The digital experience has undergone rapid transformation in the past decade. Organizations are expected to provide a seamless user experience across every channel and device.
Recently due to unprecedented situation of COVID-19, customer behaviors take a sharp turn towards digital–first and almost all businesses have been thrust into reorganizing their approach to customers.
It is inevitable that customer expectations and satisfaction will drive Digital Transformation and Quality Transformation. As a result, QA teams are facing new challenges every day.
QA teams are striving to identify problems that might eventually result in revenue losses. The ultimate goal is to eliminate issues early in the software development stage making software robust, reliable, and secure. As part of this, QA teams need to move away from regular traditional testing and undergo a complete transformation.
This article throws insights on how to transform the Quality Assurance function within your organization and how Enhops can help. Without further ado, let’s get started.
What is Quality Assurance Transformation
A quality transformation is characterized by automation of processes, optimization of operating models, faster delivery, self-diagnostic and self-healing systems, and in-process quality improvement.
Quality Assurance transformation emphasizes people, processes, and technology, which involve empowering and energizing the workforce, automating repeatable tasks, and achieving agility when it comes to executing them.
To bring agility, processes are expected to be simple and seamless, technology should enable SDLC to meet the market demand, and the workforce should be empowered with free flow knowledge and tools to make them productive
It’s easy to assume that the QA role will remain the same, no matter what project they work on. But the ground reality is the role of QA undergoes some important shifts because of the transition to Agile working practices. As the team becomes more agile, QA processes need to transform to add value to their projects.
Why Quality Assurance Transformation is essential
Let’s take a closer look at why QA transformation is vital.
Protect the brand image:
A quality assurance transformation program measures end-user experiences based on real-time data for customer experience testing to improve accessibility, reduce response times, and increase consistency in brand perception.
Right experience:
To gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace, organizations are focusing on delivering an excellent consumer experience. But in the absence of appropriate quality metrics and digital assurance, the adoption of test automation tools for repeated tests across devices and operating systems is vital.
Enterprises need to focus in building the right experience for the customer across all browsers and devices in a real-time user environment.
Emphasize the adoption of New and Disruptive Technologies:
A consistent QA transformation approach allows teams to develop quality metrics and assessment models to evaluate the newly adopted technology’s impact and help build smart devices and ensure IoT works as effectively and cost-effectively as possible.
Enhance risk management:
For better risk management and enhancing the overall quality of the software, Cybersecurity is becoming an integral part of the Quality Assurance process. Quality assurance’s integration with Cybersecurity will minimize the risks involving the Quality of the end product or service, and as well as there are fewer security risks.
Elements of Quality Assurance Transformation:
- Quality Mindset:
QA is a continuous process, not the end of the development or deployment funnel. But always process, planning, designing and implementation take the main focus which is not enough to deliver excellence. A quality mindset changes how an organization thinks, creates, and delivers products.
Everyone must be on board with the change from the CEO to the software developer. A quality mindset across the organization encourages developing productivity-driven behavior and optimizing efforts to produce a perfect product or deliver ideal service.
The very basic rule here is to communicate why quality is important for the organization and how every role is expected to contribute towards it. Communicate how to bring a quality mindset from Day 0 across the organization.
- Agile and DevOps Practices:
To fulfill the promises of Digital Transformation, organizations are taking a test-first approach instead of the old waterfall test-at-the-end development model. With customers’ expectations rising every minute, businesses must create powerful practices to ramp up their software development practices.
To survive and thrive, the enterprise’s IT processes must adapt quickly and effectively on the journey towards Agile and DevOps success. Enterprises can build resiliency by using DevOps Test automation tools which is also the key to leveraging digital solutions as the main differentiator.
C-suite executives know the need for urgency to transform DevOps testing strategies to enable scalability and ensure faster-to-market. CIOs who are like to implement people-centric processes to increase throughput, aim at improved operational support and quick fixes.
- Continuous Testing:
To achieve its full potential of Quality Assurance Transformation, Continuous Testing needs to be an essential part of the DevOps pipeline. To provide testers with the ability to come up with innovative and new testing strategies using data it is important to establish a Continuous Testing process using the right tools and automation.
Standardized testing is a crucial part of the DevOps concept, but the need to evolve is also indispensable in the digital accelerated environment. Continuous testing offers QA a new transformation to optimize their pipeline, reduce costs, and make better software faster.
- AI-Powered QA Transformation:
With the increasing pace of development and software releases, businesses must be prepared to harness the power of AI to transform their QA function. Organizations prepping themselves from the beginning by collecting the right data and adding the right algorithms to prepare the right testing systems will surely stay ahead of the curve of the competitors.
For instance, Mineral (formerly ThinkHR) reduces the cost of test maintenance and accelerated QA team velocity by introducing AI-led QA. Whereas CISCO has automated their regression testing to enhance the speed of the test case automation and platform flexibility.
Using intelligent and self-healing systems will limit the time it takes to recover and develop systems that can understand, respond to, and sometimes predict failures, resulting in a change in the way organizations practice quality control. AI-based self-healing system can configuration changes, detects failures, and helps understand and fix the underlying cause.
How QA can accelerate Digital Transformation
To improve the efficacy of operations, modern organizations use digital technology. They are looking for a system to realign the delivery excellence to the market’s needs, which includes delivering projects to operations on time and with high reliability, concomitantly meeting the organizational commitments.
Here is How QA Transformation accelerates Digital Transformation
- Enhance application/product quality: Heterogeneous transformation models help testing maturity, augment test efficiency and improve test coverage to deliver exceptional product quality and reliability.
- Optimize YoY costs: Enhanced defect management helps reduce the overall defect rate, reducing the cost of maintenance of high-quality applications. Test virtualization further reduces the CapEx and OpEx, thereby helping optimize cost across the board.
- Reduce time to market: Using automated tools, infrastructure, resource optimization, and embedded quality assurance mechanism within each testing phase helps standardize and optimize processes. It helps improve early life cycle quality, thereby reducing time-to-market.
- Maximize ROI: End-to-end QA transformation solution entails test management functional and performance testing to ensure testing is optimized and aligned with business requirements. This helps ensure delivery excellence, thereby maximizing ROI.
Reinvent your QA Transformation with Enhops
Today’s emphasis on Quality has evolved, so it is imperative that the role of quality management in organizations also needs transformation. While the current global economy stresses more on delivering faster and cheaper, Quality concepts and methodologies should be redesigned to be relevant to continuous business operations. This focuses on time to market versus having an exceptional client experience.
Our QA experts address the diverse needs of QA transformation or large-medium-small enterprises. We have designed and developed a comprehensive transformation suite that leverages multiple enablers and best practices to facilitate continuous improvements and efficiency gains that align with your unique business goal.
Reach us at Contact Us or drop your query at marketing@enhops.com
