Software development companies that apply tests automation vs usual approach success statistics

Question

I search the web, but can't find any.

Are there any official statistics of the companies success depending on whether they use e2e, unit, integration tests and automation?

Answer 1

The Statistics you are looking for here are not useful in your presumed goal of determining which route to take and/or present it to management with statistics to back it up..

A very small (tiny) amount of companies 'hit the jackpot' and go big time. Thousands of other companies fail. Most of the few big companies that succeed use extensive automation from what I have read from the founders. Many of the thousands that failed may have used manual testing. Going with the 99% in this case would not be a good choice for many companies looking for rapid growth.

The statistics you actually want are the relationship between revenue and growth to the amount of automation used. That is so fuzzy and open to different interpretations at different companies it is essentially meaningless.

The solution to advocating automation at your company?

Present a vision

Automation is the key to success and it is key to:

• Delivering changes faster to address a changing environment, changing growth stage of the company, changing consumers, changing business conditions, changing competition, etc.
• Shifting testing left and let developers instead of customers find the bugs earlier and cheaper
• Higher quality code because you can constantly refactor in safety
• Increasing MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) as automated tests are the guardrails against breaking things.
• Decreasing MTTR (Mean Time To Recover) as automated tests can quickly ensure that a fix or change doesn't break something else).

Answer 2

The yearly State of DevOps report gives insights in the what successful companies do as quality and engineering practises. read the 2021 version here.

According to the in 2019 published book Accelerate companies that perform better on these DORA metrics are financial more successful compared to companies that score lower.

Keep in mind that the technical practises you name are only a small part of technical excellence and continuous delivery. So holistically viewed just adding more test automation might not make you more successful, it might just slow you down.

This year’s Accelerate State of DevOps Report by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team at Google Cloud represents seven years of research and data from more than 32,000 professionals worldwide. Our research examines the capabilities and practices that drive software delivery, operational, and organizational performance. By leveraging rigorous statistical techniques, we seek to understand the practices that lead to excellence in technology delivery and to powerful business outcomes. To this end, we present data-driven insights about the most effective and efficient ways to develop and deliver technology.

https://cloud.google.com/devops