European firms are neglecting quality assurance (QA) in application development, and their software may fail to meet their needs as a result, according to research by Compuware.

Compuware found 78 percent of organisations did not to apply a formal quality assurance methodology. A quarter of respondents said their QA team did not have sufficiently trained or experienced members, and a third said they had no full-time team manager.

Sarah Saltzman, Compuware's technology support manager, said it was surprising that so many firms had no formal methodologies in place despite the emergence of best practice initiatives such as Six Sigma and Capability Maturity Model (CMM).

"If you don't have the correct processes and steps in place [such as quality assurance] you may not be properly prepared when it comes to testing, and may even test the wrong part of the applications," Saltzman warned. "[Firms also] need to embed business requirements into the development process [but] sometimes it gets lost in the detail."

The situation is unlikely to change unless senior IT staff and company stakeholders drive through quality assurance initiatives themselves, Saltzman added.