Embracing testing IP to ensure successful digital transformation

Digital transformation is an ongoing journey. It is an initiative in which an organization evolves its business processes, business models, and organizational culture to adapt with a digital-first mindset.

Digital transformation is about continuous learning and applying the lessons for continuous improvement. What used to be a slow and steady journey of constant feedback and evolution, has turned into frenzy with the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a result, in response to the changing competitive, regulatory, and consumer landscape, organizations are employing a band aid approach to digitization, leading to short-sighted solutions and failed transformation efforts.

The average digital transformation stands a 45 percent chance of delivering less profit than expected, suggested a McKinsey research.

Diego Lo Giudice, VP & Principal Analyst at Forrester says –

“There’s a connection between the different transformations and digital excellence. For example, what is it that makes a digital transformation successful? It’s software, and it’s the way you build, deliver, deploy, test and do all that to the software. There’s a need for excellence, which we haven’t fully mastered yet. Today, many are just scratching the surface in terms of the advanced practices of Agile and DevOps.

If you think about a very large bank, they have thousands of developers and they’re trying to transform different areas of the organization. A transformation in a highly regulated industry like this requires a lot of business leadership and commitment from the top.

But, in general for most organizations, the CIOs and the stakeholders don’t really have a good, holistic idea of what’s going on, where waste is happening, where a certain practice is maybe not working, or if the toolchain they leverage is not performing as quickly or safely as they require, and so forth.”

There are three aspects to digital transformation that Diego suggests:

• Businesses must master digital to stay in business
• Software powers the digital experience
• Software execution excellence equals business execution excellence

These three inter-laced aspects of digital transformation points to the necessity to employ mature software testing processes to test more, test better, test faster, and test smarter.

The key to successful digital transformation is continuous testing that leverages next-gen smart automation technologies to deliver quality at speed in every release.

Smarter test automation, mature continuous testing

The leading analyst, Forrester, in their latest report on The Forrester Wave™: Continuous Functional Test Automation Suites highlights the necessity of an evolved test automation strategy to achieve digital excellence –

“The pandemic, recent financial crises, and market volatility are forcing enterprises to become adaptive. Automation is at the core of being adaptive. While test automation is not new, past automation approaches have not helped app dev teams keep up with increased demands of modern delivery. Testing becomes strategic in new areas like automation (e.g., testing of robotic process automation, low-code, and AI-infused apps); smarter with infusion of AI and ML; and more efficient by converging different types of nonfunctional and functional testing.

With business, technical, and developer personas all stewards of quality, modern software testing requires a technology environment that enables collaboration and easy navigation from one type of testing to another and among the different persona testers.”

It is now evident that testing needs to start early in the software development life cycle and should happen at each stage. This essentially means a shift from the quality assurance approach to quality engineering approach, which is about integrating quality assurance & testing practices deep within the development processes so that the end product is of the best standards.

To make this transition, the traditional testing processes and tools do not suffice. Instead, smarter, intuitive, and future-ready technologies are required in the form of IP tools.

IP-led testing services for making digital transformation efforts effective

Elaborating on the key components that organizations must master to successfully make the digital transformation effective –

“When it comes to the role of testing in the context of digital transformation we have to approach it from two different aspects – one is the skill set and another one is the mind set. As more and more organizations are moving towards digital transformation, the aspects of early testing and utilizing test automation in an optimum manner are very key components.

It means that more and more test engineers need to reskill themselves to be able to contribute to this whole new phenomenon. And just like any other thing, moving to digital transformation also means change management. Organizations are realizing that some of the old ways of approaching testing needs to change. There is a lot of non-functional testing that needs to be done in the context of digital transformation. It could be performance testing, security testing, mobile testing, and service virtualization. Some of these test types are a lot more relevant in the context of digital transformation.”

Modernized testing is not only about automation or quality engineering. It is a polygamous & harmonious marriage between Agile, DevOps, AI, ML, and digital technologies.

BlueSwanTM – the next-gen software testing platform

BlueSwanTM, the next-gen proprietary software testing platform developed by Cigniti, is a composite suite of varied testing frameworks in which each platform is tailored to serve a range of challenges that organizations might face. More precisely, it is a logical grouping of 6 projects or platforms where each platform can operate independently as well as in sync with the other platforms.

Cigniti’s Quality Engineering specialists and thought leaders, leveraging the collective years of experience of serving and solving the test engineering problems of global businesses, after extensive research, have come up with BlueSwan.

It aligns the organizational goals with the prevalent trends, assures optimal performance of your chosen framework through continuous QA, and accelerates the migration process with its intelligent proprietary tools. It fortifies our IP-led software testing services approach along with the Cigniti 4.0 services and domain-centric approach for offering world-class testing services to business across the different verticals.

Schedule a discussion with us to know more about Cigniti’s testing IP.