Bank of England Supports New Software Quality Assurance Benchmarks

New measures from QA Vector® Analytics show wide variation in effort devoted to fixing software defects

LONDON, July 2, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- The Bank of England has agreed to partner QA Media, a London-based information business, with a three-year subscription for a new service that allows banks and other financial firms to compare the effectiveness and return on investment of their software quality assurance processes.

QA Vector^® Analytics is a unique platform, said QA Media, that meets a critical need; financial services are fundamentally dependent on software systems and major outages have illustrated the need for inspectable, agreed standards for software quality assurance and testing. 

"The Bank of England is pleased to be a partner in this project, especially as it has been created by a UK-based information company that has an international customer base," said Jordan Daniel, Domain Lead, Quality Assurance and Productivity at the Bank of England.

"While our participation in the project is partly aimed at benchmarking our own internal software development processes, we also see a growing need for benchmarks for software quality and resilience that can be shared by banks and other financial firms. The launch of QA Financial Vector^® Analytics is especially timely as those firms have been re-assessing their software platforms in response to the impact of Covid-19 on their customers and their own development teams."

"Our research shows that the success of financial institutions depends on delivering more software, more quickly, to their business teams," said Justyn Trenner, who heads the QA Vector^® Analytics platform. "But they still struggle when it comes to knowing how effective their quality programmes are and whether they are spending enough, and can justify incremental spend, on QA and testing. Since testing can account for as much as a third of total IT expenditure and remediation costs can be as much as half of all development project spend, benchmarking this properly has the potential to drive major efficiencies."

QA Vector^® Analytics enables financial firms to contribute data on their software development processes - including, for example, data on the number of development faults that have to be addressed in production, the timeliness of software delivery and the effort expended on both quality assurance and remediating defects - and then extract benchmarks that enable them to compare their performance with a peer group of other firms. 

A number of leading UK and international banks and insurance companies, as well as the Bank of England, have participated in a proof-of-concept for the service, which is now launching commercially. Initial findings indicate a substantial disparity between the best and worst outcomes for the amount of resources absorbed by remediation of systems already in place.

While businesses of all kinds face a similar challenge in benchmarking software quality, it is a more complex issue for banks and large financial firms because of the size of the IT platforms, the number of older, legacy software systems that they often have to manage, and because of the number of different regulatory regimes in which they operate. Over recent years, regulators have increased their scrutiny of  how financial firms manage IT risk and resilience, and some have started to codify what that means in terms of software quality. 

You can watch a video of Jordan Daniel and Justyn Trenner discussing these issues and the initial findings of QA Vector^Ⓡ Analytics at the QA Financial Digital Forum, an online conference held on June 17th.

About QA Media Ltd: QA Media was founded in 2015. The firm is an independent information, research and international events company based in the City of London, connecting buyers and sellers in the marketplace for software quality assurance services. QA Media's information services are designed to promote the sharing of critical information on the management of IT risk.

For reference, the video linked above may be found at https://youtu.be/UEmXV_tGyUg.

For further information, or to speak to either Jordan Daniel or Justyn Trenner, contact: Justyn Trenner, Director, QA Media Limited at justyn.trenner@qa-financial.com or on +44 (0)7703-162363.

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