How to transform Businesses with Quality Assurance and Testing

Author: Diya Jones

The advent of the internet and associated technologies such as the cloud, mobile, social media, analytics and the Internet of Things have whetted the appetite of customers. The entire digital revolution has increased competition in arguably every possible domain. This has presented customers with options that play a significant role in their changing preferences. Customers are no longer satisfied with just routine customer service but want more. The rising expectations have moved from mere satisfaction to delight. Thus, customers, armed with the knowledge of industry best practices and technology, want businesses to incorporate them and deliver. Such changing dynamics of user preferences have forced businesses to opt for digital transformation by using the latest technologies.

However, businesses, in the rush to carry out digital transformation to beat the competition, have taken recourse to cutting corners. For them, the focus is more towards developing and delivering new products fuelled by the customer demand. The rush has led to a situation where quantity has triumphed over quality. This is due to reasons such as cutting costs and achieving a faster time to market.

Importantly, such an approach has led to the deterioration of the quality of products/services. Within an integrated digital landscape, this has resulted in delivering a bad customer experience. Hence, instead of achieving ‘customer delight’, businesses have ended up bruising themselves. With businesses staring down the barrel with dwindling sales, low customer base, and increased competition, quality assurance testing has taken centre stage.

Again, the adoption of technologies such as cloud, mobile, AI, data analytics, and IoT has exposed businesses to risks. These risks are related to cyber security with hackers or cyber criminals on the lookout to wreak havoc. Hence, the twin challenges of increased cyber threats and bad user experience have brought quality assurance testing into the reckoning. Companies have realized the correlation between the quality of their products/services and customer retention. This has led to the adoption of better paradigms like Agile and DevOps. According to these, digital quality assurance is not a standalone exercise but a continuous one across the SDLC.

The adoption of quality assurance testing

The quest to achieve a better customer experience, faster time to market, and reduced redundancies and cost has led companies to do the following.

  • Adopt new technologies like the cloud and migrate their legacy systems to the same.
  • Implement Agile, Lean and DevOps paradigms to streamline and integrate development and digital QA testing.
  • Automate the digital QA testing process for better test coverage and faster identification of glitches.

How can QA and testing transform businesses?

  • Speed of delivery: Customers not only want faster delivery of products, information or services, they want them qualitatively superior as well. The twin objectives can only be achieved by employing end to end automated software QA testing. As the automated test scripts check the applications repeatedly against predefined outcomes, there is a quicker identification of glitches. Thus, software QA testing ensures speedy delivery of quality products.
  • Continuous improvement: As mentioned before, customers no longer remain satisfied with the mere delivery of products/services alone. They want the products/services to be of top notch quality during the period of their usage as well. This means the products have to be updated from time to time to improve their quality as well as functionality. This calls for carrying out regressive testing, functionality testing, performance testing and yes, security testing. In the DevOps scenario, quality assurance remains an ongoing process - right from the development stage to the delivery of the product and thereafter.
  • Improved customer trust: When customers see the product faring well against deliverables and meeting their requirements, they seldom look at other options. The rising customer trust manifests itself in improved business performance.
  • Meeting regulatory guidelines: The presence of glitches in an application or network makes it vulnerable. The glitches can be exploited by hackers or cyber criminals to pass on malware, viruses, and trojans. They do so to steal sensitive customer information or to disrupt the system. Therefore, in the eventuality of a data breach, businesses can invite penalties from the regulatory authorities. This is in addition to inviting lawsuits from harried customers. Hence, conducting rigorous QA testing can help businesses to meet regulatory guidelines.

Conclusion

In a digital landscape of shifting customer preferences, rising competition, and an increased cost of development, it is QA testing alone that can transform businesses. The transformation leads to better customer experience, business outcomes, and ROI.