The majority of companies (60%) around the world are hosting up to 50% of their applications in a cloud environment, according to the 2010-2011 World Quality Report, produced as part of ongoing collaboration between Capgemini Group and HP Software & Solutions.

Along with an increase in applications deployed in the cloud, organisations are also deploying agile IT delivery in their applications and infrastructure as they look to streamline operations.

The report also reveals the effects of the economic downturn on enterprise software development and quality assurance.

It finds that new projects are being initiated but IT investments are shifting from a daily operational focus towards building new applications that bring competitive advantage for business.

The shift has seen both developers and testers come under increased pressure to provide greater efficiency, more consistent quality assurance methodology and better reuse of automated software.

Organisations are increasingly turning to agile and cloud based delivery methods to modernise their applications.

Benefits cited include cost reduction (50%), increased agility (33%) and improved time to market (14%) for cloud computing. Time to market (37%), quality of application (26%), resource utilisation (23%) and cost savings (14%) were cited as the main benefits of agile IT delivery.

As requirements for IT delivery change, the report finds that the requirements for future quality assurance engineers are changing as well.

Testers of tomorrow will work in smaller teams that are expected to deliver executable code within 4 to 6 weeks. Tight deadlines and smaller teams are likely to lead to a future where members of quality assurance teams will possess robust quality assurance (31%) and business domain (22%) skills, database knowledge (14%) and scripting skills (10%).