Technology has now become an essential part of our day-to-day lives and every company, whether it is small or big, rely on software in one way or another for carrying out their business. As companies march on to their digital transformation journey, the emphasis is on delivering innovative software faster and with greater agility. You don’t want your QA to be a bottleneck and hamper the ability of the company to deliver at a pace that is needed, but you also need to deliver high-quality, bug-free software.
What makes QA still relevant?
To answer this, it is important to understand, what the biggest driving factor of a successful digital transformation is. It is none other than, the very old ‘Customer Experience’ which in turn impacts many business objectives such as corporate image protection, increasing image of quality and end-user satisfaction. QA can play a crucial role in ensuring that these business objectives are met and a successful digital transformation is achieved.
Companies after having invested significantly in digital transformation, would like to know if it leads to desired results. The challenge is to achieve transformation while maintaining product quality and interoperability of linked systems while also delivering a pleasant user experience.QA and testing is the answer to predict and decide the actual outcome of a digital transformation. Testing becomes a critical factor both during and after the transition to digital.
Below is a list of additional pointers that make QA still relevant while transforming the business to digital. These may not sound new, but still form an important part of achieving the digital transformation goals
Complexity: The nexus of Social-Mobile-Analytics-Cloud-Internet of Things forces, makes digital transformation very complex. QA becomes an important function to test the complexity of the system by coming up with the best processes, tools, and techniques.
Security Threats: Security is of utmost importance specifically when the world is so interconnected. While smart interlinked systems support an incredible volume of opportunities, it also makes the entire system that much more vulnerable to security threats. QA with appropriate security testing, helps mitigate this threat.
Leveraging Legacy Infrastructure: Enterprises that are not born digital, will need to leverage their legacy systems. Testing ensures their core functionalities are not impacted as they chart their path towards digital infrastructure.
Test Reporting: An important aspect of testing is Test Report that provides the actual health of the system which in turn helps stakeholders proactively make key decisions.
QA Transformation
Although QA is an inseparable part of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), digital transformation has significantly changed how software testing is performed. It requires a strategic commitment to continuous quality and a deep-seated transformation across people, processes, and technology.
Companies need to recognize this and galvanize their digital transformation initiatives by modernizing their testing. By reviewing and reinventing software testing across their organization, companies will be able to remove the bottlenecks that the existing QA strategies cause and further accelerate their transformation.
The data reported in Accelerate 2018 Vienna summit shows how the organizations that committed to transforming their testing benefitted.
Continous Testing Approach
Maintaining a balance between the business’s demand for speed and their tolerance for risk requires Continuous Testing that provides real-time insight into the application’s business risk.
Continuous Testing is an end-to-end QA process of executing automated tests continuously to provide quick and frequent feedback on business risks associated with a software release. Continuous Testing extends test automation and supports practices such as risk-based test case design and prioritization, stateful test data management, test-driven service virtualization, and seamless integration into the DevOps toolchain.
Traditional testing methods deliver results at the end of the development cycle. Continuous testing, on the other hand, takes place at several stages including requirements review, development, integration, staging and production. This ensures that defects are handled much earlier in the development cycle thereby improving overall quality and saving considerable time and money.
Here is what’s needed to enable continuous testing in the Organization:
- Align testing with business risk to optimize test execution, implement automated quality gates, and provide critical insight for release decisions
- Minimize manual testing and shift it to session-based exploratory testing
- Shift testing efforts to the API layer when feasible
- Utilize test data management and service virtualization to enable continuous execution of realistic end-to-end tests
- Integrate functional testing into CI/CD to be a seamless part of the delivery pipeline
Transition from QA to QE
In pursuit of their digital transformation goals, organizations need to transition their testing from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering.
While “Quality Assurance” assures quality of the product, “Quality Engineering” drives the development of quality products and processes. In other words, QA is reactive and identifies defects in the developed software, whereas QE looks to be proactive and prevents bugs from entering the code.
This transition can be achieved by considering the following factors:
Workforce transformation: Organizations need to evaluate their existing testing teams to reskill them to make a successful leap from QA to QE. This involves changing the team’s mindset, updating their skills and tools, and transforming the culture as a whole. By doing this, organizations will effectively move from “testing as a people activity” to “testing as a service”.
Upstream testing: Testing itself will have to be flipped upside down. While the traditional way involves testing the product once it has been developed, the Dev Ops way brings in testing right from the beginning of the software development lifecycle. This is done by incorporating feedback and continuous integration during the development lifecycle. Testers will participate in the software design sessions and lay down the strategy for look-ahead testing.
Automation framework: Developing a robust automation framework will help in making the transition from QA to QE. It is already a common practice to have automation on routine testing processes but there is scope for greatly expanding the role of automation in testing with tools that make use of data analytical technologies to get insight into the customer experience and make informed decisions.
Enterprise CI/CD: A Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD) pipeline helps save a lot of time and effort spent on manual, error-prone deployment work. It works in tandem with the upstream testing to drive quality from the start of the software development lifecycle. Moreover, automated tests can be incorporated and scheduled to run after every deployment.
Crowdsourcing: Organizations can leverage various crowdsourcing platforms to crowdsource work to public, private and certified communities via the Hybrid Crowd extension. Crowdsourcing allows organizations to expand their spectrum of digital services, meet last-minute requirements and accelerate design, coding, testing and data science. Organizations using crowdsourcing benefit by getting access to the best ideas and pay only for output that fits their requirement.
Outcome-based model: Adopting an outcome-based model increases efficiency while reducing operational costs. Using measurable performance metrics, organizations can align their QE process with the desired outcome and move away from managed capacity models which cost more. With outcome-based models, one has to pay for outcomes instead of individuals, bringing in transparency and making it a win-win situation that increases the rewards and decreases the risks.
Conclusion
While organizations on their journey towards digital transformation are practicing devops & CI/CD, it is important to take QA along and give that continuous approach to testing. QA, with its transformation to continuous testing and quality engineering, enables enterprises to effectively adapt to digital transformation and guarantee the desired customer experience.
With daily or even more frequent deployments, it is important that QA doesn’t become a bottleneck to getting new, quality functionality into the hands of customers. Hence, leading enterprises and top-ranking CIOs are specifically focusing on QA to successfully implement their digital transformation initiatives.