Key reasons why your organization needs Digital Assurance and Testing

In the fast changing digital landscape, technology and innovation are driving competition. The quicker a company embraces technology, optimizes it through a product or service and delivers the same to customers, the better are its chances of attaining success. Digital assurance of the software product or service helps provide a valuable customer experience. In todays’ highly competitive market, winning companies will be those that offer a seamless and rich customer experience. This entails a change in the way products are developed, tested and deployed. Otherwise, a bad customer experience can lose the trust of the customers.

Digital software testing, the key enabler

The digitally empowered customers of the day want quality products and services to make their routine tasks easier, convenient, and cost effective. Although companies have woken up to the fact that quality is the key driver of success, their over emphasis on reaching the market before others is leading to a situation where quantity often gets precedence over quality. Thus, to ensure that speed and quality go hand in hand while developing, testing or deploying a software, companies must embrace digital testing. This requires the adoption of paradigms like Agile and DevOps and better digital testing tools.

The objectives of digital assurance are geared more towards generating favourable outcomes than being guided by inputs. Digital assurance is the key enabler that ensures businesses remain competitive and focused on delivering the best customer experience. Also, in order to deliver quality outcomes, businesses must transform their internal processes. They can do so by adopting digital technologies such as cloud, IoT, predictive analysis, mobility, and smart devices. The objectives of businesses should be geared towards providing consistent digital experiences across devices, access points, platforms, technologies, and networks.

Reasons why digital QA and testing are important for businesses

Organizations, be they digital, wannabe digital or traditional, need to reach out to customers to provide value addition and a seamless customer experience. They do so by reshaping their business models, reinventing strategies or transforming their processes. Moreover, in a digitally connected ecosystem where security has become the key concern, QA has become the key differentiator – between success and failure. Let’s find out why digital QA and testing are important for businesses.

Creating value proposition: Customers are mostly swayed by the value proposition that a company offers. For example, the large number of mobile phones sold by Apple in spite of their high price range is due to the brand’s value proposition. This has happened because customers have become convinced about the quality of the mobiles and their associated services. Apple did not achieve its value proposition in a day or two but by rigorously testing its mobiles and mobile apps for performance, convergence, functionality, usability and security. They have done these across platforms, networks, operating systems, and access points.

Security: With the rise in security incidents like data theft and cybercrimes, customers have become increasingly wary of buying a digital product. This is where the implementation of a strict digital software testing exercise can convince customers. Moreover, ensuring the security of a digital product is needed to avoid the dire consequences. These can range from losing customer trust, inviting penalties from regulatory bodies, and facing lawsuits from affected customers to losing revenue and brand value.

Competitive advantage: Digital software testing ensures that a software is free of glitches and is ready to face the market dynamics. By using proper testing tools and frameworks, the vulnerabilities and bugs in the software can be eliminated. This provides a better digital experience to customers and helps the product gain a competitive advantage.

Transform the internal processes and legacy systems: To achieve the outcomes of digital QA and testing, the internal processes and legacy systems need to be transformed. By adopting the DevOps model, businesses can realign their legacy systems to meet the stringent quality standards. This can be achieved through test automation and continuous testing of the product. Once the internal processes and legacy systems are streamlined and strengthened to meet the high quality standards, enhancing customer experience can be achieved.

Conclusion

The digital transformation initiatives by businesses through embracing technologies and paradigms can achieve critical mass only if digital software testing is made part of the development and deployment phases.

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.