Digital Assurance: Key to Ensuring Optimal Business Growth

Digital technologies have transformed the way we interact, conduct business, work remotely, study, hire services, pay utility bills, enable medical consultation, and many more. The World Wide Web has truly bound the world to an invisible string that cuts across geographies, industries, cultures, languages, geopolitics, and others. The transformation seeks to influence customer experience, time-to-market, competition, and costs for entities in a positive way. However, with the expanding sphere of digitization, customers benefiting from rising competition have become choosy about better quality products or services. This has put increased pressure on organizations to provide digital assurance for their products or services and, in the process, deliver outcomes such as better functionality, performance, security, and usability.

Digital assurance solutions comprising testing tools, reusable test assets, accelerators, and domain expertise ensure software products to be of top-notch quality and reach faster to the market. These solutions allow organizations to remain competitive and profitable. Since competition is getting intense with each passing day, a minor glitch can smear the reputation of a brand and cost the organization a loss of revenue and market position. Further, with IoT, AI, Cloud, Social Media, and Analytics gaining popularity and adaptability, digital assurance needs to incorporate various approaches to be effective.

Thanks to the competition, organizations are moving away from traditional silo-based digital assurance testing and embracing a continuous delivery methodology driven by test automation. The new approach to implementing successful digital testing is ‘do it right the first time’. This is at the heart of the Agile-DevOps model, where digital quality assurance is part of the development process (planning and execution).

What is digital assurance all about?

Digital assurance comprises a host of quality assurance techniques and practices that ensure seamless collaboration among different elements or components of a digital ecosystem. The digital ecosystem may consist of systems, tools, people, and processes enveloping a broad spectrum of social, mobile, and analytics. Given the growing complexities of the digital ecosystem, organizations must employ smart digital assurance practices to remain relevant.

Why is digital assurance critical to ensuring optimal business growth?

Even though the role of digital QA in the SDLC is well known, let us know how it can ensure optimal business growth.

• Drives competition differentiation: Any digital testing strategy should align with the overall business objectives to deliver a better quality product quickly to the market. When software products are rigorously tested during the development process, any hidden glitches or vulnerabilities are identified and fixed. This makes the product resilient against cyber attacks, compatible with various devices, and market-ready. In a competitive market where customers look for products that are qualitatively superior and deliver great CX, the brand can achieve competitive differentiation and quality assurance.
• Enhance CX: Customer experience is at the heart of any digital business transformation initiative. Every software product driving that initiative should be able to deliver an enhanced customer experience (CX). And it is a critical parameter to measure overall customer satisfaction through the Net Promoter Score, an index displaying the inclination of the end customer to recommend a software product, service brand, or company to others. With digital quality assurance being an integral part of the build process, courtesy Agile-DevOps, any type of customer feedback gets quickly addressed. This enhances CX and increases the NPS score for the brand and company.
• Increased agility: The digital revolution has meant the adoption of new technologies at a faster pace. The use of test automation tools and accelerators as part of the digital testing framework can deliver increased agility and efficiency for the build process. This makes the build compatible with the market and addresses the needs of the customers. As the SDLC becomes agile, the result, in the form of quality software products, helps to increase brand equity.
• Managing complexity: With the increasing number of enterprise resource solutions being used by organizations across verticals, the complexity of processes has risen. Only by implementing a comprehensive digital testing strategy can such complexities be addressed, and applications made easy to use, safe, and fast loading.
• Ensuring safety: With rising episodes of cyber-attacks, organizations and their software products are at an increasing risk of getting compromised. Digital assurance can identify and fix any bug or vulnerability present in the software product or network and make the customer’s experience safe and secure. So, with the reassurance of safety, customers can download the application in greater numbers, leading to better sales for the company.

Conclusion

The competitiveness of any organization can only be achieved if it leverages new technologies, paradigms, and practices. With digital transformation in full swing, organizations must reinvent themselves and the technology platforms they use to stay relevant. And it is only by implementing a robust digital testing strategy that organizations can drive collaboration, integration, communication, and automation to transform themselves.

James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality