In the software development and delivery world, there is ever-lasting greed for faster, cheaper, and better. Digital transformation has led to an exponential change in business expectations, development approaches, systems architecture, and customer experience.

But often this greed for speed puts quality assurance in the backburner. Quality as an afterthought has a heavy price to pay. The best-laid plans, tools, and development efforts are futile if the product does not meet the quality criteria. Or worse it has a critical bug because of a minor oversight as a result of poor testing prioritization. This translates to poor customer experience.

How can businesses achieve a quality-led digital transformation approach without compromising on speed or costs?

Shared responsibility of quality among stakeholders

One of the main principles of DevOps is to make the testing and development process more cohesive. New age applications and real-time changes demand frequent updates to meet consumer demands. The goal is to embed quality throughout the lifecycle and achieve a faster go-to-market.

This makes quality a shared responsibility among team members. The lines between the developers’ and testers’ roles have blurred in agile testing. Making QA (Quality Assurance) a priority for everyone is integral to a quality-driven delivery.

Setup acceptance criteria

Dev and test teams can easily achieve a quality-led approach by setting up a common quality goal acceptance criterion. Define tangible aspects of quality that the application must meet. Developers must then validate all builds against these acceptance criteria. This will save considerable time and always ensure high-quality releases.

Include both developers and testers in the planning phase

Involve developers in the planning phase to get instant feedback on the functionality and set better expectations. Similarly, when testers are included in the planning phase, they can discuss the testing approach and strategy. This helps teams to avoid missing requirements and validations.

Setup Continuous Testing Environment with a focus on People, Processes, and Tools

Companies that have recognized that the traditional test management approach simply does not work anymore, have modernized their testing.

They have reimagined and reinvented software testing across the board with Continuous Testing – the mantra for DevOps and digital transformation success.

The adoption of Continuous Testing ensures quality-driven digital transformation. There is no silver bullet, however. Transformation takes time and managing Continuous Testing right depends on three parameters – People, Processes, and Tools.

Watch this webinar on “Managing Continuous Testing Right to Deliver Digital Transformation” where specialists from ABN AMRO discuss these three pillars.

People

Digital and test transformation require a radical shift from legacy processes to a modern and agile way of working. This requires support from internal team members as well as intense training to implement the changes required for Continuous Testing.

Along with people, it is also important that automated processes are in place. CI/CD pipeline orchestration with Continuous Testing setup is required to achieve faster releases without any manual intervention.

Tools

People and processes for Continuous Testing cannot succeed without the right tools. You cannot achieve transformation with the same old legacy tools that pose as bottlenecks and slow down your QA processes. Modern, agile tools with the capability of seamless integrations will drive quality-driven digital transformation.

To understand how QMetry helps Enterprises achieve Digital Transformation, download this factsheet.

Increase use of automation

Manual testing alone can’t address the scalability and varied needs of testing on diverse web browsers, devices, platforms, and systems. Automation plays a vital role in enabling continuous testing and guaranteeing both speed and accuracy.

With the increased use of test automation, Agile teams can identify and resolve issues early in the lifecycle and ensure a continuous feedback loop essential for DevOps. This ensures more testing, improved test coverage, and faster releases.

Want to know more? Download this guide on “Test Automation”

Measure the success and bypass risks with Actionable Quality Insights

DevOps and Digital Transformation require continuous monitoring and process improvement. Quality Analytics provides insights into the test progress, productivity, and overall application quality. Using the right tools and reports, businesses gain a real-time view of the test quality across teams and projects. This is even more important when the tests grow in volume and complexity.

Quality metrics offer valuable insights and actionable intelligence from all your test data to shorten the feedback loop, reduce processing time and efforts. Traceability helps in identifying risks and helps you take the next steps for further validation.

In a nutshell, continuous monitoring and reporting on test management and quality analytics help you stay one step ahead of the game.

Find out more about Quality Analytics

Conclusion

Digital transformation is not just about technology. It is a mindset and culture change to invent better ways of meeting and improving business initiatives and customer experiences. Quality will continue to play a radical role in how the business wants to achieve the golden triangle of speed, quality, and cost.

By Disha Thakkar

Source: https://www.qmetry.com/blog/managing-quality-driven-digital-transformation/