US Government Agencies Commit To Increased Application Testing

In what I hope will be an indication of events to come, at least two governmental agencies are planning on greatly increasing application testing throughout the development life cycle in and effort to avoid making costly post-deployment fixes. Grant Gross, of IDG News Service in his article U.S. agencies: More application testing needed, states:

Two U.S. government agencies are embracing performance-engineering processes and application testing throughout the development cycle as a way to avoid costly fixes after deployment, officials there said Wednesday.

Representatives of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) said they've deployed performance-engineering software in recent years, and it has helped cut down on problems after development.

"If you catch an error in development, the cost is the cost," said John Chambliss, manager of the IRS WAN management team. "Once you get to [operations and maintenance], it's about 100 times the cost."

For the past two years, the IRS has used application performance management software from Opnet Technologies in Maryland to fix problems in the development of its portals that allow Web-based tax filings, Chambliss said at Opnet's annual conference in Washington, D.C. If electronic filing doesn't work, the IRS has major problems, he said.

The IRS uses Opnet's software on in-house development and also encourages outside developers to use it, Chambliss said.

The IRS has run into several IT problems in recent years. In 2006, the agency paid out more than $381 million in improper tax returns because of problems with a new Web-based version of software that detected fraudulent returns.

I can only remark that spending say one tenth of one percent of that $381 million on additional testing would have probably made a big difference in catching the errors that lead to them paying out that remarkable figure by mistake. But what is important is that the IRS and the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service have realized their mistakes and will be doing a much better job of testing in the future.

If this catches on, maybe this spade of preventable I.T. miscues I have been pointing out will diminish. As an advocate of additional testing all I can do is continue to point out the problems and suggest solutions.

There are any number of testing solutions available on the market, but speaking from my clearly biased viewpoint, I have to recommend companies take a serious look at Compuware's Application Delivery Management solutions. I feel they offer the most complete application testing and delivery solution for the entire Application Development Life Cycle.

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