Key to build a robust Digital Assurance and Testing strategy

Digitization has had a transformational impact on businesses and their revenue models. The success of the number of digital products both in the B2B and B2C segments is underpinned on customer experience. The better the quality of customer experience offered by a product, the better is its user adoption and impact on brand loyalty. To ensure the same, businesses need to follow a robust strategy of digital assurance and testing. Consequent to the strategy, a product can incorporate the best of design elements and leverage various digital channels to achieve the business objectives. With advanced technologies such as AI, Big Data, Augmented Reality, IoT and Analytics making their presence felt, digital products cannot but remain oblivious to their impact. These technologies are increasingly leveraged by businesses to transform their brand building strategies and to enhance customer outreach.

The digital transformation market is driven by changing customer preferences, innovation, the spread of new devices, the advent of new platforms, languages, and frameworks, and the adoption of new technologies like IoT, AI, and cloud. If one talks about software applications, they are needed to be updated from time to time. This is needed to keep the applications compatible with the latest devices, platforms, browsers, or OS while pre-empting threats from malware at the same time. Even though most of these updates are delivered free and on a real time basis, they can disrupt the customer experience a great deal. To ensure such updates are delivered quickly causing the least disruption to the customer experience, businesses should embrace digital assurance and testing in the Agile-DevOps mould.

How to ‘manage’ customer experience in the Agile-DevOps mould?

Managing the customer experience can be a difficult task given the proliferation of digital devices and growing innovations in technology. And unless the workforce has incorporated the values of agility and innovation, and created a quality culture, meeting business objectives related to customer experience can be a herculean task. The biggest bottleneck in achieving customer experience can come from within the organization. It is observed that departments generally work in silos not to speak of even working at cross purposes occasionally. And unless the department wise objectives are aligned with the overall business goal, the digital product will not function to its optimum level. This calls for the implementation of the Agile-DevOps model of software development, testing, and delivery.

According to this model, the digital assurance services are made part of the development sprint. This results in a faster identification and elimination of glitches and consequent saving of costs. Moreover, the quality culture created as a part of DevOps ensures the customer feedback about the product is acknowledged and acted upon in real time. The business should create a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery pipeline to update the product throughout its lifecycle. The digital assurance services enable businesses to enhance their value proposition, achieve ROI, and maximize outcomes from the digital campaigns.

The digital transformation testing of today is all about incorporating automation and using real time data analytics across multiple digital touchpoints. Automation gives the opportunity to validate specific features and functionalities of a product by using test variables. This negates the use of actual demographics in specific regions to validate a product. For example, instead of testing a particular feature of a digital product related to the customers in the USA, the same can be validated through digital QA and testing services during the development and integration stages itself. The use of virtualization can help create the right test variables to validate the test scenarios.

Map the user as well as customer experience

The digital quality assurance exercise should look into the customer journey and identify pain points that he or she experiences. The pain points can be experienced by the customer during his or her interaction with digital touchpoints across devices, channels, and platforms. Also, the digital testing strategy should be clear about mapping both the user and customer experiences. Even though the two are used interchangeably, they are markedly different from each other. If user experience is about an individual’s interaction with a digital product, a customer experience is related to the entire lifecycle of the product.

Conclusion

Any digital software testing exercise should aim at providing a great customer experience by using test automation in the Agile-DevOps mould. It should take into account aspects like a faster turnaround time, addressing the security risks, and expanding the test coverage area for maximum effect.