Tag: Cigniti

Why independent software testing is the best way to approach Quality Assurance

Amanda Nardi

Contributed by Cigniti Technologies.

Today, everything boils down to customer satisfaction. The technological advancements taking place across the industries are being undertaken to deliver enriched customer experiences and improve the user satisfaction ratio. Customer satisfaction, in today’s market dynamics, rely on three key factors – speed of delivery, cost effectiveness, and, most importantly, quality. If the customers are able to derive value from a product/service, their satisfaction levels will rise proportionally.

During 2019-2023, the global market of software testing services is expected to grow by USD 29.84 billion, accelerating at a CAGR of over 12%. Software companies are trying to break away from the legacy processes and methodologies as well as the old-school approach toward software development, where QA was placed at the bottom of the priority scale.

For companies to build quality offerings, they need time, which they do not have in spare due to fierce market competition. In order to align both quality as well as delivery speed, automation becomes the key. Consequently, the test automation services market is also growing exponentially along the software testing services. In fact, software test automation is one of the key reasons for the rising market share. However, neither automation nor quality comes cheap.

Hosting a test environment, maintaining test tools and test cases, developing the infrastructure is all too cumbersome and cost-intensive. Independent software testing services prove to be a boon here. Partnering with an external QA vendor for Independent software testing services allow you to leverage the advantage of a dedicated testing team without the challenges of maintaining such a team. Let us discuss why independent software testing is the best way to approach Quality Assurance:

Quality of testing

The developers who have written a code are often unable to look at it objectively, which means that there is a high chance that they will miss a critical bug. An independent testing team brings an unbiased and impartial view to software testing, which helps in maximum defect detection and minimum defect leakage to the production. This is all about bringing in a fresh perspective and a new outlook toward assessing a software for errors and glitches. More the number of defects found and resolved, higher the quality of the final product and better the performance.

Less effort, more focus

Traditionally, developers were expected to write, integrate, as well as test a code. This would lead to burnout, and therefore subpar quality of codes and a lot of defects in production. With an independent testing team to back them up, developers can center their focus entirely on writing an effective code while the hired testers will bear the responsibility of finding the bugs. Testers also come with knowledge of industry standards and compliance, which results in an end-product that is developed following the best practices.

Cost effectiveness

An independent testing services company has its own set of the required testing infrastructure. This removes the need for businesses to set up the hardware or software required for testing or to maintain testing practices, test environments, and tools. Also, as there is minimum defect leakage into production, the iterations for each software development cycle is decreased. All of this collectively results in reduction of overall costs.

Faster releases

With a separate testing team taking care of the quality aspect, development and testing can occur in parallel with each other. The automation expertise of the independent software testing services provider adds to the ability of delivering a quality software in shorter turnaround time. A dedicated testing team becomes key to ensuring success of such contemporary software development methodologies such as Agile and DevOps.

In Conclusion

As per Forrester, “much of the recent growth in outsourced application services has been fueled by customers engaging independent testing services where the development provider is separate from the provider performing the testing.” Independent pure-play software testing providers have all their resources dedicated toward quality assurance. They have all the required tools, infrastructure, processes, and resources, along with the expertise and experience.

The Next-Gen Technology Landscape of the Healthcare Sector

Amanda Nardi

Contributed by Cigniti Technologies.

The healthcare sector is expected to touch $390.7 billion by 2024. Let us discuss the next-gen technologies that are going to impact the healthcare sector.

  • Internet of Things (IoT): Sensor-embedded devices exchanging information over the internet (IoT devices) are finding their way across technology landscapes. These have found usage in the healthcare sector and are making a profound impact on the health of users. By redefining or reshaping diagnostics, disease management, and preemptive care, IoT devices, including the wearables, will become more common in future. To ensure the success of these devices so that they are able to manage life threatening conditions, healthcare software testing should be the norm. Let us understand how IoT devices can be of help in the healthcare sector in the days to come.
    • Tracking locations in real-time: One of the major challenges the healthcare staff needs to grapple with is locating medical devices in real time. For example, portable devices like nebulizers, scales, defibrillators, and ECG devices, among others, are often moved across the healthcare facility. They are often left at places where finding them can become a challenge, especially when there is an emergency. However, should these devices or apparatus be equipped with IoT sensors, they can be easily monitored in real-time. This can help the stakeholders to monitor and manage the healthcare environment.
    • Share health data: Physicians are often challenged by the lack of data concerning the vital parameters of patients. These may include blood pressure, heart rate, and calories burnt, among others. In the absence of such data, carrying out correct diagnosis can become difficult leaving the patients in limbo. However, wearable IoT enabled devices can allow the sharing of vital parameters of patients leading to a quicker and accurate diagnosis. To make sure these devices perform to their optimum and do not suffer from glitches, conducting healthcare application testing becomes a critical requirement.

