Software Quality Assurance is evolving continuously. Do you know why?

Change with evolution is an inevitable cycle that enterprises need to adopt for growth and sustainability. Let’s look at the growing popularity and demand for Digital Assistants such as Alexa and Siri, and how software giants are working towards making their products much more responsive and conversational. The AI platform and supporting applications continue to evolve and develop further to accommodate varying needs and protocols. Likewise, Software Quality Assurance has to go through an ever-evolving process to deliver various aspects, right from building much more compatible applications, to confirming with different security protocols. While this holds true, what are the key reasons for QA to mature and progress continuously?

Why Software Development and Testing needs to keep evolving?

Neither QA nor development can recite a monologue and deliver adequately. Transition of roles and evolution of processes can happen only when both the functions collaborate and share an average of their experiences. In the current context, businesses are struggling with diverse protocols and regulations to align their business processes and applications with information security policies such as GDPR in Europe. Similarly, there are many policies that are influencing the adoption of QA processes and development patterns. Complying with all these policies requires intense communication and coordination amongst teams.

QA helps monitor various engineering processes such as feature development, software/application design, hardware configuration, release management, and much more. Global businesses are increasingly becoming digital and so are their various consumer-facing offerings and applications. Hence, the software development process has to evolve and get much more inclusive and agile rather than just working with a definite flow.

Nevertheless, there are quite a few factors that can be credited for the constant growth and progress of QA and Software Testing as a function and process. They can further reinforce the significance of Software Quality Assurance across diverse industries as well.

What are the key reasons for QA to mature and progress continuously?

Organizations are increasingly investing in Quality Assurance and Software Testing to not only ensure quality of their applications, but also to bring sustainability and profitability for their business. Hence, there is a lot at stake when it comes to investing in QA infrastructure, which includes test cases, automation frameworks, or even setting up a Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE).

Changing customer demands and preferences

The consumer scenario is getting highly competitive, where new products and applications are getting launched every hour. Enterprises are coming up with new and potential ways of luring new users, and even retaining the existing ones. For instance, Web-based channels such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, and many more are launching new series each month. While they do so, they need to ensure that their existing viewer base is tuned in, and there are offers that are bringing in new viewers as well.

This implies that they need to package their products differently, yet offer an Omni-channel experience. This needs scrupulous coordination between development and testing teams. QA is expected to evolve and try new methodologies to deal with the growing business demands and their customers.

Growing Security concerns

A Gartner report estimates that ‘Worldwide spending on information security products and services will reach $86.4 billion in 2017, an increase of 7 percent over 2016, with spending expected to grow to $93 billion in 2018.’ It further mentions, ‘Spending on emerging application security testing tools, particularly interactive application security testing (IAST), will contribute to the growth of this segment through 2021.’

Whether it’s Cybersecurity or Application Security, ensuring security of applications has become a primary need for all digitally inclined organizations. Cybersecurity threats, breaches, and data leaks have threatened every organization and institution across the world. This implies that regular security testing mechanisms cannot work. You need a robust strategy that is much more responsive and agile, which keeps evolving with time and challenges. QA needs to adopt new tools and leverage new methodologies that can bring down such crisis.

Better tools with richer features

Methodologies such as DevOps and Agile enable more automation and scrupulous monitoring of development and testing activities. This is enabled by leveraging various tools to achieve the expected outcome. Tools come with their own capabilities and specialities. They could be free platforms or licensed paid tools. With relevance to the testing and development requirements, testing tools need to get better and much more compatible over time.

Conversely, QA teams need to evolve and update their skills to leverage better tools that can deliver more, perform differently, and give better results. Nothing can stay constant, as growing needs are coercing testers to perform differently and derive smarter results.

Challenges posed by Digital Transformation

Digital Technologies come with their own set of challenges and opportunities. It is up to testing teams to devise the required strategy and deal with it. The strategy needs to encourage continuous testing, deployment and integration. In order to make this possible teams have to keep adopting new testing platforms and leverage them to meet their objectives.

There is no definite way of achieving excellence, but it is important that QA teams keep experimenting and archiving what has been achieved. This helps to go back and refer, and keep a track of the QA activities in the development process.

You need to keep reinventing and innovating!

Ultimately, what does every business need? It needs innovation with more and more experimentation, which assures higher RoI and profitability. By adopting new tools and testing platforms/methodologies, QA is able to evolve and keep reinventing its strategy. This brings much more inclusiveness and responsiveness in its outlook to accommodate change and new ideas. QA must also bring scalability to its process to test differently and bring sustainability that is powered by innovation.

There is no definite way in which QA teams can ensure success. Only with constant growth and evolution of processes, it can steadily bring conviction in its approach and extend the same for businesses as they go out and serve their end users.

At Cigniti, we have established Software Testing Centers of Excellence around Mobile, Performance, and Security Testing. Connect with us to explore the capabilities of our dedicated labs and gain maximum benefit from your QA investment.