Why it is important to transition from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering?

 

The inscrutable march of technology continues taking convenience, quality, capability, scalability, and user experiences to a whole new level. Enterprises are looking at implementing new technological paradigms and tools to develop quality products and services, generate new revenue models, and stay competitive. As the technology landscape transforms at a rapid pace with the advent of technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, the Internet of Things, Predictive Analysis, Big Data, and many more, traditional models are no longer adequate. When the stakes are so high with driverless cars and IoT devices on their way to become the new normal, traditional software quality assurance services need to give way to quality engineering. 

The quality engineering approach is about driving quality into the core of any software development process rather than following it along the way. This helps to reduce the possibility of errors/bugs to get into the system. Thus, quality engineering is more of a pre-emptive way of reducing glitches and ensuring the applications running the IT ecosystems of tomorrow are of proven quality. Further, the below-mentioned developments or observations highlight the predicament of following traditional software quality assurance services –

• About 30 percent of glitches or defects are due to wrongly configured test environments (Souce: an IBM study)
• Poor quality software leads to a loss of $60 billion annually in the USA
• Enterprises can save costs by optimizing the use of tools (Source: Gartner)
• Software testing comprises more than 50 percent of the development cost. This calls for automating the QA process and improving its effectiveness (Source: Journal of Systems and Software)
• Actual resource utilization for testing is about 57 percent instead of the expected 75 percent (Source: NIST Journal)

Why transform from quality assurance to digital quality engineering?

The benefits of switching to a robust, all-encompassing, and qualitatively superior QE services are as follows:

Driving the DevOps pipeline: DevOps envisions the marriage of development and operations to improve the quality of products and customer experiences on a continuous basis. Software quality engineering envelops DevOps by bringing the management, ideation, design, systems, product management, and operations together. It is a holistic approach to develop and deliver software applications that are safe, reliable, robust, secure, and scalable.

Maximum test coverage: In enterprise quality engineering, the entire span of the value chain (requirement to delivery) is covered in testing. It includes both shift-left and shift-right approaches of QA wherein the former testing is incorporated in the build phase itself. While in shift-right, quality is built into the delivery phase with continuous releases to ensure user satisfaction. Thus, software QE services cover the entire span of the SDLC including aspects like setting up and managing the test environments.

Powering CI/CD: DevOps is about developing and delivering software involving phases like build, test, and deployment. Here, every code change based on feedback from the QA team leads to faster integration and delivery in a transparent manner. The endless loop of feedback, code change, integration, and delivery ensures a better quality of products for the customer. Also, with the blurring of lines among departments and the initiation of a change in culture, quality is not merely the responsibility of the QA team alone but every stakeholder in the SDLC.

Better planning: There may be times when QA specialists identify an issue in the code requiring significant rework. This would lead to cost escalation and stretch the turnaround time. On the other hand, quality engineering services help in better planning at the initial stage of ideation and product development. They provide better insights to recognize limitations surrounding product implementation early on. Thus, identifying the potential glitches early in the development process can add to significant savings on cost and time. 

Better communication: Digital quality engineering specialists can test a product like the end-users and draw traceability into the systems should some glitches be identified. Their knowledge about the whole span of product development, testing, and delivery, helps in understanding issues from the perspectives of the system and users. They can contribute to enhancing the processes within the SDLC for churning out top quality products at every stage and iteration.

Conclusion

With quality becoming the cornerstone of product development and ensuring competitiveness for an enterprise, the thrust is towards eliminating glitches during the planning stage only. This is why it is important to transition from QA to QE to facilitate quicker releases through the CI/CD pipeline and ensure superior customer experiences.

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What role does Quality Engineering play in your Digital Transformation Journey?

Digital technology has emerged as a disruptor for enterprises, governments, organizations, and entities the world over. It is no longer the ‘add on’ but the much needed ‘core’ to remain visible, responsive, successful, and competitive. If earlier, customers used to be at the wrong end of the stick for businesses, today, digital has given them a user-friendly interface to get their point across. Further, with digital technologies giving customers the power to be choosy with their brands, products, or services, businesses are in a bind. They can no longer ignore the voice of the customer and have to design their products or services as per their customers’ preferences. In the whole scheme of things, quality has become the differentiator for businesses to remain competitive. It is the quality of products or services that ultimately determines whether customers stick with the specific product or service or move onto others. 

Digital technologies have led businesses to go for a paradigm shift in their strategies. So, they not only have to deliver superior quality products at a faster rate but need to keep them updated as per the changing times and/or technologies. No wonder, they rely on Agile and DevOps methodologies to deliver superior quality products in double-quick time. To meet the fast-changing customer expectations, businesses adopt digital transformation with digital quality engineering at the core. To understand more about software quality engineering, one needs to know about customers’ changing preferences. Yes, today’s customers are no longer satisfied with a particular brand or product unlike the ones in the earlier generation. Armed with a plethora of choices, the customers of today want high-quality apps that can be used across devices and platforms. Here high-quality apps would mean fast-loading, feature-rich, secure, scalable, responsive, functional, and navigable. Thus, instead of testing apps or builds on a range of devices and platforms post-development, it makes sense to incorporate quality in the app development lifecycle.

If digital transformation is about optimizing the value chain, improving productivity, reducing defects, enhancing efficiency and security, and ensuring the quick release of builds, then digital quality engineering is the enabler. It allows organizations to streamline their value chain and ensure the development of a functional product.

Role of quality engineering in advancing the cause of digital transformation

With quality no longer remaining an ‘afterthought’ in the production cycle, it needs to be integrated with every phase of development. This ensures early identification and fixing of glitches in the build before passing it to the next stage.

