The importance of QA is increasing steadily with the growth in digitalization, with 40% of the financial sectors have already adopted DevOps. As now more and more companies are embracing agile methodology and DevOps, they are meeting the growing demands for the fastest product delivery incorporated with continuous feedback. There is now a greater dependency on continuous testing with an increasing need for faster product delivery.

In agile methodology, the testing team is a part of a core development team, which nudges them to be ready for any subsequent changes in software and develop it accordingly. Software testing has been evolving, from manual testing to automation, open-source frameworks, agile, DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI / CD). With a continuously evolving approach to testing, the development team enables faster deployment of software reducing the time-to-market.

What is QA transformation?

QA transformation means focusing on user experience while ensuring the information security of the application. Meeting customers’ expectations, needs and focusing on customer satisfaction are the key parameters that drive QA transformation.

For example – In a pandemic situation, such as the current COVID-19, there has been a surge of new applications to address customer needs. Not restricting just to quantity of digital products, these applications focus on quality as well as variety, spanning across different sectors namely banking and financial sectors, GPS tracker and COVID19 cases tracker, video calling and teleconference platform, online delivery of grocery, food, and medicine delivery. With continuous feedback and integration, these apps were released faster in the market than we could anticipate.

Companies adapting to automation, open-source frameworks, agile, DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI / CD) helped them in reducing the time-to-market. As software testing is quickly emerging, it relies heavily on codeless test automation, AI/ ML, RPA, and more. Since QA practice evolved with these methodologies, it facilitated the growth, flexibility, scalability, and sustainability of the digital platform.  

How important is a good QA practice?

A well-structured QA program follows complete quality metrics to facilitate digital transformation, hence, ensuring the quality of the software becomes essential. Based on customer requirements companies determine their QA resources their respective roles to accomplish the digital transformation goals.

QA plays a crucial role in digital transformation. QA helps in,

• Protecting brand image 

A good QA practice is to consider user experience across multiple digital platforms. This includes improving user access reducing response time and improving consistency in brand perception.

• Enhancing product quality

The end-users need a high-quality product for glitch-free performance. The right QA practice eliminates performance bottlenecks and enhances the quality of products to ensure user satisfaction.

• Ensuring User Satisfaction

Attaining complete coverage of user requirements and expectations by designing and automating test cases. Implementing solutions and accumulating test data for test automation and ensuring customer experience. 

Benefits of QA in Digital Transformation

As automation, open-source frameworks, agile, DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI / CD), methodologies are growing more than ever before, these are becoming an integral part of the Software Development Lifecycle. Following are some of the benefits that the development team would experience following the methodologies.

• Ensure Application Security

Continuous system integration exposes an application to many bugs and defects. Hence, the developers and testers follow definite processes and methodologies to continuously improve the quality of the application throughout the QA transformation process.

Collecting customer-sensitive data ensures application security by reducing the chance of exposure to risks. A quality assurance plan allows companies to identify the risks and build software that continues to perform even during a crisis.

The customers’ sensitive information and data can be misused, due to improper QA plans and prevailing technical glitches in software, which leads to loss of market share and customer reputation.

To avoid these unforeseen scenarios, organizations are investing in digitalization and building QA strategies, which is expected to play a crucial role in ensuring business growth and sustenance.

• QA Transformation improves user experience

Over the years, companies are striving to improve customer experience and gain a competitive edge in the market with the emergence of new trends and technologies like Big Data, Cloud services, and Mobility services. The technologies that are driving digital transformation are unlikely to provide results without appropriate digital assurance and quality metrics.

Following a proper quality transformation strategy and planning prepares organizations to adopt digitalization promptly, as with every innovation your platform, process and system remain ready to adapt to frequent changes saving you time, money, and effort.

A prior quality assurance planning and testing ensure that your applications are compatible across all devices and browsers and offer seamless customer experience in a real-time user environment.

Interesting here, as it may seem, the QA or testing teams are leveraging test automation tools for repeated tests across devices and operating systems to ensure flawless integration, performance, and user acceptance.

• QA Transformation allows you to adopt new technologies

As enterprises adapt to new technologies, it brings along multiple challenges such as system integration with existing, being familiar with the new technology with work culture, training, development requirements, and more. The QA transformation allows you to measure, manage and integrate processes to deliver financial and timely benefits consistently.

Organizations build their own Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) to adopt robust processes and get test results through the test transformation process. Various teams build quality metrics and assessment models to measure the impact of the newly adopted technology on the overall transformation process.

Quality Assurance impact on Digital Transformation Initiatives

The DevOps enables continuous delivery, continuous deployment, and continuous integration. Since testing is an integral and inseparable part of DevOps, some of the test engineers have coined it as, “DevTestOps”. The functional testers are now adapting to the more agile framework and intensively performing A/B testing, NFC testing, mobile testing (functional and automated), system integration, data testing and more.

Agile Awareness in QA Transformation

Companies’ leap in adapting to the agile methodology has made the QA teams in companies struggle with the implementation of the agile development model and the end-to-end transformation to the agile framework.

An agile QA should be open to change and adoption of glitch-free techniques. Following a few steps will allow a smooth transition from traditional to agile QA. QA is an integral part of the development process, and it needs to be considered as one. QA does not just only focus on improving the quality of the application, it reduces the risk factor redefines and transforms the process.

Steps for successful QA transformation

• The QA team needs to be trained in agile methodology so that they can be more receptive to digital changes.
• Before rolling out the transition to agile, a few pilot projects need to be introduced. This will allow you to build agile competency and lower the risk of transition.
• Since traditional QA is very different from the agile methodology, which follows an iterative approach and an adaptive model, developers and testers should take up more ownership in terms of responsibilities.
• The QA team are expected to be more competent to write any kind of code. Conventional methods and processes are no longer applicable if you are looking for a smooth transition to agile QA.
• Test automation is a key feature of testing, developing, and deploying the software. The developers and testers should work in perfect coordination until the automation results are achieved.

Conclusion –

At Yethi, our team is driven by in-depth knowledge of the domain and technology systems support, coupled with the requisite skill set. We are a team of quality assurance professionals focused on the BFSI industry. We have helped many organizations globally in ensuring the quality of their applications while reducing their turnaround time, time-to-market.

Yethi’s flagship 6th generation codeless test automation tool – Tenjin is an intuitive automated test suite, which is built with features for seamless system integration and flawless performance. With agile, granular, and multi-system test capabilities, Tenjin can interact with multiple applications through APIs.