How Digital Transformation can be enabled by Quality Engineering

Organizations are embracing digital technologies to give customers omnichannel experiences and scale up their business volumes. The disruptive nature of these technologies has allowed companies to shore up their capabilities for storage, processing, and analytics. Developments such as social media, mobility, analytics, IoT, and smart devices are enabling digital transformation and determining how users engage with businesses. The production demand in companies has gone through the roof thanks to the changing market dynamics and growing competition. This demand for scale has necessitated the expansion of the legacy systems and inclusion of the user ecosystem. The latter encompassing social media, personal devices, and cloud, among others expects a superior customer experience.

With shortening time to market and the need to ensure Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI and CD), the role of QA has changed. It has moved from the earlier waterfall model of ‘testing after development’ to ‘testing alongside development’ of Agile/DevOps. As customer experience has become the determining factor in the adoption of digital products, the role of QA has become critical. This is more so due to the need to validate software across interfaces, platforms, devices, browsers, and networks. With the demand for continuous builds gaining ground, the development and QA teams should go beyond the status quo. They should aim at preventing defects rather than taking the usual reactive approach. Thus, QA assumes the role of digital quality engineering. This involves the management, maintenance, and development of IT systems with enhanced quality standard.

Today, quality assurance goes beyond functional testing and covers non-functional parameters as well. These include security, usability, performance, accessibility, and compatibility. Thus, digital quality engineering is a nimble model underpinned on parameters such as being agile, intelligent, automated, and on cloud. It goes into assessing, optimizing, and ensuring customer experience (CX), every time.

How quality engineering services impact digital transformation

As digital transformation helps enterprises to reorient strategies, streamline workflows, optimize the cost of operations, and enhance quality, the software quality engineering services make the below-mentioned impact.

·         Analyzing user behavior to optimize CX quality: Analytics solutions run through user data patterns to derive business intelligence. The use of AI through automated algorithms helps in analyzing the user data on bounce rates, average time spent, or user inflow, to determine the trends. For example, webpages with high bounce rates or loading speeds can mean performance issues. Also, AI-driven QE services can analyze the user behaviour pattern and give fresh insights to developers about incorporating new features or functionalities.

·         Test Driven Development (TDD) and Behaviour Driven Development (BDD): The two popular approaches to software development require unit testing of the code before conducting other tests. The enterprise quality engineering team needs to ensure the testing process is quick. It does so by pitting quality via API validation versus UI-driven test cases. The BDD approach is geared towards ensuring acceptance outcomes. Here, the software quality engineering services implement the QA steps using automation scripts as defined by the user story. These two development approaches require better collaboration among various stakeholders - teams representing digital quality engineering, development, and management.

·         Enable ‘on demand’ usage with ‘on cloud’ model: Delivering customer experience can be a costly affair with upfront investments on infrastructure, devices, and tools. Further, add maintenance cost to the updation of browser or device variants, and you are staring at huge CapEx. This calls for moving to the cloud platform where tools and infrastructure can be dynamically provisioned based on demand. For example, the experts at any quality engineering company can execute compatibility testing by hosting automated scripts on the cloud. Thereafter, virtual machines can be provisioned with myriad OS-browser combinations to conduct the tests. Thus, QA teams can maintain a dynamic testing ecosystem that can address the changing requirements. The ecosystem can eliminate the need for infrastructure setup or license procurement.

Conclusion

Software applications are primed to provide enhanced customer experiences. They do so by interacting with the accompanying digital ecosystem - devices, browsers, operating systems, and networks, among others. The applications need to be glitch-free and overcome hurdles like evolving technologies, diverse market demands, and cost pressures, among others. QE services are increasingly being sought to deliver great customer experiences by harnessing agile, intelligent, and automated processes. They can help enterprises to stay up the competitive curve, deliver value for money, and optimize the customer experience.

This article is originally published on it.toolbox.com.

What is Software Integration Testing all about?

The software applications driving the modern digital ecosystem, in conjunction with the hardware systems, are dependent on various third-party applications and platforms. The omnichannel footprint of software means each module (and the interface between modules) needs to function smoothly to deliver the expected outcomes. This is ensured by conducting software integration testing.

One of the important characteristics of a software application are the seamless flow of information between its two ‘units’ or ‘modules’. However, the flow of information could be interrupted by the presence of glitches, which if not identified and corrected in time can make the application faulty. Thus, software integration testing helps to expose faults that lie at the interface between two integrated units. Once the individual units or modules are tested, the integration of interfaces gets validated.