# Better integration: QE services call for better collaboration and integration between teams, especially development and operations, in releasing quality builds within faster turnarounds.

# Better test automation: A quality engineering approach involves the use of test automation to validate voluminous lines of code as per their expectations. The QE specialists should be able to write pieces of code for better integration with tools and frameworks. However, QE driven test automation is not a silver bullet to ‘correct’ every flaw in the code but needs a better choice of test cases and test areas. These include the following:

·        Repetitive tests that are susceptible to manual errors

·        Optimizing test cases and improving test automation by incorporating AI

·        Tests that need virtualization of data sets due to the latter’s unavailability. The unavailability could be due to the challenges of geography, demography, or complexity

·        Tests to be conducted across multiple devices, platforms, and networks

·        Frequently used features or functionalities that may be risky

·        Tests that are difficult to be performed manually

# Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD): The two approaches envisage the conduct of unit test for the code before initiating any further tests. Both TDD and BDD approaches call for better collaboration among quality engineering services, developers, and business stakeholders. This commonality of approach is to ensure the final outcome is in line with the avowed business objectives. The software quality engineering team ensures quality through API validation when pitted against UI-driven test cases.

# Performance metrics aligned to customer experience: Digital quality engineering ensures the customer experience to be top-notch across device platforms. It does so by setting up and measuring the performance metrics as per expectations. This enforces trust, increases accessibility and responsiveness, improves the omnichannel experience, and enhances brand image. 

Conclusion

The highly competitive world of online business requires enterprises to come up with quality products delivering great customer experiences in short turnarounds. It is only through a quality engineering approach that glitches can be fixed early, testing can be conducted across device platforms and the final deliverable is made to align with customer preferences and business objectives.

What benefits do Quality Engineering Services bring to businesses?

With Information Technology disrupting the entire global landscape, individuals, enterprises, and entities are embracing digital transformation in a big way. And in this pursuit of transformation, enterprises are updating their legacy systems and migrating some (or all) of their products, services, or databases to platforms like the cloud. Amidst such disruptions, software (system or application) has emerged as the key for enterprises to remain relevant and competitive. However, the software can often end up with bugs or glitches, thus adversely impacting its performance. Also, a glitch-prone software can dilute the user experience and render the brand ineffectual.

Digital technologies, in addition to disrupting the business ecosystem, is impacting the IT environment considerably. Interestingly, the entire thrust of digital transformation is towards obtaining better customer experiences. The latter can, however, get impacted when the software or system does not function to its optimum thanks to the presence of glitches or bugs.

So, how does one ensure the software leaving the development and testing pipeline to be quality compliant? The answer lies in following a robust quality assurance service. However, in the shift-left testing approach, since the focus is on identifying and mitigating errors early on in the build stage, there could be chances of errors slipping through. With DevOps being embraced by enterprises to achieve faster release of glitch-free software, the focus has come to quality engineering. According to this, enterprises should work towards preempting the presence of glitches instead of finding (and mitigating) them later.

How QA has evolved due to the new digital challenges

As enterprises across industry verticals are embracing digital transformation to increase efficiency, there are opportunities and challenges galore. With the advent of quality engineering services, enterprises can look at the below-mentioned outcomes.

·         DevOps and Agile driven shift in priorities and strategies

·         Getting access to devices, new technologies, and form factors

·         Integrate new technologies with the legacy systems and overhaul them

·         Better integration between development and testing teams

·         Incorporate user feedback mechanism into the build and test pipeline

·         Increase the use of automation in testing

·         Training resources in alignment with the requirements

·         Maximizing the scope of testing within budget constraints

How a quality engineering strategy can help matters?

As opposed to traditional QA processes, quality engineering services involve analyzing the design of a product and working with the development and operations teams. These aim at managing the development, operation, and maintenance of IT systems, architecture, and frameworks to obtain a superior quality standard. In enterprise quality engineering, every stakeholder is made part of the planning, development, and delivery pipeline.

Shift-left and strengthen right: With the change in business priorities and technologies such as IoT, AI, and SMAC, among others, the world of QA is facing transformation. So, in shifting left and strengthening right, the software quality engineering services cover a few aspects. These include test and analytics-driven development, virtualization, security testing, API testing, continuous automation, and performance engineering to manage quality.

Agility: Automation has emerged as the key requirement to meet the goals of Agile and DevOps. By implementing test automation in the shift-left driven development and testing pipeline, glitches can be identified and mitigated early. It also enhances the quality coverage of software products across multiple channels. Moreover, test automation can offer advanced analytics and reporting mechanism to predict bugs or defects in the test environment. Thus, the impact on user experience can be reduced drastically and the business made more agile and responsive.

Business value: Leveraging digital quality engineering can help enterprises in offering glitch-free products tailored to customer requirements. This can add to their business value due to reduced defects, faster processes, and minimum user acceptance testing efforts.

Improved security: Vulnerabilities in IT systems and networks have become a cause for concern. The rising graph of cybercrime and the potential threat it poses for businesses and their end-customers need to be tackled head-on. Leveraging a quality engineering strategy in the form of DevSecOps can focus on enhancing security and making the software hack-proof.

Conclusion

Enterprises should leverage the latest tools, technologies, and methodologies to develop quality products or services. As the presence of defects or bugs can hit the user experience and thereby the brand value, implementation of quality engineering should be prioritized. The ultimate aim should be to achieve rapid delivery of quality products or services and reduce the cost of operations. A robust quality engineering strategy can deliver SLA-driven and outcome-based quality-compliant products or services in real quick time.

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.