PROGRAMME - KEYNOTES

The Business Value of Testing: Are you Ready for the Next Steps?

Gilbert van der Heiden, Research Director
IT Sourcing, Gartner (NL)

IT has to proof its value to the business and business demands that proof. Testing would be an excellent catalyser but it often seems to fail to reach the business eye. From a business perspective there is still limited understanding of the impact of embedding testing throughout the fulfillment of business demand to realise business benefits. Why is that?
Testing becomes technical quite fast and therefore it easily becomes an IT issue instead of a business issue. Testing is hard for the business to understand. In fact, it is hard to understand how hard it actually is, why one should even have to do it, and what value is actually realised. Especially if the IT organisation is at a low level of maturity: They test but systems still fail; they test to requirements but the requirements are bad; they say "you are good to go" but they built the wrong thing. How then convince a business to invest in testing when it doesn't bring them what they have expected?
This presentation will address these issues.