Why is QA Transformation vital for Digital Transformation?

Technology is becoming more and more integral to all aspects of our lives, so its impact is growing. Many organizations desire to fully reap the benefits of technological growth, driving them to embrace a total digital transformation to accelerate processes, develop innovations, and embrace opportunities. The digital transformation is changing the way businesses work, impacting every functional aspect of the business. Digital transformation is one of the top priorities for all business leaders, regardless of the size of the company and has become the norm for any business aiming for growth in today’s competitive market. To meet the requirements and expectations of digitally equipped customers and ensure the quality of the product, all industries, specifically IT, depend highly on Quality Assurance (QA) and testing. QA’s role in modern software development has evolved over time with the industry’s trends. As recently as a few years ago, QA was typically seen as a task that was planned and required manual testing based on documents and requirements, which only happened during the testing phase. Whereas, Now QA releases products every week or two, sometimes within just two hours, as part of continuous delivery.

Before we move further and discuss how QA is evolving to play a leading role in digital transformation, let’s look at How has QA evolved over time?

Traditionally, quality assurance testing occurs typically near the end of the development cycle and was only used to detect faults and eliminate defects. Waterfall methodology, for instance, involves developing the software first and then passing it along to the Quality Assurance (QA) team, who then offers feedback and returns the software to the development team to resolve the issues

Whereas in an agile environment, the Quality Assurance Team collaborates with the development team to improve products and processes on an ongoing basis. Through standardized procedures, QA strives to deliver consistent results, which means organizations need to ensure that their processes for achieving the desired results meet specific quality benchmarks. Software testing has traditionally focused primarily on identifying and fixing defects. Businesses that seek to transform their products and services digitally must evolve the role of the quality assurance process to meet the needs of user experience and customer satisfaction.

A good quality assurance program contributes positively to several objectives of a business going digital: protecting its image, increasing quality awareness, and ensuring end-user satisfaction.

Let’s take a closer look at how QA plays a vital role in digital transformation.

A quality assurance program measures end-user experiences across multiple platforms. Additionally, it will improve accessibility, reduce response times, and increase consistency in brand perception. Furthermore, automation can enhance these efforts greatly. Good QA programs can address the challenges associated with testing customer experiences across multiple channels: To ensure that the test suite covers user expectations and requirements, Developing and automating test cases, test data collection and implementation solutions based on data for customer experience testing.

The QA process accelerates the digital transformation process not only at the application level but also through lifecycle automation. Managing multichannel digital transformation activities requires testing automation to impact all areas of the product lifecycle positively. In addition to conventional automation, QA ensures cross-platform compatibility and delivers a positive customer experience throughout the entire lifecycle.

With an effective QA program, all quality metrics will be readily available to development teams so that they can conduct the right mix of manual and automated testing for all digital channels, browsers and mobile devices in actual end-user conditions. Quality awareness enables testers to align with a single quality strategy; as a result, the QA team can keep pace with development by ensuring quality and elevating the customer experience.

Several trends and digital technologies, like Big Data, Cloud computing, and mobility, are defining the Digital Transformation journey to create an excellent consumer experience and gain competitive advantages in the marketplace. Adoption of test automation tools for repeated tests across devices and operating systems is very crucial for QA/testing teams in the absence of appropriate quality metrics and digital assurance, otherwise all of the efforts made by the whole team could be rendered ineffective. For this very reason, ensuring the quality and compatibility of the applications across browsers and devices is vital for seamless customer experience in a real-time user environment and build the right experience.

As businesses adopt the digital revolution, they can encounter several challenges, including integration with the existing technology platform, adoption of the new technology within the work culture, and training and development requirements. A consistent QA transformation approach enables measurement, management, and integration of processes to provide financial and timely benefits. Furthermore, it allows teams to develop quality metrics and assessment models to evaluate the impact of the newly adopted technology on the overall transformation process. In order to achieve digital transformation, the incorporation of new-age technologies is essential for building smart devices and ensuring IoT works as effectively and cost-effectively as possible for enterprises.

Consumers, businesses, and devices are constantly connected, leading to the development of new apps, features, and updates; additionally, our smartphone applications are either being updated for the latest software versions or treating bugs that we do not even realize exist. All of these things lead to an essential part of the digitalization process and require modern quality assurance techniques for not only finding and fixing defects but also working closely with stakeholders to prevent recurrence of such defects, thereby ensuring impeccable quality in the products being developed and faster-time-to-market.

A testing automation strategy and practice allow QA teams to quickly and easily generate reusable test assets, including test data, test cases, and test automation suites. Additionally, test automation allows QA team to move testing further left or back in the pipeline. Testing automation can be directly beneficial to application development in several ways, such as Faster delivery, Multiple devices & multi-browser testing and increase coverage

Faster delivery: It is possible to reduce testing time and validate the build by incorporating automated tests into a CI/CD pipeline.

Multiple device and multi-browser testing: Digital transformation empowers businesses to reach their customers across various channels. Thus, Quality assurance testing has to cover each of these channels to ensure product quality.

Increase coverage: By automating regression testing, testers will have more time to validate new features and carry out the manual, exploratory testing. By maintaining test coverage, businesses will be able to increase quality by a substantial factor.

It is imperative that the application or software perform well. An application crash, outage, or even the time it takes for the app to process/work on a customer request has the potential to directly affect the app’s revenue and reputation with its today’s users. In addition to identifying issues and trends related to quality, the QA team must also identify and isolate their root causes. QA team must adapt to the constantly changing digital transformation journey to stay relevant and effective. For an organization to fulfil all the characteristics and behaviors of a digital transformation, it must maintain the quality of all digitally complex product implementations. As part of the lifecycle of the customer, businesses should provide support and services for multiple platforms, services, and applications. Testing and QA should be integrated through the entire SDLC, as well as integrated with DevOps implementations.

All in all, a good quality assurance strategy with a focus on continuous optimization & accelerated testing, customer experience, rather than functional validation and offer 360° assurance, including different testing aspects and validation between different stages, which in turn enhance the Digital Transformation process. The right Quality Assurance service provider is essential to strengthening every step of the development process and ensures it is leak-proof at every stage. One such Quality Assurance service provider that can assist you in the entire digital transformation journey is Sparity. It offers seamless Agile Testing, Test Automation, DevOps, Automation as a Service, Mobile testing, security testing, to name a few. Sparity understands the importance of Quality Assurance Transformation in the Digital Transformation process for large, medium, and small enterprises and offer comprehensive testing across your digital value chain.