Quality can be assured for any end-to-end digital transformation journey by executing a wide range of testing activities. These include continuous testing, continuous integration, continuous deployment, continuous monitoring, and many others.
Today, customers’ expectations have upended many well-established procedures in software development and delivery. One of them is the positioning of quality assurance testing in the software development lifecycle.
This is increasingly witnessed in the digital transformation journey of enterprises. Since the journey entails the transformation of processes, technologies, interactions, and others, quality has become the driving force. This is due to the fact that competition demands the faster delivery of software applications while ensuring service excellence.
This calls for considering a wide range of parameters, for any dip in the performance of the software application can have significant ramifications on the brand. If historically, software testing was more about the identification and mitigation of defects, today it has become more holistic.
Software quality assurance has moved towards enhancing user experience and customer satisfaction a la Agile and DevOps methods of development. Quality has come to be baked into the product rather than being a one-off parameter to be executed in the SDLC.
How Quality Contributes to Digital Transformation
Quality assurance testing contributes positively to major digital transformation objectives as mentioned below.
- Achieving complete coverage of test requirements
- Ensuring glitch-free product development and deployment
- Reducing or eliminating rework while enhancing productivity and efficiency
- Improving brand equity by ensuring a superior user experience
- Delivering pipeline automation to manage multi-channel digital transformation efforts
- Creating a quality culture across the organization (both in-house and cloud)
How to Bake Quality into Your Digital Transformation Efforts
Unless your digital transformation efforts have quality baked into them, the objectives will not be achieved as per expectations. In a competitive market where customers won’t think twice before dissing your product, it is imperative that quality is incorporated into the value chain right from the planning stage. The following ways can ensure quality is baked into the SDLC:
Continuous Testing
In the Agile-DevOps-driven software development model, QA testing comprising manual and automation processes should be integrated from the early stages. This helps to identify and mitigate errors at the beginning rather than making them later when the job becomes complex, time-consuming, costly, and risky.
Continuous testing offers higher speed, reliability, responsiveness, and frequency while developing products. It focuses on ensuring business agility through continuous integration and deployment. Continuous testing also entails simulation aorvirtualization of the test environment.
Continuous Integration
It integrates the product codes to a central location while validating them using test automation. It automates QA services to validate the customized builds and generates reports notifying success or failure.
Build a Consistent Feedback Loop
Businesses often skirt the issue of client consultation for speed, an approach that can backfire at anytime should something go wrong. Any software testing company should consult the business stakeholders during every stage of the sprint. This allows for transparency and assures stakeholders that the value propositions are intact.
Continuous Deployment
The process manages the deployment of the software solution in a live environment. By incorporating auto-build deployments, the server generates automated alerts for performance issues or failure scenarios. Here, automation is driven by application release automation, wherein every team (development, QA, and production) uses the same process. This precludes any one-off scripts for deployment.
Continuous Monitoring
It is executed using application performance management solutions, which allow incident management through performance analytics and proactive monitoring. The solutions divide the application into smaller, manageable, and independently running components.
Cloud Testing
As more organizations migrate to the cloud, the need for cloud testing has become critical to validate certain cloud functions. These include scalability, performance, security, and redundancy, among others.
Cloud-based quality assurance services test the reliability and performance of applications deployed in the cloud. They do so by simulating real-world traffic and meeting the functional and non-functional requirements.
Security Testing
Security has turned out to be the biggest threat to the digital landscape. Hence, QA testing companies must ensure the protection of all sensitive information and its accessibility to authorized users. They must check whether the cloud or in-house systems are equipped with the latest security controls and adhere to the established regulatory standards.
Performance Testing
Any software application can show latency or erroneous results when subjected to a workload beyond a specific threshold. Performance testing verifies the response time, throughput, and other performance metrics of an application at peak load times.
Conclusion
Quality assurance testing is not limited to the above-mentioned tests but encompasses a wide range of testing. These may include API testing, reliability testing, disaster recovery testing, system verification and acceptance testing, interoperability testing, compatibility testing, multi-tenancy testing, and others.
It is only through a comprehensive phalanx of testing procedures that the objectives of digital transformation for an enterprise can be achieved.
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