How Can a Business Strategy Be Ruined Through the Lack of Strategy?

The combined onslaught of disruptive technologies, changing user preferences, a greater competition and security considerations have forced businesses to reimagine and reinvent themselves. To achieve the same, companies are increasingly into innovation and development of products that reach the market faster. The aim is to pre-empt competition and enjoy the early mover advantages. The approach forms a part of the digital transformation initiatives that businesses have adopted with a greater frequency.

The process of digital transformation ought to be smooth without disrupting the existing ecosystem. For otherwise, the customer service gets impacted leading to dissatisfaction and the company risks losing its brand value. Bringing about digital transformation in an organization is a difficult proposition. This is mainly to do with the presence of legacy systems (read unwieldy, non-scalable, complex and costly), and human resources that need to be upskilled for new technology platforms and paradigms.

Furthermore, the growing expectations of customers about 24 x 7 connectivity and device agnostic products and services have necessitated the adoption of new technologies and business models. This has brought about challenges for enterprises as many dimensions of technology are not in their control. These dimensions include network connectivity, availability of an adequate bandwidth, and the security of cloud platforms among others. These challenges coupled with the business imperatives of reaching the market faster have given rise to the need for quality assurance. In fact, there is a growing realization among business stakeholders that quality assurance and testing cannot be ignored any longer. This is due to the fact that software quality assurance testing plays a greater role in achieving business outcomes.

The greater emphasis on software quality assurance testing has led to adoption of innovative practices, tools and platforms. The industry has seen a paradigm shift in testing approaches – from the early manual based waterfall model to the latest Agile, TCoE, and DevOps models with emphasis on test automation. Importantly, notwithstanding the role of QA software testing in improving the product quality and meeting business outcomes, business strategy is still about beating the margins. Let us find out the consequences of neglecting qualityassurance and testing in terms of ruining a business strategy.

Consequences of not following Quality Assurance

Losing competitiveness: One of the objectives in framing a business strategy is to remain competitive. And to achieve the same, the products and services of a company should either be on par or better than its competitors. This is where the role of software quality assurance becomes critical. It validates the quality of a product on parameters like performance, functionality, load carrying capacity, usability and security. However, in the absence of testing, the inherent glitches can let the product falter on any of the above mentioned parameters. As a result, the user experience can go for a toss leading customers to opt for competing products and the company losing its competitive edge.

Not reaching the market in time: The changing market dynamics and evolving technologies mean businesses need to remain ever vigilant. They are required to bring out innovative products and reach customers before their competitors. However, without using the right test automation tools, the timeframe of testing applications gets extended. This can delay activities like the delivery of innovative solutions, adding functionalities/updates or conducting regression testing.

Security ramifications: Neglecting the quality testing of software applications can leave glitches to go unnoticed and unmitigated. The same can be exploited by hackers with the use of Trojans, viruses, spyware and malware to achieve the following:

• Steal sensitive personal and business information

• Disrupt the systems and networks

The above activities can lead a business to lose customer’s trust, attract penalties and censure, or lawsuits from customers and regulatory agencies. These have the potential to ruin a business completely.

Impacting the product quality: Customers are increasingly using software applications to carry out a plethora of activities. These can range from paying for utility services and booking of train/plane/movie tickets to buying from eCommerce stores among others. Moreover, in the age of the Internet of Things (IoT,) embedded technologies are used extensively in medicine and other mission critical processes. The lack of quality of such software can lead to the malfunctioning of sensitive equipments. This can have perilous consequences such as loss of life and property.

Conclusion

The unpredictable business environment shaped by increased competition and the advent of new technologies has meant that companies have to deliver quality products within tight turnaround times. This can be ensured by following rigorous testing of software and streamlining the processes. Neglecting the same can have perilous consequences as mentioned above.

This Article is originally published at Medium.com, How can neglecting Quality Assurance and Testing ruin a business strategy?

How Software Quality Assurance Gets Better By Using A Testing Centre of Excellence?

