How Quality Engineering plays an integral role in Digital Transformation

Organizations are embracing digital technologies to give customers omnichannel experiences and scale up their business volumes. The disruptive nature of these technologies has allowed companies to shore up their capabilities for storage, processing, and analytics. Developments such as social media, mobility, analytics, IoT, and smart devices are enabling digital transformation and determining how users engage with businesses. The production demand in companies has gone through the roof thanks to the changing market dynamics and growing competition. This demand for scale has necessitated the expansion of the legacy systems and the inclusion of the user ecosystem. The latter encompassing social media, personal devices, and cloud, among others expects a superior customer experience.

With shortening time to market and the need to ensure Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI and CD), the role of QA has changed. It has moved from the earlier waterfall model of ‘testing after development’ to ‘testing alongside development’ of Agile/DevOps. As customer experience has become the determining factor in the adoption of digital products, the role of QA has become critical. This is more so due to the need to validate software across interfaces, platforms, devices, browsers, and networks. With the demand for continuous builds gaining ground, the development and QA teams should go beyond the status quo. They should aim at preventing defects rather than taking the usual reactive approach. Thus, QA assumes the role of digital quality engineering. This involves the management, maintenance, and development of IT systems with enhanced quality standards.

Today, quality assurance goes beyond functional testing and covers non-functional parameters as well. These include security, usability, performance, accessibility, and compatibility. Thus, digital quality engineering is a nimble model underpinned on parameters such as being agile, intelligent, automated, and on a cloud. It goes into assessing, optimizing, and ensuring customer experience (CX), every time.

How quality engineering services impact digital transformation

As digital transformation helps enterprises to reorient strategies, streamline workflows, optimize the cost of operations, and enhance quality, the software quality engineering services make the below-mentioned impact.

Analyzing user behavior to optimize CX quality: Analytics solutions run through user data patterns to derive business intelligence. The use of AI through automated algorithms helps in analyzing the user data on bounce rates, average time spent, or user inflow, to determine the trends. For example, webpages with high bounce rates or loading speeds can mean performance issues. Also, AI-driven QE services can analyze the user behavior pattern and give fresh insights to developers about incorporating new features or functionalities.

Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Behaviour Driven Development (BDD): The two popular approaches to software development require unit testing of the code before conducting other tests. The enterprise quality engineering team needs to ensure the testing process is quick. It does so by pitting quality via API validation versus UI-driven test cases. The BDD approach is geared towards ensuring acceptance outcomes. Here, the software quality engineering services implement the QA steps using automation scripts as defined by the user story. These two development approaches require better collaboration among various stakeholders - teams representing digital quality engineering, development, and management.

Enable ‘on demand’ usage with ‘on cloud’ model: Delivering customer experience can be a costly affair with upfront investments on infrastructure, devices, and tools. Further, add maintenance cost to the updation of browser or device variants, and you are staring at huge CapEx. This calls for moving to the cloud platform where tools and infrastructure can be dynamically provisioned based on demand. For example, the experts at any quality engineering company can execute compatibility testing by hosting automated scripts on the cloud. Thereafter, virtual machines can be provisioned with myriad OS-browser combinations to conduct the tests. Thus, QA teams can maintain a dynamic testing ecosystem that can address the changing requirements. The ecosystem can eliminate the need for infrastructure setup or license procurement.

Conclusion

Software applications are primed to provide enhanced customer experiences. They do so by interacting with the accompanying digital ecosystem - devices, browsers, operating systems, and networks, among others. The applications need to be glitch-free and overcome hurdles like evolving technologies, diverse market demands, and cost pressures, among others. QE services are increasingly being sought to deliver great customer experiences by harnessing agile, intelligent, and automated processes. They can help enterprises to stay up the competitive curve, deliver value for money, and optimize the customer experience.

Oliver has been associated with Cigniti Technologies Ltd as an Associate Manager - Content Marketing, with over 10 years of industry experience as a Content Writer in Software Testing & Quality Assurance industry.