Worldwide Automated Software Quality Forecast, 2023-2027: Demand for Software Velocity, AI, and Continuous Testing Drives Higher Growth Expectations

This IDC study provides an analysis of the 2023-2027 automated software quality (ASQ) market forecast. It discusses IDC's ASQ assessment for a market that showed double-digit growth of 10.5% to $4.1 billion in 2022 (compared with 12.8% growth during 2021 on updated ASQ numbers of $3.7 billion). This continued double-digit growth for ASQ for the second year sets the basis for a higher ASQ growth rate estimates moving into the forecast time frame. We see ASQ adoption driven by the imperative to ship quality software across more complex, distributed, and digitized environments more rapidly than ever. As organizations continued to reinvest more deeply in ASQ solutions to address increased challenges with digitization in the face of challenges across a variety of vectors (including business, technology, software sourcing, and diverse platform deployment with mobile, social business, and cloud), major share ASQ solution providers are experiencing some revenue increases and a number are experiencing high double-digit growth. Midsize innovative vendors in emerging technology areas such as mobile, software quality analysis and measurement (SQAM), and cloud testing contributed to what we expect will be improving ASQ growth moving into the forecast time frame."High investment in and demand for ASQ solutions and significant growth provide a foundation for adoption during the ongoing geopolitical, environmental, and financial volatility as organizations rely more than ever on quality software for digital execution. IDC research in 1H23 also shows software quality and testing as a primary area benefitting from generative AI, for which we saw increasing solutions moving into 2023 and expansion forthcoming. These factors underlie our ASQ forecast moving into 2027. Our current ASQ CAGR of 12.4% for the 2023-2027 time frame (up from 8.2% for the prior forecast period) expands the CAGR that we set initially in June 2022 for the 2022-2026 time period. There was an increased adoption for ASQ as software velocity increased, seen in adoption trends and survey data that underscored the impact of rapid digitization that continued in 2022, along with increased complexity for remote multimodal application development and deployment and highly constrained, distributed staffing resources. These combined factors result in ongoing demand and growth for software quality automation," said Melinda Ballou, program director, IDC's Agile Application Life-Cycle Management, Quality, and Portfolio Strategies. "Responsiveness on the part of ASQ providers to customer needs for quality software will help sustain and drive growth overall, as vendors deliver more complete agile DevOps and quality and life-cycle management solutions via acquisitions and partnerships and as consolidation continues. Smaller and larger vendors continue to play a crucial role for market innovation as we see from agile and cloud testing, quality measurement with static and dynamic analyses and security leverage, and agile and mobile ERP testing for business applications, as well as AI, machine learning (ML), and emerging robotic process automation (RPA) solutions for testing, as software development democratizes with no-code/low-code options and citizen developers. We expect additional acquisitions and ASQ growth in this space in the 2023-2027 time frame."