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.

Key Reasons to consider Quality Engineering Services.

Quality Engineering Services

If the changing customer expectations are anything to go by then the way IT solutions are created and tested has undergone a paradigm shift. This is in addition to the business dynamics that has seen mergers and acquisitions, quick product rollouts, and technology changes such as mobility, big data & analytics, IoT, and artificial intelligence among others. The impact of such tectonic shifts – in customer expectations, business dynamics and technological changes - has redefined the role of development and testing teams.

Apparently, the task is cut out for the IT teams – either come out with quality applications in double quick time or just cool your heels and see customers lap up competing products or services. The demand to deploy quick applications for the consumers and provide an elaborate backup have transformed the Quality Assurance process. Currently, the shift has moved away from the traditional Quality Assurance to the new Quality Engineering Solutions.  

What is quality engineering?

The integration of IT related processes and workflows across devices, platforms, frameworks, networks, and organizations has meant that quality does not remain a standalone attribute. In fact, quality has embraced multiple dimensions that range across the end to end application lifecycle. With Agile and DevOps models being the new game changers, quality has moved from mere testing of applications post their development into a more comprehensive scheme of things.

Consequently, quality assurance services have given way to quality engineering services. The services encompass the design, development, management, administration and maintenance of IT systems to a high quality standard as mandated by international quality regulations.

Why is digital quality engineering important?

In the Agile and DevOps model of software development, testing and deployment, quality is optimized by making every stakeholder responsible. In other words, if the development and testing teams are entrusted with ensuring the application’s quality, the operations team needs to see the same runs properly throughout its lifecycle, and customer feedbacks are taken seriously. The main thrust of quality engineering services is to prevent the development of glitch ridden applications in the first place. This is in sharp contrast to the traditional QA model where the focus is more on identifying glitches.

The quality engineering strategy involves a robust collaboration between the developers and testers. The testers, on their part, build the testing framework and write the automated scripts at the beginning of the SDLC. The framework is maintained for the whole SDLC and is made an intrinsic part of all future development and test sprints. Digital quality engineering optimizes quality and brings speed in the SDLC. It is not only about executing functional or non-functional testing, but also ensuring that every sinew of the SDLC is validated. It brings about a change amongst the stakeholders, tools, and processes to collaborate and work towards a common goal – of delivering quality products.

Key reasons for considering quality engineering services

Move towards Shift-left testing: The increased use of technologies viz., AI/machine learning, IoT, predictive analysis and the adoption of social, cloud and mobile means a move towards shift-left testing. In the Agile and DevOps model, testing is more aligned with development through common sprints. Moreover, there is a need to create analytics driven QA, API testing, and execute performance engineering while focusing on continuous automation. A robust shift-left testing when integrated in the SDLC leads to better test outcomes.

Rapid deployment: When the demand is geared towards the rapid deployment of quality products, a software quality engineer instead of detecting glitches in successive iterations of a sprint should aim at preventing the glitches from becoming a part of the code. This requires optimizing the processes, tools, technologies and techniques in the SDLC.

Business value: The key to meet customer expectations is by creating an end to end value proposition for the product. This calls for adopting a number of desirable and feasible options to drive innovation. The innovation should enhance the customer experience. QE services help execute continuous automation and virtualization leading to a significant increase in the test coverage area.

Business goals: The main objective of building a quality application is to meet the business goals. This requires the processes to be designed and set up in accordance with the business goals. Thus, a software quality engineer comes handy for he or she is a part of the project management team that decides the processes, tools and techniques to be incorporated in the SDLC.

Conclusion

The requirement of quality products to meet the imperatives of digital transformation initiatives has led to incorporation of quality engineering as an enabler. It is a move towards eliminating quality issues at the beginning of the SDLC leading to customer delight.

This Article is originally published at Medium.com, Key reasons for considering Quality Engineering services.