To draw an analogy to this type of testing, let us consider two groups of friends who have been invited to a party. To find out if they can get along, they should be subjected to an ‘integration test.’ This is done by bringing them to a single room and observe how they interact. In a similar vein, to check if each unit of software functions seamlessly, they need to be integrated and tested. Thus, integration testing, as part of the software testing services, checks if all unit’s function in harmony. It ensures if the modules developed by different developers are working towards a singular objective.

Various types of software integration testing

The various ways to test the integration of modules are as following:

Big Bang: As one of the most common ways to test the integration of software modules, the big bang involves smashing and testing all the units together. This may keep the tester in good stead if all the tests are completed or the software project is relatively small. However, it can have its cons as well. For example, in case a glitch is identified, it would be difficult for testers to figure out the right module or unit responsible for it. To find the erring module, testers have to detach a few of them and repeat the testing till they identify the glitch. Since this approach requires the modules to be ready before testing, it can extend the turnaround time for product release.

Incremental: Here, two or more logically aligned units are tested as part of a single batch. Thereafter, other similarly aligned units are checked eventually ensuring the interface of every single unit with another is validated. It combines both the bottom-up or top-down approaches.

Hybrid, Mixed, or Sandwich: This approach combines both bottom-up and top-down type of integration testing. Here, the top and lower modules are tested simultaneously for integration thereby deriving the best results. This approach can come in handy for large projects.

Best practices for integration testing

Since most software development processes are moving towards Agile or DevOps, it needs to be seen how integration testing can fit into a CI/CD environment. The software testing services for integration should have the following best practices.

Execute integration testing before unit testing: The waterfall model of software product testing has led us to believe that fixing a glitch later in the SDLC can be costly. This is due to the fact that one doesn’t move to the next stage until the completion of the present phase. This approach, however, can be turned on its head in an Agile environment. This is because Agile offers the flexibility to change the business logic in an SDLC.

Do not confuse unit testing with integration testing: Unit testing targets the basic code and needs to be run frequently to detect bugs. On the other hand, integration testing is much more time consuming and should not be part of every build cycle. However, it may be included in the daily build.

Extensive logging of processes: Identifying and mitigating bugs in a unit test are easy. However, given the scope and complexity of integration tests spanning a number of modules, doing the same is difficult. The need is to keep a record of processes to better analyze the reasons for failure.

Conclusion

Integration testing may be expensive and time-consuming but is essential to deliver quality products in the DevOps and Agile-driven environments.

This article is originally published on dev.to.

Why Agile Testing needs to follow a new approach?

The global digital transformation journey requires the quality of processes, models, products, and services to be top-notch. To ensure accelerated growth, enterprises are embracing the Agile model and moving away from the traditional ones - waterfall, spiral, and iterative. The reason being the slowness and inadequacies of these models. Enterprises have realized the need to adopt innovative ways to offer customer delight, the final outcome to stay competitive. The agile testing approach is mainly embraced by enterprises that need their development pipeline to create continuous builds. This calls for both development and testing to be conducted simultaneously instead of the earlier silo-based waterfall method.

The need for adopting the agile testing approach has been necessitated due to the growing complexity of software applications. Today, the performance of the software is determined by the quality of its interfaces with third-party applications, browsers, devices, and operating systems. The more complex a software is, the more comprehensive testing it demands. Agile testing is about shift-left testing where planning, designing, writing, and testing code becomes part of the sprint. It is a collaborative approach instead of the waterfall’s silo-driven approach and drives better outcomes. Agile testing involves taking continual feedback from the customers and stakeholders.

Why is agile software testing advantageous?

The complexity of software applications has shifted the focus on testing. This is to ensure the applications live up to the expectations of both businesses and customers. The agile testing approach focuses on smart testing through automation rather than using the time-consuming manual means. Here, the testers and developers follow a collaborative approach with the former offering timely feedback to the latter. This makes the final product fully aligned to the customers’ requirements or expectations.

Principles of Agile Testing

Agile application testing follows a set of principles to deliver glitch-free products to the end-customers:

Continuous Testing: Agile testing experts conduct continuous testing to identify glitches at various stages of development and integration.

Continuous Feedback: One of the main reasons why products often fail to meet customers’ expectations is the apparent disconnect that exists between the end customers and other stakeholders. The agile testing strategy ensures the development team receives continuous feedback on the quality of builds. This helps the product to meet the business as well as customer needs.

