“Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges.” In the classic film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, this line was spoken by a group of bandits who clearly didn’t need law and order on their side.

Today, one could easily picture a different type of bandit that has been disrupting application development and coding, uttering something very similar.

“Testing? We don’t need no stinking testing.”

Yep, for a few years now, it has seemed like agile developers and DevOps teams haven’t been giving testing its proper due. One could almost picture them thinking, “So what if there’s a bug, design flaw or performance issue. We’ll fix it in the new version next week.”

Of course, this line of thinking has turned out to be a big mistake. Instead of issues getting fixed in next versions, many agile developer groups were simply pushing problems down the line and creating bigger and harder-to-fix issues in the future.

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Luckily, it looks like a big about-face is now occurring. Aberdeen research has seen a big spike in interest in the deployment of tools to test application performance, usability, and functionality, especially in the development phase. And we’ve seen the biggest surge in interest among established enterprises that have already made the move to DevOps and agile development.

Also, our surveys into DevOps and performance management have found that businesses that are leaders in application performance are investing in testing tools that help them optimize development in emerging areas.

For example, with all companies, agile tools are a top area of interest (at 29%), followed by agile software development (24%), and software testing (12%). Aberdeen research has shown that many businesses are adopting agile practices for development and are looking to be more innovative and meet rising customer expectations for applications and services.

Interestingly, when we drill into large enterprises, we see interest in software testing double (to 27%). With many of these large organizations having already adopted agile, it makes sense that they would show increased interest in improving their applications through testing, as our research shows significant costs, both in revenues and in customer satisfaction, from applications with poor performance and usability.

We will continue to research the growth in testing and in all areas of application development and optimization. Given the rapid rate of innovation and change in these areas, it is clear that businesses need every tool at their disposal to stay on top.

In the end, good testing is a kind of badge of quality for applications and services. And that’s the kind of badge that even modern coding bandits will need.