As IoT based devices capable of providing real-time data become commonplace, efficient diagnostics and care will increase. They will help healthcare professionals in saving lives with the help of data, analytics, and better decision making.

  • 3D Printing: This technology is used to create physical objects from digital data. The examples of 3D-printed prosthetics and human heart model are helping amputees and medical professionals, respectively. The global market for this technology is expected to reach $2,319.5 million by 2020. Let us discuss the latest innovations in 3D printing.
    • Prosthetics: One of the major challenges amputees face in wearing prosthetics is a lack of customization. Prosthetic devices made in the assembly line are made as per general measurements. This is where 3D printing has come as a godsend for physically-challenged patients. Here, patients’ exact specifications concerning the body part(s) are obtained digitally and personalized variants of prosthetics are built. These provide greater maneuverability to the patients, helping them lead their lives with ease.
    • Tissue engineering: The technology helps to recreate damaged tissues and intricate body parts – printed ears, hands, livers, eyes, or hearts. This can be of great help in trauma cases where patients have lost a body part, organ, or tissue. Tissue engineering helps to create functional constructs for damaged tissues or organs. Here, engineered materials combined with stem cells can create the required cell type.
    • Surgical tools: Surgery is becoming more precise with less incisions to be made. This calls for personalized surgical tools to help surgeons in making precise incisions and implanting medical devices. 3D printing with its disruptive application can bring about greater personalization and cost benefits.
  • Artificial Intelligence: This is defined as machines induced with intelligence having the ability to mimic human brain functions. The healthcare sector can benefit immensely by embracing AI. It can drastically improve patient outcomes with medical professionals leveraging AI-enabled medical knowledge. AI-enabled systems can help medical professionals with real-time, relevant, and quality information to derive suitable inferences. These can help in reducing the cost of treatment, elimination of unnecessary procedures, streamlining workflows, and building patient-centric treatment protocols.

AI systems can help in diagnosing chronic health conditions like diabetes, coronary heart disease, and cancer, among others, within minutes. They can do so by analyzing the vital parameters of patients saved in electronic records. Thus, the systems can reduce the need for unnecessary biopsies or even surgeries to diagnose a condition. However, these systems must be subjected to intense healthcare compliance testing to ensure they function as per the expected outcomes.

  • Liquid biopsy: Today, the diagnosis and monitoring of cancer are costly, time-consuming, painful, and invasive. With liquid biopsy, cancer cells can be extracted from a blood sample without having to conduct costly and painful recurring biopsies. The technology will help to monitor tumors in a non-invasive manner even better than a CT scan.

Conclusion

The healthcare industry is going to face disruption thanks to the advent of advanced technologies. To ensure these technologies perform to their optimum and deliver expected outcomes, they should undergo healthcare QA testing. Moreover, since technology is not always flawless and can engender a number of glitches, even driven by human factors, healthcare tech QA can be of help. It can ensure continuous testing of the devices or built-in software as part of the delivery pipeline. Healthcare tech QA can lead to reduced technical errors, better compliance with regulations, and save lives.

 

How digital transformation services can help your enterprise to streak ahead

Amanda Nardi

Contributed by Cigniti Technologies.

The world is moving rapidly by riding on the cutting-edge digital technologies, namely, IoT, SMAC, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, among others. Businesses are developing products or services with interfaces spread across devices, operating systems, browsers, and networks. This has necessitated their legacy systems to be updated by engaging digital transformation services.

The dynamics of market is increasingly being led by changing customer preferences reflected in new needs, habits, and ways of consuming and communicating. Digital transformation allows enterprises to derive outcomes such as increased productivity, expanded consumer base, streamlined workflows, reduced operational costs, enhanced quality products or services, and better ROI, among others.

