Enhance Testing Focus to Positively Impact Your Digital Drive

According to Gartner, by the end of 2024, 75% of enterprises will shift from piloting to operationalizing AI. To innovate their way beyond the pandemic, they require an ever-increasing velocity in terms of processing, building, and delivering applications to face unprecedented competition and retain market share.

Next-gen technologies are becoming critical in accelerating this pace through enterprise digital transformation and enabling them to facilitate process excellence and enhance digital customer experience. At the same time, software testing is additionally playing an instrumental role in ensuring the tri-factor advantage of speed, value, and quality.

The role of testing is evolving from merely serving as an independent function within software delivery to becoming an integral and inclusive part of the team and delivery lifecycle as digital transformation efforts expand.

According to World Quality Report 2020-21 (WQR) findings, QA professionals are no longer solely responsible for testing and finding defects but are now geared up to ensure that the remaining members of software delivery team instill quality in their work.

Why Testing is Critical in Application Modernization

The core of digital transformation lies in application modernization, with enterprises migrating applications to the cloud, creating new cloud-native applications, or incorporating AI and ML into applications. From being process-driven, application development has moved to focusing on outcomes, so enterprises look to retain a competitive edge by continually improving CX, among other attributes.

This pace of innovation in CX demands the frequent release of applications, as enterprises require applications to be both easy-to-use and available anywhere. Prior to the release of those applications, they must be tested to ensure that they are functional, secure, usable, and safeguard user privacy. Continuous testing provides an instant feedback cycle that helps ensure the new features of an application will meet expectations.

According to a research report by IDC, critical application failure can cost an average of $1 million an hour. The report also found that the average total cost of unplanned application downtime per year is $1.25 – $2.5 billion.

How a Robust Testing Strategy Impacts Digital Transformation

Better testing processes help to deliver flawless products and reduce time-to-market drastically. What are the advantages that a robust testing strategy can offer businesses to ship quality products faster and have a competitive edge?

Increased Automation

Automation is crucial in enabling digital transformation. Testing is being approached from a product life cycle standpoint as the future markets are likely to be dominated by IoT products.

Conventional testing methods do not yield the flexibility that we require to test IoT systems. However, increased automation gives a much-needed push to the release cycle and delivers the product on or before time.

Enterprises are strategically adapting techniques like custom automation solutions, frameworks, and accelerators to address specific testing needs and scale their testing process.

Utilizing Predictive Analysis

With the advent of Agile and DevOps, there is no doubt that the focus on collaborative efforts has emerged as a mainstream activity. However, with the emphasis on shortening development cycles, it becomes a cumbersome task to test every functional aspect of a product.

Predictive analysis will help the product team prioritize and emphasize the tests that need to be done first. On the other hand, utilizing the historical data will allow the testing team to analyze and identify the impact of the changes that were made and then identify the test coverage.

Enhance the Customer Experience

As customers get emotional with brands, they would like to share their experiences on various platforms. A small flaw in the entire customer journey would ruin the brand’s reputation. Therefore, customer experience holds prime importance in the era of digital transformation.

Testing teams must focus on testing the products from various facets: flow, application UI, ease of interaction, device capabilities and functionalities, and device state and networks, to just name a few, to adhere to the highest standard of quality.

Improving Security

Security has always been one of the biggest areas of concern as customer data is generated at various touch points while using the applications. The onus is on the testers to ensure stringent security measures are applied to ensure there is no breach of data. Across all stages of the product development cycle, security testing is one area that demands an increase in continuous automated testing.

Continuous testing helps to detect possible security threats early and ensure that vulnerabilities are eliminated. So, all the touchpoints have to be stable and provide the user with a flawless and satisfactory customer experience.

Increased Awareness of Quality

An effective testing program will provide an overall view of all quality metrics. This allows development teams to complete the right mix of automated and manual tests for all digital channels. It can be done side by side for browsers and mobile devices in actual end-user conditions. This ability enables testers to align with a single quality strategy. By doing this, they can contribute to delivering high-quality, responsive, multichannel user experiences.

Helps to Personalize/Customize the Services

Customers want to be recognized not just by their names, but also by their preferences and interests. They crave personalized experiences that encompass custom-made products, services, and sales processes. Faster deliveries enable us to generate more customer data and provide huge insights to customize services and build tailored products.

Digital transformation success calls for increasing quality-at-speed for software-enabled digital experiences. To get there, it’s imperative for enterprises to enhance the delivery capability of their teams. This involves automating much of the testing program.

How Test Automation Accelerates Digital Transformation

The advantage of test automation technologies and practices is that they enable QA teams to readily generate reusable test assets. This comprises test data, test cases, and test automation suites. Test automation also facilitates teams to shift testing further leftward – or further back in the pipeline.

Conventional application testing methodology includes testing the code at a component level using unit tests. Later, integration tests make sure that components interact with each other, and then, from the end user’s perspective, UI testing validates the code. This is a manual process that can be error-prone and difficult to scale.

With the agile approach, automated application testing leverages AI and ML technology for each testing stage. As the application advances, testing scripts are kept in sync using automation. Further, automation enables an enhanced number of unit and integration tests, improving the quality of the application through continuous testing.

The core advantage of automated testing is its comprehensive nature. This ensures that new features are added safely without disturbing the existing application features.

On the other hand, beyond the manual approach, automated application testing needs tools and expertise in automation. While some tools offer codeless AI-driven features, others demand scripting. Using an open source tool or a commercial one, automation provides consistent results and data points.

Conclusion

The shift to digital-first has resulted in organizations reimagining their business models and customer strategies. A robust digital transformation strategy requires a complete makeover of the traditional QA processes and infrastructure.

Cigniti’s Digital assurance and testing solutions address the multi-faceted needs of digital transformation while keeping agility and customer centricity at the core of our services. We conduct comprehensive testing across your digital value chain, encompassing digital marketing, web portals, web content, digital assets, and web analytics, as well as the entire digital ecosystem including cloud, mobility, big data, and connected devices.

Schedule a discussion with our Digital Transformation and Assurance experts to find out more about enhancing testing focus to positively impact your digital drive.