Paradigm shift in quality assurance

The Digital transformation marks a foundational change in the enterprises across markets and industry verticals. As the enterprises grapple with the challenges related to change in the organizational culture, technology infrastructure, development and deployment of software, there is a paradigm shift in the way quality assurance is practiced and achieved. The traditional testing teams are increasingly perceived to be lagging behind in terms of skillsets, tools and methodologies.

The digital enterprise imperative

Digital transformation has taken centre-stage at the enterprise level as the businesses are getting disrupted and customer focus becomes the key. The last five years have witnessed a vast majority of the organisations embarking on digital transformation initiatives. With customer experience becoming ‘more important than ever’, the focus now has moved from multi-channel to Omni-channel, providing a seamless, uniform customer experience.

The digital shift is being touted as the ‘biggest enterprise and market transformations since the dawn of the industrial revolution’. However, digital transformation is riddled with challenges as enterprises are grappling with obstacles at multiple levels ranging from integration with legacy systems and development & deployment methodologies to digital testing strategies (or the absence of it)! Digital assurance approach and strategy, which takes the specifics of the digital and Omni-channel shift into cognizance holds the key to a successful transformation for the businesses to derive maximum value out of delivery

Change in perceptions

Digital transformation has also led to a paradigm shift in the way the quality is perceived and assured.

• A recent Gartner research indicates that ‘successful digital businesses have abandoned conventional ideas of quality assurance and testing centres of excellence, and have shifted to integrating a continuous quality approach across roles and the application life cycle’. They pursue a continuous approach to quality that is focused on prevention and automation, utilizing key agile practices such as behaviour-driven development (BDD), pairing, static analysis and test automation that support continuous quality. Continuous quality expands from testing as an event to a set of continuous activities.’
• Digital business is driving a faster pace of delivery to support the continuous delivery of incremental changes. Traditional testing teams cannot meet this pace nor the expanded view of quality required.
• The key findings of the World Quality Report 2019-20 indicate the priorities for driving business being Agile-DevOps, AI in testing and QA, end to end automation in testing, TDM and TEM etc. It notes with particular reference to financial services industry that, ‘the skills requirement for testing professionals is undergoing a massive shift. From largely functionally knowledgeable testers, the demand has moved to having a good blend of technical and domain skills. The need is for testers who can fit in multi-disciplined teams seamlessly’.
• DevOps and Cloud Speed Are Driving the End of QA as we know It.

IT is integral to Business

The landscape of testing / quality assurance is undergoing a significant change driven by business environments, technology trends, and is moving away from traditional software development and deployment methodologies. These changes call for a focus on continuous quality which is closely aligned to the current and future digital strategies of the enterprises.

Tracking the growing market & seizing the opportunity

While numbers vary with reports, the following are pointers to a significantly growing market opportunity in the digital assurance space.

• Traditional retail and commercial banks spent approximately US$1 trillion globally between 2015 and 2018 on efforts to transform their IT, with a large portion of that spend now being dedicated to butterfly-enabling technologies, such as cloud and AI-powered analytics. Within that aggregate number, an increasing portion is reserved to new investments —rather than IT maintenance—that now account for about 30 percent of banks’ IT spend. Many banks are also hard at work to shift the balance between “run the bank” and “change the bank” spending to ensure that the institution evolves at a competitive rate.
• Global testing market will grow by 30 Billion in the next 5 years accelerating at a rate of 12% – 18% CAGR.
• The digital assurance market size is expected to grow from USD 2.90 billion in 2017 to USD 5.47 billion by 2022, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 13.5% during the forecast period.
• The global automation testing market size is expected to grow from USD 12.6 billion in 2019 to USD 28.8 billion by 2024, at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 18.0% during the forecast period.
• Amount raised in first HY of 2019-20 by Indian tech start-ups is 4.88 billion USD with FinTech, Transportation and Logistics leading the way.

The Qapitol QA journey

Qapitol QA started off its journey precisely at this juncture of a fundamental shift in the business environment. The new age technology focus and specializing in Digital Transformation testing has helped it win the trust of many a startups, soonicorns and unicorns in the FinTech, FoodTech, Retail, eComm, HealthTech and Edutech domains. Our journey is an integral part of some of their spectacular successes. Within a span of four years we have grown and have developed a unified automation framework and embarked upon building a product/ platform for both functional and performance testing of APIs. The future roadmap is aimed at enhancing the framework, product solutions/ platforms and a sharp focus on building further capabilities and ecosystem in assuring the emerging technology areas.