on to deliver software," Mittal said in his post. "This is not like conventional hardware virtualization that copies some servers to free up hard drives and rack space in your own data center. We are talking about simulating every constraint in the software environment—the very distributed and over-utilized stuff that software teams need to interact throughout development, such as complex customer-response data, core mainframes, integration middleware and performance data that is either costly or unavailable to you."

"This research follows a European study conducted in July 2012 in which 32 percent of respondents revealed that they were expected to deliver and manage four to seven releases a year, compared to 53 percent in North America," Ian Parkes, managing director of Coleman Parkes Research, said in a statement. "Even more surprising, 75 percent of respondents across North America and Europe reported they were seeking additional budget to pay for more application development man-hours, when we know that additional labor is not in fact the ideal solution."

"In short—it's time for enterprise IT to industrialize simulation and modeling, or suffer more delays and failures," Mittal said. "While the concept is new for software, it shouldn't be. Other industries such as aviation and automotive manufacturing have done it for years, using things like wind tunnels, flight simulators and computer models to avoid real-world constraints and do their engineering and testing much earlier, far before real products are assembled. IT needs to apply these same principles of simulation and modeling."

According to the study, "These survey results suggest that development managers often bring new applications or services from testing environments into production without complete insight into how their integrated applications might fail. For engineers, understanding failure modes is a critical part of the job, yet according to this study, 69 percent did not have this insight on a consistent basis. This is an alarming prospect for any board giving the green light for new software projects, especially those that impact the customer. It is also concerning that only nine percent have comprehensive insight into how complex, integrated applications could break in production."