Name the 5 factors to be kept in mind while testing Digital Technologies

Digital Testing

Going digital has become the latest buzzword for businesses to embrace and stay competitive. This is happening right across the business verticals wherein some are looking at re-engineering and shifting their entire business portfolio into the digital medium. While others are looking at incorporating suitable digital elements into their existing business models and legacy systems. The ultimate aim of going digital is to achieve a high growth trajectory by leveraging advanced technologies and a growing customer base. With customer satisfaction becoming the ultimate differentiator for businesses, the digital testing of technologies, products, and services has become critical.

Digital technologies are evolving at a frenetic pace and are being accessed by customers and businesses alike on a multitude of device platforms. Since these technologies help a business to realize its digital transformation goals including streamlining its workflows and empowering stakeholders with better analytics and planning, these should be of high quality. Hence, to deliver a delightful customer experience across all channels, digital software testing has become mandatory. However, the same comes with several challenges as well such as:

·         The smooth functioning of digital technologies depends on their compatibility across platforms, frameworks, cloud, browsers, and networks. Thus, digital testing should involve validating a host of APIs.

·         Testing the integration of services and end-to-end workflows across digital channels.

·         Testing the consistency of solutions across multiple touchpoints.

The changing dynamics of customer behaviour, technologies, and business outcomes has forced digital testing services to change track and adopt new paradigms. These include Agile and DevOps with testing moving shift-left and comprising outcomes such as continuous delivery and integration. Let us now have a look at the top five factors influencing digital assurance and testing.

Top 5 factors to consider while testing digital technologies

#1. Ensuring top notch customer experience: Businesses of the day engage with customers through a multitude of platforms such as web, mobile, and social media. Each customer transaction can involve interfacing with a number of channels, devices, browsers, frameworks, databases, servers and networks. Thus, there is a need to provide a seamless and consistent customer experience across channels. So, instead of the digital QA and testing services validating the functions of a software application, the focus has squarely shifted to validating the customer experience. This calls for testing the functional and non-functional aspects of an application across multiple channels and technology platforms.

The objective of ensuring a consistent customer experience has been bedevilled by the challenge of maintaining data privacy and security. Any digital QA strategy should cover multiple customer touchpoints to ensure compatibility, usability, and accessibility. Also, customers should be offered personalized experiences, be it in the form of using themes, layouts, and styles or a quick feedback to his or her queries.

#2. Being Agile: Staying in competition has become a challenge for businesses as they have to churn out quality products or services at a quick pace. This calls for the digital testing services to be extremely agile in learning, innovating, and adapting to new technologies. Since development cycles are getting increasingly shorter, digital quality assurance is embracing paradigms like Agile and DevOps. The aim of testing is to provide optimal test coverage, better integration, and quick identification of glitches. This can only be achieved by using test automation and service virtualization among others.

#3. Open technology: Most businesses are continuing with legacy systems while planning for digital transformation. This is due to reasons such as high cost and large scale disruptions that moving to an alternative technology platform can incur or cause. The digital QA services should check if the application and its various touchpoints are kept open to support better API integration with third party systems – be it with existing legacy systems or while moving to an alternative robust architecture.

#4. Data security: Upholding the privacy and integrity of customer data has become critical in view of the recent GDPR and other regulations. As more customer data moves into the digital domain, testing services should validate the quality of their storage, access points, and the medium of transfer.

#5. Time and budget constraints: The testing team should choose the appropriate processes for test automation besides selecting a suitable test tool to save time, cost and effort. Also, choosing the right test model such as waterfall or Agile should depend on the complexity and size of the project – more dynamic the test requirements, greater should the focus on adopting Agile. 

Conclusion

As implementing digital technologies can have implications for businesses, workflows, workforce, and customers, digital software testing should be executed by keeping a slew of parameters into consideration. This ensures the development and delivery of a robust and secure software application thereby driving a delightful customer experience.

Diya works for Cigniti Technologies, which is the world’s first Independent Software Testing Company to be appraised at CMMI-SVC v1.3, Maturity Level 5, and is also ISO 9001:2015 & ISO 27001:2013 certified.