High-stress e-commerce environment fosters emergency changes, report says

Almost 30% of changes made to up-and-running e-commerce applications are unscheduled and considered emergencies, giving I.T. staff less time to determine what impact the changes may have, a new report says. What’s more, the report says e-commerce I.T. teams have no confidence in more than 15% of changes they make.

The emergency nature of such changes and the lack of confidence in them stems from the high stress and complex environment of e-commerce businesses and technology, says the report, “I.T. Operations Research Report: Testing Maturity, Part II—Applications and Operating Systems.” The report is from I.T. operations and testing vendor StackSafe Inc. and research firm Research Edge Inc.

“The traditional rationale for not consistently testing changes to e-commerce and some other applications is that the applications operate in fast-paced and volatile environments where testing changes is very challenging,” says Dennis Powell, senior product manager at StackSafe. “Improving change management and testing can provide significant value to organizations by reducing downtime and improving availability.”

The report, based on a survey of 400 I.T. operations professionals, found that companies’ policies on how to change software and test the changes varied according to an application’s complexity, the lead time required for changes and the costs associated with down time.

Applications tend to fall into three profiles with regard to change management and testing, the report says: High-stress environments, including e-commerce and customer relationship management; prudent planners, including enterprise resource planning, supply chain management and transaction processing; and laissez-faire planners, such as web hosting.
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