How quality engineering can impact the digital economy

Digital quality engineering

Before the era of consumerization and the advent of digitization, quality has become the center of attention for businesses. However, the emergence of digital technologies including the internet has empowered consumers to find out and compare an endless list of products from across the world. Quality assurance to end users has become an indispensable feature of attaining success along with the right digital strategy. Organizations are at different levels in their digital transformation journey and at distinct speeds as well. No matter what levels they are at, their business objectives have stayed the same - delivering a superior quality product at high speed.

The implementation of digital technologies has become imperative to stay ahead of the competition in most of the industry verticals. Today's organizations realize that they cannot retain or gain a competitive advantage unless they continuously deliver exceptional quality software faster than their counterparts. In fact, user experience and speed have become even more critical for success and survival. This is the primary reason why development initiatives such as DevOps and Agile have become a part of the digital transformation milestones and the boardroom agenda.

With time to market becoming shorter, the importance of software quality engineering has shifted entirely from the erstwhile way of waterfall testing in the SDLC. Most organizations today pursue Agile methodology that offers accelerated delivery of products and services. Enterprise quality engineering always ensures timely release of all builds, be it the tools, hardware, data, cloud solutions, performance-related readiness, and devices. Digital quality today requires an engineering approach that is different from the traditional method to achieve agile delivery and prevent defects.

Let us look into some of the primary features of these approaches below:

Business agility and continuous testing:

Automation is not a stand-alone approach anymore where scripts are executed by respective specialists and status reports are accumulated later. Automation today is synonymous with Continuous Integration and is scheduled to be run as the build arrives. The integration of automation with test management solutions achieve shortened release cycles with an automatic appearance of results without any human intervention. With shortened release cycles, the time for verifying quality also gets reduced significantly, thereby, elevating business agility.

According to Andy Walter, the CEO of Procter and Gamble, manual testing is no longer a sustainable method, for it creates bottlenecks for organizations in achieving operational excellence. With the help of continuous testing, organizations are able to radically evolve their ecosystems. Organizations cannot satisfy the rigorous demands of digital transformation without Continuous Testing and DevOps along with the agility and speed they trigger.

Exceptional user experience

Digital platforms help derive continuous and immediate feedback on applications’ quality. Any feature of the services and products that does not satisfy customer expectations is handled with harsh reviews by disappointed end users. Therefore, UX has become as crucial as the application’s functionality.  Software quality engineering should be integrated into the digital transformation strategy for seamless UX assurance. User experience is a combination of various factors such as device capabilities, application flow, ease of interaction with application UI, networks, and so on. As the performance of any application is paramount, every outage, crash, and slowing down of the application can raise customer grievances. These, in turn, can directly have an impact on the revenue and value proposition of organizations.

The software quality engineers identify such challenges and work on mitigating them. As per Vittorio Cretella, the CIO of Mars, quality assurance is critical for creating an exceptional user experience. Previously, there has been a cushion between consumer and information technologies, but now, everything is interconnected, thereby, placing IT in a very strategic position in any organization. Organizations need to realize how the users are responding and how to achieve an optimal customer experience with the help of continuous testing and quality assurance.

Role of Enterprise Quality Engineering in digital transformation

Digital quality engineering has a crucial role in the journey of digital transformation. Implementing quality checkpoints ensures delivery of the intended business outcomes along with end-user satisfaction. Quality assurance fortifies the end-product at each phase throughout the software development cycle and reduces challenges posed by latest technologies. Quality assurance plays the best supportive role in any company's digital initiatives to ensure security and performance.

As the Internet of Things (IoT) is set to take over the organizational value chain and determine how they are interconnected, it has become indispensable for organizations to include quality engineering. Therefore, enterprises making advances towards the direction of extended digitalization already understand the associated risks and see the entire picture of quality challenges. QE keeps a continuous check on the quality of the service or products being offered right from the beginning of a software development cycle. Enterprise quality engineering tries to meet the three main agendas of a company’s digital transformation initiative: safeguarding brand image, demanding quality assurance and delivering client satisfaction.

Safeguarding brand image

Quality assurance measures the end-user experience across several digital platforms. This enhances accessibility, minimizes response time, and enhances the brand image of the organization. Software quality engineering addresses the following difficulties in testing user experience across multiple devices, platforms, and networks.

• Devising test cases.
• Gathering important requirements in the test set and the right coverage of end-user expectations.
• Using test tools for user experience testing.
• Establishing test data for customer experience testing.

Entire Life cycle Automation: Quality Assurance expedites the transformation process not only with the implementation of application-level automation but also by speeding up life cycle automation. Apart from utilizing the conventional automation method, digital quality engineering focuses on testing the end-to-end software development life cycle, thus ensuring impeccable user experience and cross-platform compatibility.

Advanced level analytics data support

Enterprise Quality Engineering utilizes advanced level analytics to extract data from several commercial and social platforms that can be used in productive decision making. This offers exhaustive insights into all levels of the end-user experience.

Conclusion

Digital channels are pushing enterprises to reach the end consumers faster through unique services and products with satisfactory results at the core. Therefore, in the modern digital economy, enterprise quality engineering experience (for customized and omnichannel experience), speed (test results as you build and even before) and iterative development (creating a viable product) are what organizations are striving for. This is where, an independent quality engineering company can bring values by successfully establishing quality assurance practices across the technological ecosystems.

Diya works for Cigniti Technologies, Global Leaders in Independent Quality Engineering & Software Testing Services to be appraised at CMMI-SVC v1.3, Maturity Level 5, and is also ISO 9001:2015 & ISO 27001:2013 certified.