Quality and Testing Trends in the Digital Transformation Era

Quality Assurance & Testing fulfills a critical role in any digital transformation journey.  Identifying the right tools, methodologies and measures to assure customer experience is increasingly essential to success.

Companies today face two big challenges. They have to find new ways to stay on top of new technologies, while at the same time assure superior customer experience.

The cost for companies trying to attack your industry and steal your market share is quite low these days, and a critical factor in maintaining a good customer experience is delivering stable products with high quality. As organizations invest heavily in digital transformation programs, Quality Assurance and Testing play a critical role.

Changes in customer behavior, elevated global competition, adoption of social media channels and emerging trends such as cloud and mobile are a few market driven challenges that organizations have to deal with during their digital transformation journey. Quality Assurance plays a vital role in responding to these challenges. It’s essential for organizations that are dealing with digital transformation to have an appropriate digital assurance strategy, with the right tools, methodologies and measures to assure customer experience.

In the new digital world, users expect a high quality, seamless digital customer experience. Looking into digital behaviors and touch points of your customers helps you succeed by learning where and how to introduce value into the entire customer chain.

The ultimate goal for companies is to ensure a truly consistent experience across all channels of interaction. Applications need to be made available in every category of devices (phones, tablets, notebooks, wearables) and should provide a seamless customer experience based on real user behavior. QA organizations can use optimized test automation for repeated tests on various devices, testing all browsers and operating system stacks efficiently.

Adapting to new and latest technologies demands higher process maturity. Quality Assurance is becoming an important function for organizations who are effectively embracing the digital transformation.

Now let’s take a look at the top trends in 2016 for Testing and Quality Assurance. Note that some of my data is based on these recent global studies.

QA and Testing Budgets Continue to Rise

According to a recent study, 52% of QA and testing spend was allocated to new development projects in 2015, compared to 30% in 2014. QA and testing teams will continue to spend more budget on new development projects and initiatives. It is also worth mentioning that the trend of outsourcing testing projects has slowed and will continue to do so, as more and more companies are embracing internal only testing processes and investing in internal test teams more and more.

Agile Testing

Agile testing is more common now. Every company has some level of agile testing, especially in the mobile space. The projects using this type of testing are driven by fast paced and responsive testing solutions, which are integrated into the agile development methods.

In an effort to go to market faster, factors like “not enough time to test” are no longer valid. Teams are leaning towards automation in an effort to reduce times to go to market and be ahead of the competition.

When it comes to agile methods, collaboration and the relationship between Test and Development teams need to be stronger. Agile scrum is a development that is changing the manner in which testers operate. This flexible, holistic product development strategy encourages teams to self-organize and communicate regularly.

Agile scrum is very different from the traditional method, in which one worked on a long project where there was little feedback and seldom any concept of when it was supposed to end. Agile scrum leads to better collaboration, which means that testing, IT and business teams work more closely together, rather than being at ‘war' with one another. This makes it much easier to see the impact of what is being done immediately, which ultimately means one can serve the client faster.

Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery is also now being heavily incorporated. Companies no longer want to wait for 18 months before going live; rather, they want a constant flow of updates—sometimes daily—around new features. This is challenging for testers, as such an approach keeps them on their toes at all times.

Under this methodology, testing is done in small increments in a production-like environment, with code integration happening at frequent intervals. This kind of testing helps the tester to detect problems early, measure the effectiveness of a change and determine whether it actually meets end-user expectations.

Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) 

A few years ago, only 4-5% of companies had either thought about or implemented a Testing Center of Excellence. Over the past few years there has been a huge shift. It is expected that as of the end of 2015 about 30% will have implemented some level of dedicated Testing centers or a formal TCoE of some sort. These type of focused teams create efficiency and excellence. This allows quality efforts to align more tightly with business needs by defining and measuring KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).

Though there is a growing trend in non-functional testing such as performance, load etc., smaller TCoE teams can perform those activities, while major TCoE teams preach the best practices to the Quality and other test organizations.

Mobile Mobile Mobile—More Focus on Mobile Testing

Mobile devices have become a major part of many organizations’ digital development strategy, but many businesses lack the testing specialists, tools, and consistent methodology needed for effective mobile development. The explosion of mobile technologies in both the hardware and software fields will continue to demand a testing framework that is both comprehensive and nimble. The development lifecycle of mobile applications is relatively compact compared to a standard web application—almost 40 percent of organizations agree that time is a crucial factor for QA and testing teams. This highlights the importance of automation to perform regression testing.

The overall focus of many organizations’ mobile testing efforts has proved to be on validating all aspects of a complete customer experience. This makes non-functional testing such as security, performance, customer experience even more important and relevant in the future.

Mobile Cloud

Cloud computing is becoming an increasing part of the IT mainstream. With about 26% of software applications hosted on cloud in 2015, IT professionals and experts see a positive growth in the adoption of cloud based testing.

To deliver a high quality mobile application, testing is critical. Testing with real devices can quickly become disorganized and labor intensive if the testing environment is not conducive to creating, collecting and generating results in a consistent manner.

More and more enterprises are exploring cloud-based testing tools in order to reduce project cost and increase ROI.

Conclusion

Quality Assurance & Testing is crucial and fulfills a critical role in any digital transformation journey. It’s essential for organizations that are dealing with a digital transformation to have an appropriate digital assurance strategy by identifying the right tools, methodologies and measures to assure customer experience and make the QA organization future ready.

Telerik® Test Studio® is our Quality Assurance and Testing solution, and it’s been designed from the ground up to help you adapt to the latest trends and help your digital transformation journey. We’re excited for what’s coming up in Testing, and as always, we’re here to support you and welcome your feedback. Give us a try today and let us know what you think.