QA practises have changed significantly throughout the years. If anything, we learned how innovatively expandable the field of test automation is. The World Quality Report for this year delves deep into QA practises to discover strategies that can promote faster and impactful IT developments and digital transformation. This year’s theme, “the closer you look, the more you see,” is fitting as the report provides some insightful suggestions about how unicorns and soonicorns can accelerate their business growth.
So, without much further ado, let us talk about the 5 key takeaways from this report for unicorns and soonicorns.
Takeaway #1 from the World Quality Report 2022-23
Consolidate quality with your development cycle
Call it quality orchestration, agile quality or whatever you want – but the crux is making quality integral to DevOps and this happens when you have 3 things in place –
- The right talent – by building an in-house team of skilled SDETs or opting for a more cost-effective option of employing QE partners on a project turn-around model
- The right quality framework – that helps you deliver superior value to your end user at a greater speed by optimum utilisation of resources.
- An organisational culture – that considers quality critical for business outcome.
QA practices such as automation of test lifecycles, end-to-end testing across agile teams, flexible and easy provisioning of test environments and test data, service virtualization and CI/CD integration usually set the stage for agile culture. However, what truly drives the sustainable implementation of agile quality is the availability of a knowledgeable team, business focus, management support and an overall organisational commitment towards it.
Takeaway #2 from the World Quality Report 2022-23
Quality Automation
Test Automation isn’t new but its adoption rate is still slow. Why is that and what can be done to realise its full benefits? Here is some food for thought
- Have a robust automation strategy in place that details every aspect of test automation – The framework to follow, tests to automate, benefits to expect, tools to use and ways to maintain and keep the test automation framework updated.
- Always partner with a seasoned test automation expert for hassle-free implementation, maintenance and updating.
- For quality to be integrated with DevOps, it’s important that test automation is integrated with the development cycle and not independent of it. Test automation that’s independent of CI/CD automation or only partially integrated, results in the misalignment of testing and development pace, gradual discarding of testing automation and incomplete realisation of benefits.
- Go for automation solutions that are easy to maintain and meet business needs accurately
- One tool doesn’t solve all your problems. Customise your framework and go for tools that meet your business needs perfectly.
Takeaway #3 from the World Quality Report 2022-23
Quality Infrastructure Testing and Provisioning
There is a clear northward trend in organisations of all sizes towards provisioning of non-production environments to cloud with more than 49% of the survey participants stated to have migrated around 50% or more of their non-production environments to cloud. The motivation for this increasing affinity towards cloud is agility, cost efficiency, improved usage of resources and robust disaster recovery.
In fact, for unicorns and soonicorns this is a great strategy for effective resource utilisation. So, if cloud is a big part of your test environment management, cloud and infrastructure testing automation should be a key part of your testing strategy and deeply integrated into your software development cycle. Make sure, you employ an end-to-end test automation tool to ensure seamless performance, scalability and functionality of your testing environments.
Takeaway #4 from the World Quality Report 2022-23
Test Data Provisioning
Do you have a project-centric approach to test data provisioning or an organisation-wide test data provisioning strategy in place?
It is advisable to have or move towards an organisation-wide test data management strategy with cloud to store test data. Currently, most organisations either store only de-sensitised data on cloud or have all test data on-premises. But this too is a positive step since it ensures on-demand secured availability of test data.
However, the bigger question to ask here is if test data pipelines are integrated into CI/CD pipelines. It is not only important to have test data provisioning automated but also to be integrated with the CI/CD pipeline automation to actually create a testing strategy consolidated with your software development cycle. If required, tie-up with quality engineering partners for a successful implementation of test data automation that’s aligned with your DevOps.
Takeaway #5 from the World Quality Report 2022-23
Emerging technologies and QE
If your organisation is working on any of the emerging technologies or keen on adopting any – quality should take centre stage in all your strategic discussions.
Not because it is the in-thing to do but because a well-defined and comprehensively implemented quality engineering approach to adopting emerging technologies will save you the hassle of increased deployment costs and cyberattacks (if you are like the 96% of the survey respondents who were asked to rate the risks for not adopting a QE strategy for emerging technologies).
So, develop the skill set of the in-house quality engineers for smooth management of all these emerging technologies or have a partnership with a reliable quality engineering solutions provider to implement emerging technologies into real-world use cases.
One of the key messages of this survey was the gradual rise of the status of quality as a means to find and fix faults in software applications to a driver of end-user experience and business outcomes. Consequently, this rise has led to bringing quality in boardroom discussions and giving it a respectable space in planning and strategy.
While enterprises have to shift gears and unlearn the past to adopt this view, unicorns and soonicorns are at an advantage of having this view embedded into their organisational culture right from inception. And we all know what’s stronger than a well-defined strategy – the organisational culture! Build a culture of quality to reap the benefits of QE.
Want to know if your testing strategy is robust enough or to what extent should you automate your tests, then write to us at [email protected].