Tricentis released the findings of its global 2025 Quality Transformation Report. The inaugural survey exposes the growing challenges in delivering quality software, as well as dissonance among today’s technology leaders and professionals around how to prioritize speed, quality, and cost in today’s AI-driven economy.
The Quality Transformation Report, based on a survey of over 2,700 global CIOs, CTOs, VPs of engineering, DevOps and quality assurance leaders, and software developers across various industries, including public sector, energy and utilities, manufacturing and financial services, finds:
- Software quality falters amid competing organizational pressures: As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%). The majority (63%) of global organizations ship code changes without fully testing them, citing the need to expedite release cycles (46%) and accidental slips of untested code (40%) as driving factors.
- Quality gaps are costing organizations millions: Nearly half (42%) of global organizations believe poor software quality costs them $1M or more annually, with financial services firms reporting the steepest losses.
- Misalignment between developers and leadership is blocking quality gains: Poor communication between software development and quality assurance teams (33%) and disconnect between leadership and software development teams (28%) prove to be top barriers to achieving higher quality software.
- Agentic AI looks set to help plug productivity, quality, and performance gaps: The majority of organizations surveyed (82%) report excitement about the possibility of AI agents to assume their monotonous tasks in the development and delivery cycle, freeing up time for more strategic and rewarding work. More broadly, 84% believe AI will help software development teams deliver software under increasingly tight deadlines.
- AI is gaining executive trust to drive critical high-stakes decisions: 9 in 10 CIOs, CTOs, and software delivery teams are confident in AI’s ability to autonomously make software release decisions.
- Enterprises are gaining clarity on generative AI’s business impact: Almost 90% of respondents say their organizations can effectively quantify the ROI from generative AI within their software development lifecycles.
- Strikingly, almost all (99.89%) respondents think autonomous testing will be useful for QA: Areas where technology leaders and software development professionals expect to see the most impact include improving software speed overall (28%), overall quality (28%), analyzing test results (25%), and test case maintenance (23%).
“Recent software outages due to unchecked or untested code changes showcase just how critical high-quality software is to the wider organizational ecosystem, and having the right balance of quality and speed to serve developing technological needs is paramount,” said Kevin Thompson, Chief Executive Officer, Tricentis. “As AI continues to evolve, we believe tech leaders and practitioners need to define what quality means for their organization to strike the right balance between quality, speed, and cost, while implementing comprehensive testing strategies to deliver better business outcomes.”
As outlined in the report, the paradigm shift taking place in software development, accelerated by AI, presents both obstacles and opportunities for leaders and practitioners to capitalize on innovative solutions that help address the ongoing discussion related to speed and quality.
Tricentis provides a full suite of AI-powered quality engineering solutions that address critical aspects of the software delivery process for enterprise organizations.
The full Tricentis 2025 Quality Transformation Report is available to download here.
