The transition from Quality Assurance to ‘Digital Assurance’
Our world is digital, like never before, and the digitization of everything is revolutionising business.
Our world is digital, like never before, and the digitization of everything is revolutionising business. Looking ahead, the world will soon be filled with everyday objects connected to the Internet. Gartner asserts that by 2020, 25 billion “things” will be connected to the Internet, making businesses vulnerable to the risks inherent to digitization.
Cost, time-to-market and customer experience are top priorities, with customer experience being today’s imperative. SMAC (Social, Media and Analytics in the cloud) and Digital Technology are changing the behaviour of organizations across all industries and as a result, end customer experiences have undergone a dramatic change. The same stands for operational processes, and business models for engagement.
Although many companies understand that they need to adapt to the evolving use of technology by their customers, they are yet to realise how fast they have to address these changes. Mobile web adoption is growing eight times faster than the internet back in the early 2000’s, and today’s customers demand ‘anything-anytime-anywhere’ service with the best experience. As an example, the users of mobile applications expect them to change almost daily. The market dynamics that rely on mobile apps demand that clients expect new features, offers and opportunities all the time.
Organisations usually fail to consider quality as one of the most important aspects to deliver a first class customer experience. That, alongside the lack of investment and accountability for ensuring it , often means that organisations fall short of the results they want and even worse put their reputation at risk. To win this race you need a strategy that raises the bar on capabilities your core banking transformation project can deliver, as technology continues to evolve.
The assurance organization (QA and testing) plays a vital role in certifying the digital transformation. So organisations need to rethink their QA Strategies to remain competitive, and move toward integrating the software development supply chain into the business.
As the ‘Continuous Delivery’ concept establishes itself into the software delivery process, application lifecycles shorten and the number of releases increases, so the emphasis must be placed on increasing capacity and quality across the organisation. By implementing Agile/DevOps principles and by automating the application lifecycle, QA can ensure process improvement metrics and establish continuous feedback that reduce errors and accelerate time-to-value, enabling digital transformation.
With automated tools, techniques and development methodologies available, QA teams are better positioned to respond to digital technology challenges within short time frameworks, protecting and even enhancing the brand value and eliminating any reputational risks through a superior customer experience. QA and Testing teams need to employ a new way of thinking based on ‘shift left’ practices simply by putting testing and automation early in the development lifecycle. By doing so, they will ensure that quality is built in from the start.
Author:
Vaios Vaitsis
CEO and Founder of Validata Group