Test-Driven: The agile testing approach includes testing at the time of development itself rather than later. This saves time and costs as mitigating a glitch after development can be expensive and time-consuming.

Less Documentation: The reusable checklist used by the agile testing specialists ensures the focus is on testing rather than on keeping the incidental details.

Simplified and Clean Coding: Since the glitches are identified and remedied within the sprint, the final code remains simplified and clean.

Accountability is shared by all: In the traditional system of testing, only the testing team is held responsible for the presence of glitches. However, in agile testing methodology, the development, testing, and business analyst teams share equal responsibility for the outcome.

Latest trends in Agile Testing

The spiraling demand for software testing and the advent of new technologies like IoT, AI, big data, and analytics emphasize the need to follow the latest trends. These include:

Artificial Intelligence (AI): The objective of agile in identifying and mitigating errors early on in the development cycle can be met effectively by using AI. For example, AI can analyze the database of past codes and check for patterns that contained glitches. These patterns can then be flagged for the developers and testers to gain necessary insights. Artificial intelligence can analyze the code under development to find if it deviated from its intended objective. This way it can help the agile-driven team to align the build with the business objectives and customer expectations.

Move towards Quality Engineering: The growing technological complexity of software applications means more chances for the ingress of bugs. So, along with continuous testing to identify errors in real-time, the focus should be on eliminating the ingress of errors in the first place. This calls for moving towards quality engineering where products and services are designed and built to meet or exceed customers’ expectations. It also involves the development, management, operation, and maintenance of IT systems displaying a high-quality standard.

Big Data Testing: With applications interfacing with other IT ecosystems (SMAC for example), a huge quantum of data gets generated. These need to be tested for errors using big data testing. Here, rather than testing the individual features of the software application, activities like data creation, storage, retrieval, and processing are validated.

Continuous Improvement, Integration, and Delivery: Agile is giving way to DevOps where apart from development and testing, the operations team is also involved. Here, any software build is tested continuously and enhanced based on the customers’ feedback. The entire DevOps process is geared towards ensuring the integration and delivery of glitch-free software quickly.

Conclusion

Is agile testing meeting the rising expectations of software applications? With delivering better customer experiences becoming critical for companies to stay competitive, the agile way of testing needs to follow the latest trends. Capturing and mitigating glitches earlier in the SDLC or even preempting them can significantly increase the acceptance of software in the market.

This article is originally published on medium.com.

What is the compliance perspective of Medical Devices testing

The role of medical devices in screening, diagnostics, and treatment has become critical. Modern medical devices have sophisticated components with digital interfaces. These help to derive meaningful inferences from the data emanating from patients’ vital stats. Since speed and quality lie at the core of the functioning of medical devices, they need to comply with quality standards and regulations. Also, since the functioning of medical devices is regulated by the built-in software, the same should adhere to basic safety guidelines or protocols.

Further, the rate of failure of medical devices has been found to be increasing by the day leading to the establishment of IEC 62304.

What is IEC 62304?

It is the international regulatory standard defining the SDLC requirements of software driving medical devices. The standard was established as it was felt that product testing alone will not ensure the safety of patients, especially when there is a software present. The standard requires every aspect of the SDLC to be scrutinized. These include development, configuration, risk management, maintenance, security, and problem resolution.

IEC 62304 offers a standard framework for the manufacturers of medical devices to design software. By conforming to this standard, manufacturers can fulfill the requirements of medical devices testing thereby generating trust. Also, since the standard is harmonized with the medical device directive practiced in the European Union, it has been acknowledged as a benchmark. The devices adhering to IEC 62304 include

•     Diagnosing, monitoring, or treating patients under medical supervision
•     Contacting the patient - physical or electrical
•     Transferring energy to/from the patient
•     Monitoring or detecting such energy transfer

Digitization in healthcare can have many dimensions. These include monitoring the performance of applications, leveraging the digital ecosystems for the stakeholders, and calculating the quantum of investments to drive digital transformation. The healthcare sector is being transformed with the infusion of new technologies (wearables included) and treatment/diagnostics methodologies. Since devices incorporating new technologies need to deliver results with precision, they should undergo rigorous medical devices testing. Let us discuss the reasons for validating medical devices through comprehensive Quality Assurance.

