Quality assurance (QA) has been a critical, if underinvested, segment in the enterprise IT landscape. As enterprises increasingly focus on digitalization, the way that QA services are being delivered is also transforming:

• Digitalization is leading to an implicit linking of assurance services with business results
• At the same time, rapid technology proliferation is challenging enterprises to create the right integration and interfaces between tools and platforms, service them with cutting-edge talent, and protect existing investments
• The rise of DevOps requires enterprises to drive quality outcomes with accelerated velocity and redefine organizational and talent models

Ultimately, automation is changing the fundamental economics of QA.

Under these circumstances, the traditional arbitrage-first CoE model for QA services needs to undergo significant changes:

• QA services need to embrace an ever-widening ecosystem of tools and technologies that can be loosely coupled in a flexible manner
• QA talent needs to evolve to be cross-functional and embrace multiple facets of development, industry context, and a variety of automation techniques
• QA organizational models need to evolve to cover an ecosystem of partners, developers, and “beyond the firewall” stakeholders, and deliver services that are more closely linked to business metrics

This report investigates these issues in detail. Based on a survey with QA and enterprise IT leaders across 100 large enterprises in North America and Europe, we:

• Examine the changing nature of key strategic imperatives for enterprise QA
• Define the current and anticipated nature of technology adoption in QA
• Identify the key challenges with traditional QA models
• Establish a vision for a new enterprise QA model