Since consumers leverage digital technologies to perform a slew of tasks, the amount of data generated is huge. Analyzing this data and deriving business-oriented insights can be a challenge unless, of course, the business has the technology and resources. Digital transformation services can help enterprises in enhancing their customer interface. For example, by transforming their legacy systems, the utility services providers have been able to improve their efficiency significantly. As a result, the consumers do not need to queue up outside the offices of such companies for doing routine transactions. They can simply log onto the portal or app provided by such companies and transact.

With new avenues of interaction such as social media and mobile, customers want their interactions with a company to be consistent across avenues. This requires companies to take an omnichannel approach to cater to their customers. If they do not fall in line, they risk creating customer dissatisfaction and losing them. Again, to cite an example, customers want to place an order as per convenience and want it delivered through their preferred channel. So, unless the company has the technology and resources to address the demand, its competitiveness can go for a toss. Let us discuss how digital business transformation can help businesses to streak ahead in the competition.

Benefits of digital transformation solutions

The proliferation of digital technologies like smartphones and computers, and the ubiquity of the internet, have forced businesses to go digital. While many companies have drawn an elaborate digital transformation strategy to convert their systems, workflows, and deliverables, scores of them remain outside the ambit. Many companies are still wary of undertaking digital transformation implementation due to the cost and challenges involved. However, overcoming them is critical for them to stay competitive.

# Better customer experience: The customers of today have become increasingly choosy, thanks to the plethora of products and services available in the market. Customers are wont to choose products, which are not only qualitatively superior but offer better experiences as well. When it comes to the customer experience, the notable elements include aesthetics, performance, security, usability, responsiveness, and prompt complaint resolution. The last part is often crucial in differentiating between two products of similar features.

# Better analytics: Data have become the most valuable asset for an enterprise. These can help an enterprise to receive deep insights into various aspects of its processes. Also, with big data coming into play, businesses should be prepared to leverage the data for achieving success. A successful digital business transformation helps companies to collate data from customer interactions and transform them into a structured form. Thereafter, they can be analyzed to develop insights, identify outliers, and optimize to deliver better customer experiences.

# Faster time to market: Today, customers generally choose products that hit the market first. The early-bird approach of customers has necessitated companies to embrace digital transformation and streamline their workflows. This involves adopting Agile and DevOps methodologies to ensure continuous integration and delivery. As products go through a faster development, testing, and delivery pipeline, customers can receive the products early.

# Better security features: Security has assumed a critical significance in the success of a product in the market. This is due to the fact that the digital products of today have interfaces with different device platforms and third-party software, thereby creating vulnerabilities. These can be exploited by cybercriminals by introducing malware, trojans, and viruses to steal data and information. Thus, the growing menace of cybercriminals to commit data theft has brought the element of security into sharp focus.

Besides, companies need to adhere to international security protocols to garner credibility and escape censure. Hence, the need to imbibe DevSecOps in the workflows has become all the more important. In this approach, security is to be treated as an integral aspect of the workflow across departments. Hence, by implementing digital transformation solutions, companies can help to identify and address the built-in vulnerabilities of a product.

# Reduce operating costs: The digitization of businesses can streamline the workflows thereby increasing its efficiency. With procedural bottlenecks including redundancies removed or diluted, businesses can minimize their operating costs. This can significantly improve the revenue stream and make the company competitive.

# Brand enhancement: With better quality products or services delivered by the company, its brand awareness in the market increases vis-a-vis its competitors. For example, the brands or products having the biggest market share are the ones that are spoken about by the customers. This is mostly due to their superior quality brought about by innovation and digital transformation.

Conclusion

The future of IT means organizations should be nimble enough to quickly adopt the technologies and methodologies of the day. They must be agile and responsive to the customers’ needs and offer products or services that are superior and secure. The need for organizations to embrace digital transformation has become critical to stay competitive.

The value of customers in the digital age

Amanda Nardi

Contributed by Cigniti Technologies.

The digital age is marked by the advent of technology and its usage to make the lives of customers simpler and convenient. Businesses, by nature and design, is dependent on customers to succeed and the digital age is no different. Rather it has increased the level of competition and given plenty of choices to the customers in terms of access, quality of products and services, cost advantage, speedy delivery, and variety. In fact, the process of digital transformation undertaken by businesses is premised on offering value addition to the end customers. The various technologies leveraged by businesses in this regard include cloud, IoT, AI, ML, predictive analysis, and big data, among others.