Quality is the cornerstone to achieve successful software development and meet the business objectives. It determines if a software system is going to be accepted by the users or remains one amongst the countless others swirling on the internet. The software system on its part is responsible for bringing about a seamless integration and functioning of composite business processes in an organization. This is needed to keep the organization competitive, efficient, resilient, agile, and stay above the technology curve.  
Software quality assurance is the process that validates if a software system performs as per the business objectives. However, the traditional waterfall model of QA software testing suffers from inadequacies such as;  

• Lack of test automation initiatives

• Lack of insight into the processes and tools that develop, test and run applications

• Slow or unable to react to the emerging business dynamics. This could relate to the changing user experience and expectations, emerging technologies, and rising competition

• Lack of test automation means glitches often go unnoticed

• Lack of synergy among the different quality assurance software testing services. This leads to an increased cost of fixing them

• Inadequate communication with the development team

• Unable to tackle the challenges of external dependencies

• Slower time to market

• Less test coverage area

• Inconsistency in the identification and elimination of bugs

• Not keeping up with cutting edge technology tools and paradigms

Moreover, increased competition has put immense challenges before businesses. These relate to the need for faster development cycle, testing and deployment of newer applications in the market. In the Agile and DevOps environment of continuous improvement and deployment, these challenges have put the software quality assurance processes under greater stress.  

To address the challenges related to lack of synergy amongst various QA functions of an organization, Testing Centre of Excellence or TCoE takes centre stage.   

What is a Testing Centre of Excellence (TcoE)? 
It is a centralized architecture or framework to integrate the cross functional software quality assurance processes leading to; 

• The optimization of quality and performance of software systems

• Implementing industry best practices

• A greater automation of the QA services

• The breaking of silos across the processes and functions of an organisation

• A reduction in redundancies

• The acceleration of the time to market

• A reduction in the software testing life cycle and SDLC

• A reduction in the cost of testing

• A rich user experience

A Testing Centre of Excellence or TCoE brings about an alignment between the people, processes, tools, and services of an organization as far as QA is concerned. It carries out a metrics-based evaluation to improve the quality testing processes with the stated aim to quickly develop and deploy a quality software application system.  
Interestingly, there is reluctance in establishing a TCoE by many organizations. The reason could related to the initial cost of setting up a TCoE. The reluctance is in agreeing to a change in the organizational culture and its functioning. The other reasons could be lack of understanding of the benefits (tangible/intangible) due to the absence of a metrics based evaluation system and lack of support by the management.  
The centralized framework of a TCoE gives the QA team an opportunity to take a peek into the organizational inadequacies. It also allows the QA team to take remedial measures to plug them. 
  
The Process to establish a TCoE 

• Find out the inadequacies of various processes and know how they hinder the development and deployment of a quality software system.

• Get approvals from all the stakeholders citing the process inadequacies and the need to set up a TCoE.

• Define new methodologies to integrate the QA processes across business functions to reduce the STLC and SDLC.

• Identify the best practices that are needed to be followed and the QA tests to be conducted as well.

• Establish metrics against which quality evaluation will be done.

• Work on a continuous improvement of the processes and tools.

Benefits of a TCoE in terms of adding value to the organization
A centralized architecture: The overarching framework of a TCoE brings together all the QA teams, processes, and tools on an even keel. The framework establishes a standardization of the QA processes to be followed across functions. This breaks the departmental silos and encourages sharing of resources. As common resources are shared, they lead to an increased cost optimization.  
Better identification of glitches:

1. a) In the traditional model, each department followed its own testing methods, which were often not in sync with the industry best practices. This approach often led to overlooking the glitches. However, a greater synergy amongst the departments and processes in the TCoE model leads to better identification of glitches.

1. b) The implementation of test automation means that the inadequacies related to manual testing are done away with. The automated test codes could test a software application any number of times. Thus, the glitches left unidentified due to the following of repetitive testing, get identified and eliminated.

Follows best practices: The TCoE model involves the use of industry best practices and technologies. This leads to a better identification of glitches in the shortest possible time.  

Conclusion 
Establishing a TCoE leads to the optimization of QA resources and helps an organization to respond to the emerging business dynamics in a better way. It is also a cost-effective and smart way to archive all the best practices, frameworks, test cases, and test scripts for future reference.

THis article originally published at Medium.com : How can a Testing Center of Excellence add value to Software Quality Assurance?