• Security: Medical devices contain sensitive data about patients’ health, which if breached, can lead to severe consequences. It is only through rigorous healthcare software testing that devices can be made hack-proof. The measures may include identifying vulnerabilities, validating and authenticating user log-ins, performing penetrating testing against firewalls, or encrypting data. Also, medical devices need to adhere to stringent quality standards such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). This ensures the protection of patients’ health-related data and information.
• Usability: This is a crucial testing requirement as devices are handled by healthcare professionals while discharging their duties. Since many professionals may find it difficult to handle the features and functionalities of devices, the same should be made simpler. This is where usability testing using automation can help to simplify and enhance the user experience.
• Big data: The healthcare sector deals with a humongous quantum of data based on which inferences are drawn about the health condition of patients. These inferences are further leveraged to plan the right treatment strategy or develop a product. Big data analytics can help to derive the right inferences from the data quickly and accurately. It can help professionals to make informed decisions related to research and development, drug inventions, or curing ailments.
• Device interoperability: Medical devices need to connect and interoperate to deliver the required outcome and user experience. Since the healthcare sector needs to ensure data privacy, security, and regulatory compliance, the role of medical devices testing specialists becomes crucial. So, healthcare testing services need to apply technical expertise, resources, and time to ensure quality, compliance, and business profitability.

The testing of medical devices impinges on meeting the regulatory requirement. Moreover, navigating the regulatory ecosystem is crucial for the successful launch of medical devices or products. It ensures the adherence of devices to attributes like performance, safety, and security. Also, with the increased complexity of treatment protocols, the standards of quality and safety of medical devices should be enhanced. These include adherence to Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) testing for devices with power supply and electronic components. The quicker these standards are complied with, the faster companies can expect their products to become market-ready.

Conclusion

The healthcare sector deals with patients’ data and information on a daily basis. To ensure the security of these, the medical devices testing experts ought to ensure interoperability and flawless performance of such devices. This is where adherence to regulatory protocols becomes important to deliver better customer experience and market adoption.

This article is already published on dev.to.

How businesses can achieve ultimate success with a QA culture

Competition forces businesses or technicians to come up with things (read innovations) that they would not do otherwise. In the rat race where businesses are delivering products or services at the drop of a hat, not everything is lapped up by the end customers. At the end of the day, it is quality that plays an all-important role in making an enterprise successful. This is due to the fact that customers of the day are choosy, smart, knowledgeable, and won’t settle for anything less.

In fact, they choose products that meet the highest standards of security, usability, functionality, and performance, among other parameters. However, there can be issues galore when it comes to ensuring the quality of a product or service. To begin with, each product should work seamlessly across devices, operating systems, browsers, frameworks, and networks. This is easier said than done as ensuring that would mean subjecting the product to a rigorous quality assurance exercise.

Why software quality assurance?

Today, good customer experience has become a differentiator for the success of a product or service in the market. This can only come about when end-customers evaluate and accept that product or service based on various quality parameters. However, meeting such quality parameters in the SDLC consistently would require the product to be tested across devices, operating environments, and networks.

In the event of such parameters not meeting the desired standards, the consequences can be immense, both for the customers and businesses. The presence of bugs in a finished product can mar the quality of service. For example, it can allow vulnerabilities to creep in and let hackers steal sensitive personal or business information. Today, when software applications carry sensitive financial and personal information, the presence of glitches can render them vulnerable.

Since the traditional waterfall model has proved to be ineffective in measuring up to the quality standards of today’s products, methodologies like Agile and DevOps have come into play. If earlier, QA testing services used to follow development and integration, today these have become concurrent with them. The focus is on executing QA software testing alongside development to save cost and time. To make DevOps successful, businesses need to develop a QA culture where everyone is an equal stakeholder.

How to enable a robust QA culture?

Building a robust culture of quality assurance in the organization is not easy as it requires establishing a seamless coordination between silo-based departments and processes. The best way to go about the same is discussed below.

Engaging everyone in the process: For start-ups and small businesses, meeting the quality standards with their products need greater involvement of all the stakeholders. In fact, everyone involved with software development (and testing) viz., developers, managers, business analysts, and testers should be a part of the QA process. Except for developers, people can evaluate the functionality of a product and give feedback. The same can then be worked upon by developers to fix glitches, thereby offering a positive experience to the users. This shall make the QA process more efficient and help deliver quality products & services.

Follow Agile methodology: The process shall lead to better communication and collaboration between departments. Also, test management can implement better test automation tools to identify and fix bugs quickly and effectively. The use of QA automation tools can eliminate running of repetitive test cases. Thus, the QA team can focus its time in executing exploratory testing.

How a QA culture can help?