In the competitive digital landscape of today, companies that look after the interests of their customers and provide prompt and qualitative support are able to achieve ROI. Any glitch or vulnerability in the product or service can have adverse repercussions on the psyche of the customers. They are no longer satisfied with giving a long rope to the company dishing out shoddy products or service but instead turn to its competitors. No wonder, businesses are adopting software development models like Agile or DevOps to bring out products that are not only qualitatively superior but are customized to the needs of the customers as well.

Digital transformation services are geared towards delivering value addition at cost effective rates. They do so by employing the Agile model wherein the QA process is conducted alongside development. In a move ahead of the traditional waterfall model, Agile helps in the quicker identification of glitches thereby eliminating costly and time-consuming corrections later. Moreover, given the demand for Continuous Integration and Delivery, businesses are looking at the DevOps model where the entire organization is made responsible for the final quality of the product or service. This approach of digital transformation services rightly encapsulates the importance of customers for businesses.

Delivering a better Customer Experience or CX has become the final arbiter for businesses to stay competitive and achieve ROI. It leads to a slew of outcomes such as better customer retention, increased sales, lower cost of customer acquisition, and reduced operating costs. Any digital transformation strategy should aim at leveraging the trending technologies to streamline workflows, innovate, add value, accelerate time to market, and deliver the best customer experience.

How good customer service can help businesses?

The digital transformation solutions implemented by enterprises should be underpinned on delivering good customer service. The benefits of implementing such solutions can be multifarious.

Customer retention: Customer acquisition can be a long drawn and costly affair encompassing running sustained marketing campaigns. However, customer retention is relatively cheaper and requires implementation of a robust customer service. Your digital transformation framework should be able to capture customer queries quickly and pass them on to the right business arm for redressal. Good customer service will help you retain customers, which otherwise can drift towards your competitors in no time.

Word of mouth publicity: Many potential customers are not swayed by the advertising blitz but listen to the feedback from actual users. Thus, if the customer experience is good, the business can gain immensely from word of mouth publicity. Happy customers can help to build trust among your potential customers. Conversely, bad customer experience can leave your customers unhappy, angry, and frustrated. The consequent bad-mouthing of your brand, product or service can be damaging to your reputation and profitability. Remember, bad customer experience can have a greater potential to damage your business’s credibility.

Competitive advantage: How do customers choose one product over the other when both have similar characteristics, quality, and cost? The answer is how well the business developing that product responds to the customer queries and complaints. In fact, customer experience can be the ultimate differentiator for customers to choose a product over its competitor.

Good customer service is better than price: A successful enterprise digital transformation should deliver good customer service. It should ensure the product or service functions to its optimum level in its end-to-end development cum delivery cycle and beyond. Remember, customers are willing to pay a premium for good quality service even positing it ahead of cost.

Conclusion

Customers stay at the core of every business and drive them to adopt new technologies, streamline their workflows, make their delivery systems hassle-free, and enhance their customer service. No wonder, every digital transformation initiative should be geared towards ensuring better customer experience.

Design, planning, and governance – the three pillars of RPA success

Amanda Nardi

Contributed by Cigniti Technologies.

A robot, by definition, is a machine that mimics and replicates human actions to automate certain activities. Robotic process automation or RPA is a robotic software that employs machine learning to study the exact steps taken by a manual resource to fulfill a task and then perform the same task at much faster pace and much better efficiency.

The manual steps act as the data on which the RPA software feeds and executes the desired action with precision. Its automation capabilities make it capable of performing about 50-60 tasks every day, equivalent to the work of up to five full-time employees. The speed and power of RPA help enterprises achieve scalability and flexibility in production, enabling them to deliver value to their customers at an accelerated pace. The eradication of need for human intervention eliminates the possibility of human errors, thus, offering high level of accuracy in process completion. By reducing the required manual labor and manhours, RPA yields a cost-effective, resource-efficient solution for tedious processes.

