Why Is Quality Assurance Testing So Important For A Business Strategy?

The combined onslaught of disruptive technologies, changing user preferences, a greater competition and security considerations have forced businesses to reimagine and reinvent themselves. To achieve the same, companies are increasingly into innovation and development of products that reach the market faster. The aim is to pre-empt competition and enjoy the early mover advantages. The approach forms a part of the digital transformation initiatives that businesses have adopted with a greater frequency.

The process of digital transformation ought to be smooth without disrupting the existing ecosystem. For otherwise, the customer service gets impacted leading to dissatisfaction and the company risks losing its brand value. Bringing about digital transformation in an organization is a difficult proposition. This is mainly to do with the presence of legacy systems (read unwieldy, non-scalable, complex and costly), and human resources that need to be upskilled for new technology platforms and paradigms.

Furthermore, the growing expectations of customers about 24 x 7 connectivity and device agnostic products and services have necessitated the adoption of new technologies and business models. This has brought about challenges for enterprises as many dimensions of technology are not in their control. These dimensions include network connectivity, availability of an adequate bandwidth, and the security of cloud platforms among others. These challenges coupled with the business imperatives of reaching the market faster have given rise to the need for quality assurance. In fact, there is a growing realization among business stakeholders that quality assurance and testing cannot be ignored any longer. This is due to the fact that software quality assurance testing plays a greater role in achieving business outcomes.

The greater emphasis on software quality assurance testing has led to adoption of innovative practices, tools and platforms. The industry has seen a paradigm shift in testing approaches – from the early manual based waterfall model to the latest Agile, TCoE, and DevOps models with emphasis on test automation. Importantly, notwithstanding the role of QA software testing in improving the product quality and meeting business outcomes, business strategy is still about beating the margins. Let us find out the consequences of neglecting quality assurance and testing in terms of ruining a business strategy.

Consequences of not following Quality Assurance

Losing competitiveness: One of the objectives in framing a business strategy is to remain competitive. And to achieve the same, the products and services of a company should either be on par or better than its competitors. This is where the role of software quality assurance becomes critical. It validates the quality of a product on parameters like performance, functionality, load carrying capacity, usability and security. However, in the absence of testing, the inherent glitches can let the product falter on any of the above mentioned parameters. As a result, the user experience can go for a toss leading customers to opt for competing products and the company losing its competitive edge.

Not reaching the market in time: The changing market dynamics and evolving technologies mean businesses need to remain ever vigilant. They are required to bring out innovative products and reach customers before their competitors. However, without using the right test automation tools, the timeframe of testing applications gets extended. This can delay activities like the delivery of innovative solutions, adding functionalities/updates or conducting regression testing.

Security ramifications: Neglecting the quality testing of software applications can leave glitches to go unnoticed and unmitigated. The same can be exploited by hackers with the use of Trojans, viruses, spyware and malware to achieve the following:

• Steal sensitive personal and business information

• Disrupt the systems and networks

The above activities can lead a business to lose customer’s trust, attract penalties and censure, or lawsuits from customers and regulatory agencies. These have the potential to ruin a business completely.

Impacting the product quality: Customers are increasingly using software applications to carry out a plethora of activities. These can range from paying for utility services and booking of train/plane/movie tickets to buying from eCommerce stores among others. Moreover, in the age of the Internet of Things (IoT,) embedded technologies are used extensively in medicine and other mission critical processes. The lack of quality of such software can lead to the malfunctioning of sensitive equipments. This can have perilous consequences such as loss of life and property.

Conclusion

The unpredictable business environment shaped by increased competition and the advent of new technologies has meant that companies have to deliver quality products within tight turnaround times. This can be ensured by following rigorous testing of software and streamlining the processes. Neglecting the same can have perilous consequences as mentioned above.

Diya works for Cigniti Technologies, Global Leaders in Independent Software Testing Services Company to be appraised at Cmmi-Svc v1.3, Maturity Level 5, and is also Iso 9001:2015 & Iso 27001:2013 certified.