QA in Digital Transformation

Before the arrival of Covid itself, Early adopter corporations were already on the bandwagon of digital transformation to provide better touch points to all its stakeholders. When Covid Pandemic hit the world, everything came to stand still in the start but companies who invested in digital transformation were able to jumpstart the recovery.

Need for digital transformation was not limited to only corporation but it was expanded to governments, local authorities and even the local mom and pop shop too. Government has to provide life saving information to its constituents whereas local authorities needed to provide education to million of students in an online mode and, mom n pop shop has to manage their life cycle over digital technologies. After the experience of last year and continuing impact of Covid, there will be no naysayer in any organization for need of digital transformation.

Pandemic has forced organization to implement digital transformation and with further caveat that it needs to be implemented “Now”. Time is of essence for organizations to serve their stakeholders, companies delaying rollout will lose customers permanently and local authorities not implementing will have irreparable loss to the local communities.

But just implementing is not enough, it has to be done correctly and timely so as not to offend the stakeholders by providing them with faulty rollout i.e., filled with mistakes and unusable with respect to usability.

Modification in existing frameworks and advent of new technologies in Quality assurance, can help organizations to reach their goal of early rollout of digital services with high customer delight scores. Some of the framework and technologies that can accelerate your journey on the path of digital transformation are as follows:

1. Predictive analysis: Software development cycle is focusing on collaborative efforts with the advent of Agile and DevOps. However, with the emphasis on shortening development cycles, it becomes a difficult task to test every functional aspect of a product. Employing predictive analysis will help the product team to prioritize and focus on the tests that need to be done first. Utilizing the historical data can allow the testing team to identify the impact of the changes that were made and then identify the test coverage.

2. Increased automation: Automation has a huge role to play in enabling digital transformation in a world that is likely to be dominated by IoT products, testing needs to be approached from a product life cycle standpoint. The reason behind this shift is the increasing importance of improved customer experience and customer satisfaction. Increased automation gives a much-needed thrust to the release cycle and delivers the end product on or before time. This is why adaptive techniques like custom automation solutions are created to address specific testing needs. Product life cycles are becoming shorter due to dynamic external environment, to remain relevant in the market, there is a need for more agile testing. We are likely to see improved test automation frameworks and processes that help to address this challenge.

3. Improved user experience: As consumers draws nearer to the brands, they also get vocal about their experience with the products they use. Therefore, user experience holds prime importance in the era of digital transformation. The user experience is as important as the functionalities of a product. That is why the quality engineering teams have to focus on testing products from various aspects like usability Eye tracking, Hallway Testing, Remote Testing and design optimization to just name a few, to adhere to the highest standard of quality. The user data from the system are further analysed by measuring, managing, and integrating processes to improve upon the experience of the users, and at the same time deliver financial and other benefits on a continuous basis. QA is being transformed into a continuous process that aids digital transformation.

4. Improving Security: As a result of the digital transformation, there is an increased risk of cyber-crimes and cyber-attacks. It becomes really important for users to protect all their assets and resources in the new digital landscape. So, it is important to protect the user by doing proper security and compliance testing. It is a good practice and, in some industries, it is mandatory to publish/flash the risk, if any, to the user before they get into any particular digital application.

I will be writing detail blogs on each of the above-mentioned areas in detail and how your organization can implement the same directly or in variation to reap the advantage of digital transformation.

At Hapleaf, we have experience in providing testing solutions to all your digital transformation QA needs. Our team of QA professional has more than 200 years of combined experience in rolling out complex testing project spanned across multiple geographies in cost effective ways.