RPA is vital for repetitive business processes that are essential but eat valuable time of employees, leaving them exhausted and burnt out to focus on higher priority tasks. Ideal for standard, rule-based steps, RPA is primarily used by the modern enterprises to automate mundane processes such as data entry and validation, record maintenance, calculations and transactions, and more. While RPA brings about 25-50% reduction in overall costs, enterprises should formulate a fitting strategy to guarantee a successful deployment. This demands consideration of three key areas that define the viability of an RPA strategy.

Planning

It is not feasible to automate everything. Human cognition is irreplaceable, and since RPA is only suitable for standard, iterative processes, it is critical to first lay out a detailed plan of why to automate, what to automate, how to automate, and when to automate.

It is required that all the processes are segregated on the basis of how much time does each of them consume. Doing so provides complete visibility of the existing processes as well as time spent per process. Such end-to-end visibility comes handy in prioritizing all the processes as per the value add to the overall business goals. Once the tedious processes are identified and prioritized, they should be standardized in order to ensure proper automation using RPA, as it cannot work optimally on those processes that have additional variables beyond the pre-defined “if, then, else” rules.

Design

With a thorough plan and process visibility, it becomes easy to analyze and determine which set of RPA tools, platform, framework, and infrastructure best fit the identified processes. The RPA architecture should be designed while considering both the process goals and the organizational goals, such that they are in tandem with each other and help organization progress on the optimization scale.

Designing an RPA architecture needs a meticulous strategy that encompasses multiple components such as robotic components library, execution data, logs, and infrastructure, software bots, configuration settings, analytic data, tools and applications, configuration management, and compliance guidelines.

Governance

To make sure that the execution path stays on track of the determined plan and design, governance is crucial. Establishing a Robotic Process Automation Center of Excellence (RPA CoE) enables enterprises to integrate the RPA strategy with the defined processes in such a way that it not only helps achieve accuracy and efficiency, but also allows organizations to scale and succeed in their goals.

Test Automation with RPA

With the advancements in the field of AI, machine learning, and natural language processing (NLP), RPA looks even more promising in software testing scenario as it dons the hat of “Cognitive”.

The current IT landscape is mandating adoption of Agile & DevOps methodologies. For enterprises striving to excel in terms of speed, efficiency, and quality, test automation is imperative. As a majority of testing processes are iterative, RPA fits the picture perfectly when formulating a test automation strategy.

This Is How Continuous Testing Supports Digital Transformation

Amanda Nardi

Contributed by Cigniti Technologies.

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

Most of the industry professionals are familiar with these lines. Those who are not, can still relate with them for they are still as timeless as they were at the time of their conception. Despite being written almost two decades ago, the Agile manifesto stands true for every innovation happened since, whether its DevOps or digital disruption.

The current IT ecosystem is replete with processes that limit manual labor through automation. Enterprises are actively trying to digitalize their labor-intensive manual tasks to enhance cost effectiveness and ROI. Digital transformation of an enterprise is tremendously promising in terms of improving speed and efficiency, optimizing workflows, and ultimately delivering a better overall user experience.

Forrester defines Digital Transformation as –

Digital transformation is not just about technology; it is about reimagining your company. It is the necessary but challenging journey of operating digital-first with the speed and nimbleness to change or introduce new products and experiences rapidly, exploit technology to create lean operations, and free people to do more complex tasks that create value.

The three main components of Digital Transformation – cloud, big data, and IoT – are facilitating the shift of core values of businesses and catalysing the Industry 4.0. Digital transformation mandates a customer-centric strategy supported by sophisticated technology solutions. Enterprises that incorporate digital solutions to solve the needs of their customers are winning, while those resisting the movement are perishing.

Any disruption that is not controlled, monitored or governed, can become a disaster. For the digital disruption to truly revolutionize business processes, there is a pressing need to establish measures that will ensure a seamless flow of work. Continuous testing can help organizations succeed in their digital transformation initiatives while staying aligned with the overall business processes.

In the pre-Agile and pre-DevOps era, huge organizational barriers were prevalent, creating thick silos between dev and ops teams. Projects used to go on for months, and sometimes years. The development teams used to spend the most time with the project, leaving very less window for testing and operations teams. The bugs and errors present in the code were found at the last minute and were then sent back to the developers for correction. This often jeopardized the entire schedule, resulting in delayed releases, pushed deadlines, costly budget overheads, and angry customers. The IT team was always on the firefighting mode, struggling to deploy a release without causing the existing systems to go bonkers.

