Even though companies say they are committed to improving software testing, they are not following through by investing in it⁠ - and DevOps pipelines are suffering as a result.

That’s the conclusion of a new survey from Diffblue among 300 developers and engineering managers in the UK and US.

It found that 41 per cent of said their organisations have fully adopted Test-Driven Development (TDD), but only eight per cent said they write tests before code - the very definition of TDD. A further 61 per cent said that their organisation is resistant to a culture of software testing and only 30 per cent considered themselves 'leaders' in testing practices.

Almost half (49 per cent) of respondents said they write tests before writing code less than 40 per cent of the time.

Even though all of the participants in the study worked at companies that have adopted DevOps initiatives, only 13 per cent thought they have achieved continuous deployment, and 58 per cent have not yet fully adopted agile methodologies. Most also said their organisation's software quality (77 per cent) and regression suites (76 per cent) need improvement.

Despite this, only 35 per cent of respondents said they always build time for testing into their release schedules. Overall, 81 per cent of developers - compared to 55 per cent of managers - agreed that the biggest hurdle to developing a testing culture is a lack of dedicated resources from management.

"Software testing is clearly a struggle for developers and their managers, yet never has it been more important to accelerate DevOps adoption,” said Diffblue chief executive Mathew Lodge. “Modern AI techniques mean unit tests can be written and maintained automatically, relieving pressure on developers and helping drive the cultural change necessary to embrace high quality DevOps pipelines.”

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