5 Reasons Why Your New Business Ideas Need Digital Assurance

Digital transformation is all about leveraging technologies by businesses to streamline processes, improve the quality of products or services, and enhance the customer experience. In the highly competitive digital ecosystem of the day, innovation is the key to stay ahead of the competition curve. It can be done through implementing ideas that have the power to disrupt the existing ecosystem. For example, Uber brought the concept of app based cabs without even owning a single cab of the fleet. This idea has not only given a whole new experience to the customers in terms of convenience and cost, but has significantly added to the bottom line of the company as well. However, no matter how revolutionary or impactful an idea is, it should be tested for digital assurance.

Why digital assurance?

When businesses adopt digital transformation to deliver better products and services and to gain the competitive edge, their processes, systems, networks and applications are exposed to risks. These risks could be in the form of glitches or vulnerabilities, which if not identified and eliminated in time, could lead to the following consequences.

• A bad user experience leading to the abandonment of the product

• Users facing issues like the compromise of their sensitive information including credit card details

• Disruption of the system leading to missing deadlines and angry clients

• Business falling foul of regulatory agencies and inviting penalties and censure

• Business facing costly lawsuits

• Loss of customer trust, brand value and revenue

Importantly, the digital landscape is fraught with risks of viruses, malware, trojans, and ransomware injected by hackers for malicious purposes. So, any software product deployed in the market should be subjected to a rigorous digital assurance testing. This is needed to assure customers and clients not to speak of the developers about the suitability of the product or service. Digital assurance testing ensures the product meets the desired quality outcomes in terms of performance, functionality, usability and security. Moreover, since digital products use a multitude of devices, platforms, operating systems, browsers and networks, they should be tested for their seamless performance across dimensions.

The five reasons why business ideas need digital assurance

1. Accelerated time to market: One of the best ways to beat the competition is to reach customers with an innovative and quality compliant product or service before others. This calls for the implementation of the Agile and DevOps model of digital QA where digital testing is part of the development sprint. The aim is to test the quality of code alongside its development and integration in the SDLC. By implementing test automation, businesses can carry out shift-left and shift-right testing approaches. Thus, with continuous improvement and testing, quality compliant products can reach the market faster.
2. Creates a quality culture: In the present DevOps guided SDLC, ensuring the quality of an application is not the job of the developers or testers alone. The onus of continuous improvement and testing lies with the operations team as well. Moreover, providing digital assurance solutions goes beyond mere deployment of a software, but lasts till its entire lifecycle. This calls for creating a quality culture in the organization where every stakeholder is responsible for enhancing the quality of the software to meet customer expectations.
3. Make the product customer oriented: Many a times, businesses are not attuned to the market dynamics and can go on needlessly adding features and functionalities. It is only through digital testing that businesses can understand the relevance of the product from the customers’ perspective and work towards achieving the same.
4. Makes the product competitive: When the right test automation tools and frameworks are used, they lead to a quicker identification of glitches. The product so tested and deployed in the market remains robust and secure. It is able to overcome the pulls and pressures of the market dynamics quite easily.
5. Make use of cutting edge digital testing tools: The requirement of a product to meet stringent quality parameters across digital dimensions can only be met by using cutting edge digital testing tools. The digital dimensions encompassing cloud, IoT, predictive analysis, big data, or AI need the use of the best digital testing tools, frameworks, and IDE’s in a collaborative way.

Conclusion

To ensure that innovative digital ideas meet the stated business objectives, digital assurance and testing is needed across the SDLC. This way, a product born out of an idea can meet customer expectations and remains resilient to the competing market forces.

Michael works for Cigniti Technologies, which is the world's first Independent Software Testing Company to be appraised at CMMI-SVC Level 5, and an ISO 9001:2008 & ISO 27001:2013 certified organization.