Managers 'railroaded' into deploying apps

Nearly two-thirds of senior IT professionals claim they are railroaded into deploying applications that have not been properly tested.

In a poll conducted by software development firm Compuware among IT professionals attending the Gartner Symposium ITxpo in Cannes, 58 per cent of respondents said the biggest factor in deciding to go live with a bespoke application was pressure from other parts of the organisation.

But half of the businesses surveyed have experienced application failure in the past year, with 32 per cent of these also suffering financial loss as a result.

"This is further evidence of the gulf between IT and the business," said Vange Yianni, Compuware's technology manager.

"With businesspeople striving for competitive advantage and efficiency gains from IT, there is a great deal of pressure on the IT director to go live with projects."

Only one in eight organisations used an analysis of the risks of failure as the major factor in the decision to go live.

And although 88 per cent of companies said they identified the business risks of application failure when defining a project, only 11 per cent of them used these risks as a basis for prioritising testing activities.

"It's very rare that you have the time and budget to test an application to the extent where you can say that it is 100 per cent reliable and stable," conceded Yianni.

"However, by having full visibility of the risks you can make sure testing efforts are directed towards those areas of the application that are most likely to cause failure."

The poll was conducted among 100 senior IT professionals from across Europe in November.