With agile accelerating the SDLCs, DevOps breaking the siloed structure, and automation taking over the manual processes, continuous testing is the only thing that remains to complete the puzzle of digital transformation.

A continuous testing approach supports developers to organize, track and manage their CI/CD pipeline in time. It also enables businesses to achieve scalability by ensuring release of glitch-free products. Quality assurance shifts left with continuous testing, as suggested by the Agile manifesto. By shifting left, the errors and risks are identified early in an SDLC, thus leaving ample time to employ corrective measures. When the risks and vulnerabilities are mitigated in the pre-production stage, the post-production and deployment failure chances can be significantly reduced.

Digital transformation needs organizations to be customer-obsessed. Continuous testing allows them to release high-quality software at a rapid pace with almost negligible flaws. As client satisfaction levels are directly related to a product’s quality, continuous testing is absolutely indispensable for organizations to achieve success and scalability.

Cigniti Technologies is hosting a Webinar with Forrester on “Accelerate Digital Transformation with Agile and DevOps Continuous Testing”. Register for the webinar and join the discussion with our guest Diego Lo Giudice, VP and principal analyst from Forrester and Kalyana Rao Konda, President – NA East, Cigniti Technologies.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, for the 4th consecutive year, positions Cigniti Technologies in the Application Testing Services, Worldwide.

Amanda Nardi

For the fourth consecutive year, Cigniti Technologies has been positioned as a “Niche Player” by Gartner Magic Quadrant (2018) for Application Testing Services, Worldwide. Gartner is aware of about 300 companies in this market. This Magic Quadrant assesses 20 of the leading application service providers based on specified inclusion criteria.

This report guides sourcing, procurement and vendor management leaders aiming to make better decisions to select testing service providers.

Cigniti Technologies has been positioned as a “Niche Player” in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Application Testing Services, Worldwide for the year 2018. Cigniti has been positioned in the Magic Quadrant for 4 years in a row. We believe this recognition emphasizes our ability to assist world class organizations in their quality engineering and digital assurance efforts. While we have invested into testing IP, providing good price points to clients and possess the pool of great talent, we establish great stories around BFSI, Travel, Retail, Airlines, Transportation, Hospitality, Hi-tech and E&U industries.

Download report: https://www.cigniti.com/analyst-commentary-by-gartner/

Everest Group, for the 4th consecutive year, positions Cigniti as the ‘Major Contender’ in Everest Group PEAK Matrix™, 2018.

Amanda Nardi

Cigniti is positioned as “Major contender” in Everest Group PEAK Matrix™ Assessment 2018: Quality Assurance to Brand Assurance: AI Driving the Evolution. This report analyses the changing dynamics of the QA landscape and assesses service providers across several key dimensions.

“As Agile and DevOps models gather steam, the Quality Assurance (QA) function needs to evolve beyond testing and be integrated across the chain to support enterprises’ digital strategies. Cigniti is helping clients achieve their digital objectives by delivering QA services through its combination of people, platforms, and processes. Its flexibility to work with changing requirements is resonating well with clients and helping to deliver consistent quality in its services.” – Everest Group

Download report: https://www.cigniti.com/analyst-commentary-by-everest/#contact

Why is DevOps Transformation recommended for Business Transformation?

Amanda Nardi

Digital Technologies such as IoT, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, and Robotics are definitely changing the way customer experience (CX) is being delivered and sustained in the current scenario. Practically, Digital Transformation is disrupting every industry vertical with distinct and compelling applications, which are needed for a successful digital strategy. Can DevOps as a process help teams to manage the issues related to digital turbulence?

When it comes to application development and maintenance, DevOps is kind of indispensable. The underlying thought process of DevOps is to enable continuous development, testing, and integration of code within the web and mobile apps. Ultimately, the factors influencing this continuous process is the collaboration of cross-functional teams, organizational workflows, across a technology platform. The overall process further boosts the Application’s Intelligence and enables seamless performance.

Click here to read more.

How can QA deal with the challenges of Digital Transformation?

Amanda Nardi

Can technology cease to surprise customers?