An all-encompassing QA culture can help enterprises to achieve success. They can do so in the following ways.

Better customer experience: A glitch-free application is a result of executing quality assurance and testing thoroughly. The final validation of features and functionalities against expected outcomes allows the application to work seamlessly across environments and customers to enjoy the best experience.

Faster time to market: When quality assurance and testing takes place alongside development following the Agile and DevOps methodologies, glitches are identified and remedied fast in the SDLC. As the workflow gets streamlined, the delivery of the product becomes faster.

Better security: The rising incidences of cybercrime have brought into sharp focus the importance of strengthening the security features of software applications. This can only happen when total quality culture pervades across the organization with every stakeholder being aware of upholding the security protocols, regulations, and standards. This can help to reduce security vulnerabilities and prevent applications from being hacked.

Conclusion

The changing market dynamics and the advent of new technologies have brought the aspect of ‘quality’ into sharp focus. It has not remained the preserve of a single department but a shared responsibility of all concerned. If only a total quality culture prevails in an organization, achieving success can only be a matter of time.

How Software Quality Engineering can help in achieving excellence

The rapid penetration of digital technology through devices and applications has transformed the lives of the end customers. Activities that were considered challenging, inconvenient, and time-consuming in the past are done in a jiffy now. Take, for example, the paying of utility bills, carrying out financial transactions, buying groceries, medicines, apparel, or the booking of tickets. However, there is a flip side to convenience, agility, and speed offered by digitization as well. With an increased level of sophistication of software applications driving the digital revolution, there are instances when things can go wrong. For example, a malfunctioning smoke detector at the house or office not picking up the smoke caused by a fire, the bank failing to notify the customer that his or her account has been compromised, or a digital pill miscalculating the level of blood sugar and administering more than the prescribed dosage of a drug.

All these can have severe ramifications for both the customer and the service provider. This brings into sharp focus the key role of quality assurance in ensuring technology to be an enabler and not a disaster. Further, to achieve success in the competitive business environment, enterprises should look beyond the customer experience, which can be a one-off thing. The challenge is to establish trust with the end-user by assuring the quality of products or services on a consistent basis.

However, this is easier said than done, for quality assurance can often miss a thing or two. This is due to the preponderance of devices, operating platforms, browsers, third-party applications, and networks. To ensure the smooth running of a software application, the same needs to be compatible with the above-mentioned elements. Moreover, in the Agile and DevOps led Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), where there is a requirement for continuous testing, integration, and delivery, QA should give way to software quality engineering.

What is software quality engineering?

As opposed to quality assurance, software quality engineering deals with identifying the causes of failures and implements a system to prevent them from occurring in the first place. It is focused more on analyzing the technical side of glitches such as their deviation and non-compliance, or the signing of quality prior to the delivery of a product. In most organizations, there is an overlap between the disciplines of enterprise quality engineering and quality assurance. It mainly deals with developing an environment where products or services are designed, developed, tested, and delivered according to the requirements of the customers. Independent quality engineering services take the cross-functional approach by combining multiple business disciplines.

So, with the advent of technologies like AI and ML, Blockchain, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, and Big Data, among others, the vulnerabilities have increased as well. Since the ramifications for application malfunction are immense, the need for a software quality engineer has become crucial. Let us find out how Quality Engineering or QE can help in achieving excellence in quality.

A quality engineering company offering QE services cover the following areas:

• Agile and DevOps testing
• Test data management
• Service virtualization
• Test automation
• Security testing
• Performance testing

How enterprise quality engineering can help driving excellence

The main focus of QE is to build a QA environment that preempts the presence of glitches and achieve the following outcomes.

Reduces or eliminates vulnerabilities: With the development and testing team working in close proximity, QE offers end-to-end transparency to everyone associated with the build process. This approach helps to detect vulnerabilities and inherent risks early in the SDLC and ensures the initiation of prompt remedial action.

Streamlines coordination among departments: The reasons for glitches to remain unidentified is that every department deals with its turf only. Even if glitches are identified by another department or process, the tendency is to overlook the same and pass the buck. However, with independent quality engineering services in command, the old ways of workflows are abandoned in favor of more coordination and cohesion. Since a commonality of interest is established among departments, the usual blame game is averted.

Enhanced productivity with automation: The flip-side of manual testing such as the lack of coverage area and errors in regression testing can be avoided with test automation. The iterative testing processes are executed quickly resulting in better identification of glitches. As the quality of code improves in the build, the overall delivery schedule becomes better and speedy.

