Need for Innovation in Digital Quality Assurance

Going Digital is no more a new word in the technology arena as most of the IT organizations have assimilated themselves to the new trend. The wheels of digital revolution have pulled every organization towards it, as it leads to continuous, consistence interaction with customers across the multiple channels leading to consumerization of services.

Digital transformation involves mobile, customer experience, social media and big data. Most of the organizations unraveled the ‘apps race’ as a part of their digital transformation strategy focusing on delivering high quality, secure user experiences, with assured business outcomes. This led to growth in IT spend allocation to QA and Testing to 35% till 2015 and might increase to 40% by 2018 according to World Quality Report 2015-16. Demand for greater agility, shorter lifecycles of device and services, and integration of services across platforms increased the importance on quality assurance testing

It might be easier for the “Born Digital” organizations to view QA as an integral part of their growth graph. But for the organizations performing testing on legacy and web application, and who are currently in the transformation stage, digital testing unless until coupled with innovation would be difficult to achieve the desired goals of customer centricity. Therefore, it is essential for the existing QA organizations to understand the current testing trends and innovate ways to provide effective testing solutions.

Digital Quality Assurance Challenges include:

Continuous Delivery: The need to meet end user expectations made continuous delivery essential. In continuous delivery environment, testing is done in small increments at frequent intervals with code integration as its being build. This would help in early detection of problems and determines the effectiveness of change.

Complete coverage: Identifying the end-user requirements and defining the right coverage of their expectations would be a major hurdle where it requires a constant communication or interaction with target segment.

Test Case Design Strategy: Use of agile scrum methodology to develop the custom apps might be an efficient way to achieve fast time to market, but a test case design following a similar strategy will have to be assessed and defined such that it accelerates the test life cycle.

Test Automation: Test tools should complement the agile development process of the application. The test automation scripts should reflect the latest version of system for which they have been developed. When the system changes, there is a need to change the tests to suit. Otherwise, the maintenance of automated test scripts outweighs their effectiveness in an unstable environment.

Mobile Labs: Demand for digital testing exploded as the use of mobile devices have become an integral part of customer existence. Although most of the organizations agree that time is one of the important factors for QA and testing in mobile development, testing across plethora of mobile devices and enhancing the customer usability is a challenge in itself. Even though organizations tend to have set up real mobile device labs as test environment, this just adds to fixed cost of maintaining them as the life cycle of mobile has been changing exponentially.

Establishing of test environments: To provide effective customer experience, the solutions have to be consistent across different channel interfaces. As the channel interfaces gradually increase, testing and maintenance of those environments would be a huge hurdle. In view of ever changing test environments, use of cloud technologies in the establishing test environments might seem a plausible option to avert the infrastructure costs and diversity of mobile devices.

Generation of dynamic test data: Static test data is an element of past! As more and more mobile applications are being built, the need to test the software components as they build has become an existential need. To accelerate testing across the latest applications, there is a need to generate dynamic test data to stabilize the applications and bring a close proximity to customer behavior.

Non Functional testing: As the goal of consistent customer experience across the channels has to be achieved, there has to be a special emphasis on performance and security of the customer data, which flows across channels. The risk of losing customer data across multiple channels and multiple platforms is huge, therefore the Security assessments, vulnerabilities, and performance audits of the environments are essential to boost the ability of applications, infrastructures and end-points. There has to be a holistic view of performance from server to front-end applications.

The challenges in digital testing is pushing the QA organizations to innovate ways to address them and provide the best in class solutions. With customer experience as the core pillar, organizations needs to deliver on the following aspects to stay relevant: Customer centricity with analytics based assurance, agility with faster time to market, stability with best in class QA practices and future ready applications with enhanced performance.

Are you looking to know more about our Digital Assurance services? Then, don’t miss the Digital QA Webinar on 14th July,2016 to know how to accelerate your Digital transformation journey.

About the Author:

About the Author: Naresh is a Solutions Lead , part of Enterprise Solutions Group at Cigniti Technologies. Naresh supports Sales and Delivery teams in creating technical proposals and supports bid process. He hold a PGDM degree from T.A.Pai Management Institute, Manipal and graduated(B.E) from Osmania University, Hyderabad in the stream of Electronics and Communication Engineering. He has keen Interests in latest technologies, Psychology and Philosophy.