The services delivered by hovering drones, speaking robots, virtual assistants such as Siri and Alexa, and smart home devices such as Amazon Echo and Google HOME are no more a surprise element for the end users. Customer expectations are increasing by the day, and it’s getting trickier to deal with these growing demands and ensuring a flawless experience. Quality Assurance (QA) and Software Testing have been enabling organizations to effectively adopt new and emerging digital technologies and ensuring desired customer experience. Hence, leading enterprises and top ranking CIOs are focussing specifically on QA to successfully implement digital transformation initiatives for their business requirements.

Impact of Digital Transformation on QA and Testing

With reference to customer-centric approaches to Digital Transformation, a new study has been conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of consulting firm Ernst and Young LLP (EY). In the report, Yang Shim, EY Americas advisory data and analytics leader for financial services, mentions, ‘An unrelenting focus on the customer allows companies to be innovative while satisfying customer needs and meeting financial criteria such as increasing revenues and profitability. The performance gap is huge between companies that take a more comprehensive and customer-centric approach to digital enterprise transformation and those that focus solely on cost reduction.’

Compelling customer experience is critical for businesses to sustain and compete in the current market scenario. All the possible performance gaps must be mended to ensure that the expected experience is delivered. This becomes an impending challenge for the QA folks, who end up facing a new issue or complication each day. Digital transformation has substantially impacted the way QA and testing are performed, and the expected results achieved.

QA is no more an activity that is conducted towards the end of the development cycle. With adoption of digital technologies, there is a growing need to conduct continuous testing and continuous integration. This implies that testing and development has to be a collaborative activity rather than testing being a sequel to the development process. Speed with quality is the need of the hour, which has influenced the way QA and testing are being conducted. Agile and DevOps practices are being adopted to ensure flexibility and accuracy for testing.

These practices can be implemented and results can be expected, but it is equally critical to set some ground rules to deal with the challenges that are thrown by the digital transformation initiatives.

How to not get blown by the Digital Transformation wave?

Digital transformation can be overwhelming for many organizations, as it impacts the functioning of almost every entity within the system. It can definitely help if certain fundamentals or protocols are established to deal with the uncertainties caused by digital initiatives. For instance, assume that a traditionally operating organization decides to go digital and adopt application-based mapping of various functions. It might create uncertainty and chaos. But if there are certain ground rules and processes set for the transition, it can definitely help in the process and ensure quality.

Create new roles for Testing

As the testing needs change, new roles are created to manage distinct functions and business operations. Roles such as Software Development Test Engineers (SDETs) are being created to address some fresh needs. These new roles are necessarily a bridge between development and testing, boosting collaboration between the two functions. Creation of these roles must be encouraged, as it will ensure business value and bring maturity to the quality assurance process.

As digital initiatives of an organization increase, the demand for these roles will only rise. Quality assurance will become much more integral to the organization’s functioning and existence.

Address the talent gap

Taking a cue from the last point, it can be accepted that digital transformation initiatives will need inventive ways for resolving issues and bugs. A tester with traditional ways might not be in a position to deal with such offbeat issues. Hence, organizations will have to train and retrain their resources to develop the IT skills and expertise to deal with the new technologies and support the transformation process. Nurturing new practices could be the best possible way to deal with random changes within an organization.

Quality Transformation for smooth Digital Transformation

If quality has to be ensured throughout the organization, it is important to implement quality transformation initiatives. This implies that there are set protocols and schedules to deal with regular quality hassles. It will ease out the excessive one-time efforts for teams to resolve issues and make it a seamless process to follow.

Leverage Test Automation platforms, bring velocity

If you need speed, you need automation. Organizations are leveraging Test Automation platforms to smartly address their testing requirements. It further helps them to achieve their DevOps and agile goals, and bring down their testing efforts. Digital transformation needs substantial amount of automation, hence, it is recommended to select a tool that fits your IT requirements.

Encourage Feedback mechanism

Digital technologies can work for you if there are open communication channels and the feedback loop is kept active. Swift inclusion of feedback is a key aspect in the digital evolution of any business. Approaches such as shift-left encourage teams to incorporate the feedback and even enable organizations to identify issues way ahead in the development cycle.

Over a period of time, organizations have realized that digital transformation cannot be successful without an overall business transformation. Every function of an organization must amicably deal with the changes caused. Business transformation is practically impossible without implementation and adherence to rules and protocols. That’s the way QA and testing can deal with the mushrooming challenges posed by digital technologies.

Can there be a permanent and definite solution? Guess not.