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.