What are the new business dimensions to have opened due to Digital Assurance?
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| Digital Assurance |
The speed and scope of digitization of businesses
have led to the realignment of strategies, processes, models and systems. The
objectives of digitization are about reducing costs, accelerating the time to
market, and offering a rich customer experience. Although all the three
objectives are important, it is the customer experience that has become the
need of the hour. This is owing to the intense competition that businesses are
facing in a digital era.
Moreover, since customers are able to access
devices such as smartphones and a slew of internet enabled applications quite
easily, their appetite for better quality products has increased as well. The
swathe of customers is found to be gravitating towards products or services
that deliver a world class experience at cost effective rates. Since customers
have become the final arbiters of products in the market, businesses have no
other option but to posit customer experience at the top of their agenda.
The positioning of customer experience as the core
business agenda has meant rewriting the script for digital assurance. If earlier, digital quality assurance was all about validating the
functionality of a software, system or network with less focus on customer
experience, today, things seem to have changed. As customer experience has
become the ultimate differentiator of your brand, products and services in the
market, the digital assurance
process should incorporate the same as its ultimate outcome. In other words,
ensuring the seamless functioning of the features of an application should lead
to a better customer experience.
The process of digital QA and testing, apart from enabling the all-important
customer experience, needs to focus on accelerated time to market as well. The
idea is to be the early player in the market in terms of offering the best of
products and services. Since digital quality assurance can be a time consuming
exercise, it should be done the right way the first time. Hence, digital QA and
testing are marked by following methodologies like Agile and DevOps with testautomation being the key enabler. Test automation, on its part, can help
accelerate the testing process, add agility and achieve the maximum test
coverage area.
New business dimensions
courtesy digital assurance testing
Digitization as a disrupter in business has brought
about issues like the lack of quality of a product/service as well as security.
To counter threats from viruses, trojans, malware, etc., businesses have adopted
digital assurance testing to be
a part of the development sprint in the SDLC. This approach is unlike the
previously followed waterfall model (read shift right) and helps to proactively
predict, prevent and detect glitches quickly. The approach includes creating
new test cases and setting up new measurement metrics. The broad sweep of digital assurance services encompasses
analyzing deficiencies in areas of coding, design, requirements, system
configuration, and release mechanism. This has helped businesses to open new
dimensions as mentioned below.
Secured products: The rapid spread of malware, viruses, and trojans has lowered the
confidence of customers in using software products especially the ones with a
financial dimension (read eCommerce applications). Also, cyber security threats
and the possibility of information/data loss have led to a transformation in
carrying out digital testing.
The move towards shift left testing has ensured the quick identification and
elimination of glitches/bugs way ahead in the SDLC. It has helped to create a
risk free digital ecosystem thereby increasing customer trust in the product.
Cloud services: The best way to address the objectives of digital transformation
related to cost and accelerated time to market is by using cloud services. And
digital QA services help in validating the scalability, functionality,
performance and security of cloud based applications and systems. These ensure
cloud services like IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and platforms like public, private and
hybrid remain risk free.
Build customer oriented
applications: The integration of
development, testing and operations as a part of DevOps has helped to boost
agility in business by receiving prompt customer feedback and preferences. This
has led to the development of robust, feature rich, functional and secure
customer oriented applications.
Conclusion
The successful implementation of digital QA in the SDLC especially in
the Agile and DevOps mould has helped businesses to remove glitches very early
in the development stage. This has helped in enhancing the customer experience
and achieving ROI for the business.
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