The world had come to an abrupt halt with the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, but there was a sudden surge of innovation. Organizations in various sectors realized that to deal with the adversities of this crisis, they must innovate new ways to sustain their business. We adopted various digital platforms to interact and grow with the exchange of services and offerings. But ensuring the quality of these products, services and offerings remained a decisive point.
We are all aware of the importance of testing. It is known to all that testing plays a vital role in ensuring system quality. Organizations are extremely vocal about the incompleteness of quality assurance without appropriate and adequate testing practices, structure, tools, and plans. Did the testing process come to an abrupt halt due to the outbreak of the Pandemic? No, it did not. In fact, organizations found different channels to facilitate the testing projects. As the old saying goes, “necessity is the mother of inventions”. 2020-2021 pandemic became a driving force to innovate for quality assurance.
Pandemic surely had some negative and positive impacts on digital transformation. But that did not refrain people from trying out new solutions and remedies to their problems. Let us look at some of the positive and negative impacts of digital transformation that organizations had to face during the global pandemic.
Positive impact of Covid-19 in digital transformation
There has been a tremendous change in the way people work, think, and act. They have learnt new techniques and how to put them to use. The digital transformation has made people adapt to the changes. They have learnt to think out of the box and try new technologies. Digital transformation has facilitated remote working, and employees know that they can still be productive and efficient even while working remotely. The new work structure is like, “give us the facilities and new technologies, and we will innovate from there”.
Negative impact of Covid-19 on digital transformation
What seemed like a positive development for some were unfavorable for others. Covid-19 came with certain restrictions on communication and physical interaction. Some of the organizations that followed an old school method could not evolve with the surrounding changes leading to the disintegration of their foundation. Many physical branches were closed down with the decrease in footfall, and their business moved to the virtual platform. It has become a strenuous task for the management team to bring their employees back to the office. Employees have learnt new ways of working it has become hard to drag their feet back to the office.
Testing before Pandemic
Software testing is an integral part of quality assurance, and organizations cannot put them on the back burner. Testing has come to the mainstream and is executed simultaneously with the development lifecycle. Organizations realized the importance of testing long before the outbreak of Covid-19 hence, continuous testing is included in CI/CD pipeline as an inseparable process. With the introduction of effective test automation tools, it has become easy and convenient to conduct and execute testing practices like regression, UI/UX functionality, integration, user acceptance and more at a massive scale. But there are more test requirements, which need expert and skilled testers to execute them. It is one reason that even after innovating the most effective test automation tools, organizations still require manual testing. Hence, we have the best of both worlds and automation test practice is most efficiently supported by manual testing.
Testing before the pandemic was mostly conducted onsite, with a significant portion handled by the offshore team. The organization had the advantages of system architecture and an adequate bandwidth with an efficient technical team deployed onsite that helped them carry out the end-to-end testing process without any disruption. After checking the end-to-end testing process and the product release, it would not have made much difference for the technical team to be on the testing site. However, the maintenance of the software performance and quality assurance was largely done by the offshore team.
Testing during Pandemic
The testing team still maintained the right blend of manual and automation testing. But a few things changed during the pandemic due to certain factors. There were sudden restrictions on travel and human contact. People were working from home and remotely, and international travel came to an abrupt halt. The testing process, however, could not have stopped. Organizations realized that it is only wise to adopt remote or offshore testing as an option. As test automation is more improvised and integrated with high-end technologies, remote and offshore testing would be as productive as onsite testing.
The remote testing model proved to be extremely convenient as the organizations could save a significant operational cost while the testing team handled the technical challenges and adversities. The technical team overcame many challenges like time zone differences, travel restrictions, and time constraints, ensuring 100% success in handling the end-to-end testing project from offshore. The team paid extra effort to deliver the project with utmost competence and assurance that all the testing aspects were considered and that all errors were addressed well without fail. Organizations are more confident that quality project delivery is possible even with challenges amidst the crisis.
Testing after Pandemic
Organizations are more prepared to deal with crisis and keep their business as usual (BAU) functional. It is no longer about choosing a testing project model. They have two models and multiple testing strategies based on their specific project requirements. Automation and manual testing go hand-in-hand and are applicable for many testing projects. The testing of banking or financial applications is exceptionally vital. Hence, it is necessary to have the most updated test automation tool to combine with the right test strategies, planning, and practice.
Organizations would not forsake either offshore or onsite testing models. Instead, both the testing model would act as a support to each other. Applying offshore testing proved to be a winning game for many organizations, as they succeeded in implementing the testing project and reap the benefits of offshore testing. Organizations have saved time and costs by adopting offshore test project models. Onsite testing is advisable when organizations have the in-house digital testing architecture to carry out the testing project. It is critical to have a compatible set-up of in-house architecture for the onsite testing model.
Conclusion –
After years of flourishing by offering onsite and offshore testing models to many organizations, Yethi has successfully delivered and completed 9+ offshore testing projects globally during pandemic 2020-2021. We are a niche QA services provider and have years of experience in delivering onsite & offshore testing projects. Having expertise in offering end-to-end testing services across all the major core banking applications with functional areas like Liabilities, Payments, Assets, Trade finance, Treasury and more, we have worked with 90+ clients across 22+ countries. We have not let our clients suffer from this unprecedented global situation and provided complete support to help banks avoid any business disruption and be prepared for any potential impact.
Our offshore testing model is designed considering all aspects like project knowledge, time constraint, travel restrictions, time zone differences and more. Our onsite and offshore testing models are managed by expert consultants and supervisors and backed by highly skilled resources and maestros in testing and programming to ensure that the testing projects are efficient and cost-effective.
Our highly experienced testing & digital consultants understand the processes and technologies involved in digital projects & quickly scale capacity to meet the needs of your business. Our dedicated offshore and onsite team can continue the workload with proper coordination, creating a continuous testing cycle.
We address the challenges of business continuity through our efficient testing models. Our 5th generation robotic codeless test automation tool Tenjin is built with intuitive features and supports our QA services. It is a fast and scalable test automation platform and works flawlessly across multiple applications to provide accurate test results.