Conclusion

With the level of sophistication increasing in the digital ecosystem, traditional Quality Assurance can come a cropper. It is only through the implementation of software quality engineering involving steps such as service virtualization, performance testing, and test data management, among others, that excellence in the quality of applications can be achieved.

Author Bio

Oliver has been associated with Cigniti Technologies Ltd as an Associate Manager - Content Marketing, with over 10 years of industry experience as a Content Writer in Software Testing & Quality Assurance industry.

This article is originally published on medium.com.

Why you need to take Application Security Testing seriously?

The rapid penetration of digital technology through devices and applications has transformed the lives of the end customers. Activities that were considered challenging, inconvenient, and time-consuming in the past are done in a jiffy now. Take, for example, the paying of utility bills, carrying out financial transactions, buying groceries, medicines, apparel, or the booking of tickets. However, there is a flip side to convenience, agility, and speed offered by digitization as well. With an increased level of sophistication of the software applications driving the digital revolution, there are instances when things can go wrong. For example, a malfunctioning smoke detector at the house or office not picking up the smoke caused by a fire, the bank failing to notify the customer that his or her account has been compromised, or a digital pill miscalculating the level of blood sugar and administering more than the prescribed dosage of a drug.

All these can have severe ramifications for both the customer and the service provider. This brings into sharp focus the key role of quality assurance in ensuring technology to be an enabler and not a disaster. Further, to achieve success in the competitive business environment, enterprises should look beyond the customer experience, which can be a one-off thing. The challenge is to establish trust with the end-user by assuring the quality of products or services on a consistent basis.

However, this is easier said than done, for quality assurance can often miss a thing or two. This is due to the preponderance of devices, operating platforms, browsers, third-party applications, and networks. To ensure the smooth running of a software application, the same needs to be compatible with the above-mentioned elements. Moreover, in the Agile and DevOps led Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), where there is a requirement for continuous testing, integration, and delivery, QA should give way to software quality engineering.

What is software quality engineering?

As opposed to quality assurance, software quality engineering deals with identifying the causes of failures and implements a system to prevent them from occurring in the first place. It is focused more on analyzing the technical side of glitches such as their deviation and non-compliance, or the signing of quality prior to the delivery of a product. In most organizations, there is an overlap between the disciplines of enterprise quality engineering and quality assurance. It mainly deals with developing an environment where products or services are designed, developed, tested, and delivered according to the requirements of the customers. Independent quality engineering services take the cross-functional approach by combining multiple business disciplines.

So, with the advent of technologies like AI and ML, Blockchain, Internet of Things, Cloud Computing, and Big Data, among others, the vulnerabilities have increased as well. Since the ramifications for application malfunction are immense, the need for a software quality engineer has become crucial. Let us find out how Quality Engineering or QE can help in achieving excellence in quality.

A quality engineering company offering QE services cover the following areas:

• Agile and DevOps testing
• Test data management
• Service virtualization
• Test automation
• Security testing
• Performance testing

How enterprise quality engineering can help driving excellence

The main focus of QE is to build a QA environment that preempts the presence of glitches and achieve the following outcomes.

Reduces or eliminates vulnerabilities: With the development and testing team working in close proximity, QE offers end-to-end transparency to everyone associated with the build process. This approach helps to detect vulnerabilities and inherent risks early in the SDLC and ensures the initiation of prompt remedial action.

Streamlines coordination among departments: The reasons for glitches to remain unidentified is that every department deals with its turf only. Even if glitches are identified by another department or process, the tendency is to overlook the same and pass the buck. However, with independent quality engineering services in command, the old ways of workflows are abandoned in favor of more coordination and cohesion. Since a commonality of interest is established among departments, the usual blame game is averted.

Enhanced productivity with automation: The flip-side of manual testing such as the lack of coverage area and errors in regression testing can be avoided with test automation. The iterative testing processes are executed quickly resulting in better identification of glitches. As the quality of code improves in the build, the overall delivery schedule becomes better and speedy.

Conclusion

With the level of sophistication increasing in the digital ecosystem, traditional Quality Assurance can come a cropper. It is only through the implementation of software quality engineering involving steps such as service virtualization, performance testing, and test data management, among others, that excellence in the quality of applications can be achieved.

Author Bio

Oliver has been associated with Cigniti Technologies Ltd as an Associate Manager - Content Marketing, with over 10 years of industry experience as a Content Writer in Software Testing & Quality Assurance industry.

This article is originally published on medium.com.