The world of technology is changing – and the rate is only accelerating. Quality engineering is becoming increasingly important across industries as businesses accelerate their digital transformations.
Therefore, companies must ensure their applications are built, deployed, and operated with quality engineering if they want to ensure customer loyalty, engagement, excitement, and repeat business.
However, developers say that testing is still the number one bottleneck to delivering apps faster. The problem is that each enterprise IT organisation has their own tech stack and processes, therefore creating its own unique approach to quality.
To ensure the level of quality engineering required to create business differentiation, it’s vital for organisations to embed quality into every single step of the app engineering and delivery process – not just testing at the end of the process.
Companies must approach quality holistically for all apps, including web, desktop, and mobile. To ensure the highest quality engineering, they must incorporate functional testing, data integrity, performance, security, and compliance.
To enable these critical steps, organisations must use new forms of automation, including contextual, autonomous and self-healing Artificial Intelligence (AI), and empower quality champions – from developers, testers, business analysts, and executives – to innovate faster, deliver better experiences, and accomplish it all in a more efficient way.
To deliver on these business opportunities at speed, the future of software development will require moving to a continuous delivery development model, leveraging low- / no-code solutions, capitalising on the quick-moving AI developments, and shifting quality ownership left in the SDLC. This will require a connected approach to quality engineering.
Here are our best practice recommendations to get there.
Create a quality mindset
It’s not uncommon for developer and quality assurance (QA) teams to live on opposite sides of innovation and modernisation. QA teams are often siloed from the processes they are part of.
While everyone involved with the software development lifecycle wants to move fast and deliver high-quality applications, the trade-offs between the two can cause tension which can be tricky to manage. And while this can get the project to market fast enough and cover risk enough, it means that nobody owns embedding quality in every step of the engineering and delivery process.
Indeed, ‘enough’ isn’t really ‘enough’ in today’s world of continuous integration and continuous delivery to meet high customer expectations. Enterprises must find ways to unify the efforts of Dev and QA as a singular product team to define what quality looks like across the entire application development lifecycle – and optimise the pipeline to deliver on it. Unless everyone has that visibility of how quality engineering is defined and delivered, then important steps will be missed.
Legacy tooling isn’t built to accommodate a collaborative model. However, finding a synergetic solution beyond the spreadsheet is a key element in creating shared goals from the moment that planning is started until the application is in production. With a shared picture of what quality looks like and a process for collaboration, developer and QA teams can drive speed, quality, and revenue that gives the broader business a sharper edge in the market.
Approach quality holistically
The need for quality engineering at speed requires automated testing early in the development process and fully integrated into the CI/CD pipeline.
By applying a continuous, AI-augmented testing platform to software development processes, organisations can release faster in response to customer demands and market pressures to remain current, ensure the all-important quality and performance that is required in today’s digital-first society, and reduce costs along the way in order to survive challenging economic conditions.
As enterprise organisations develop applications that rely on continuous software updates, test automation is crucial in increasing release speeds and improving application quality. This helps the organisation run more efficiently to meet its bottom line.
Furthermore, test automation gives organisations the ability to monitor and assess issues in real-time, or even stop them before they occur. By adopting this pre-emptive approach, major disruptions, which can impact everything from productivity to customer experience or revenue, can be staved off.
Harness next-generation automation
While some questions may remain around AI adoption, it’s clear that enterprise teams that work to harness the full power of next-generation tools available achieve far more.
With more organisations shifting their workload to the cloud, low- / no-code applications are coming into their own, and AI-powered test automation is key for this transition to be successful.
From visual testing, intelligent bug hunting, smart impact analytics, and test design and optimisation, AI integration provides a helping hand for software teams following a DevOps process, streamlining the process from development to deployment and continuously improving this cycle.
Implementing automation, meanwhile, helps inform decision-making processes for DevOps teams by finding patterns and identifying outliers, freeing their time and brain power to focus on tasks that are both more fulfilling and strategically important to the business. The adoption of AI also helps to further intertwine developers and testers to work more efficiently together, thereby ensuring that their work will contribute direct business value.
Focus on all apps
Customers have become accustomed to, and indeed embraced, the ‘Amazon effect’ on the way that they shop, and now expect the same level of accessibility from any brand, across all platforms.
Instead of treating testing as an afterthought, it’s vital for organisations to incorporate continuous, automated testing across web, mobile and desktop applications as a standard, business-critical step.
With the requisite automation in place, enterprises can avoid slower release cycles and an inability to keep pace with customer demand, as well as greater strain on their development teams.
Worse, however, they risk releasing low-quality software applications, damaging brand reputation and sales. By integrating automated testing from the outset, businesses will achieve quicker innovation with greater quality for an enhanced user experience.
Everyone on the team
With smaller teams and fewer resources in today’s challenging economic climate, teams have to do more with less when it comes to quality engineering and software development.
Speed is essential, but so is quality if the customer experience is to be protected. Thankfully, recent developments in AI, quality engineering, and low- / no-code platforms have transformed development teams’ capabilities by helping them deploy higher quality software and updates more quickly, as well as bridging the talent gap and bringing expertise from other areas of the business into play for a more efficient development process.
These tools make it easier for teams to embed testing in their engineering process with minimal overhead so they can continue to build fast and drastically increase quality. By enabling business users to take on tasks that would typically require professional developers, low- / no-code software is revolutionising how businesses operate, reducing the dependency on IT, and keeping operating costs low. Thinly stretched teams can do far more with less, helping to achieve the previously impossible concept of quality at speed.
A connected approach to quality engineering
To stay competitive in today’s digital landscape, businesses must deliver new products to markets faster than ever whilst ensuring quality, or risk falling behind competitors and sustaining reputation damage with customers.
Rather than just testing updates or new apps at the end of the engineering and delivery process, it’s key to embed quality at the beginning of the planning process and every step of the way across all platforms like web, desktop, and mobile.
For this to be achieved, businesses must embrace new forms of automation and enable quality champions across the organisation to create a connected approach to quality engineering that allows faster, more efficient innovation, and quality that truly enables business differentiation.
