Enterprises are modernising and securing their legacy systems to usher in quality, speed, competitiveness, cost-effectiveness, and better ROI. In going about digital transformation, quality assurance acquires an end-to-end connotation straddling both old and new system environments. However, as the digital ecosystem is geared toward meeting the ever-changing customer expectations and market dynamics (mergers and acquisitions, risks and compliance, data and analytics, and global app rollouts), enterprises are embracing the quality engineering approach.
It focuses on creating a mechanism of continuous feedback to ensure outcomes like continuous integration and deployment. Quality engineering solutions aim at incorporating quality excellence in the code itself rather than ensuring it after a code is developed. QE helps enterprises to be proactive when it comes to match the pace of technological changes and change their culture. It fastens the time to market, reduces the cost of testing, improves customer satisfaction, and enhances the overall product quality.
Quality engineering takes an all-encompassing approach in adherence to various quality standards, regulations, metrics, and parameters. It leverages technologies, quality standards, and measuring tools to ensure quality control throughout the SDLC and beyond. Any quality engineering company keeps a long-term perspective on quality control with the aim of preventing glitches in the first place rather than going for troubleshooting every time they appear. Using detailed data analytics, a software quality engineer derives dependable organizational insights into processes to help teams achieve improved productivity, reduced waste and glitches, and enhanced time to market.
How quality engineering (QE) helps enterprises
With software applications becoming more complex, having interfaces across devices, platforms, browsers, networks, and third-party applications, the possibility of vulnerabilities and glitches to gain access and hold fort is immense. These, if not identified and addressed in time, can lead to consequences such as bad quality application, poor customer experience, data breach, loss of data, non-compliance to quality standards, high cost of correction, lowering of brand reputation, and negative revenue flow. Hence, to pre-empt such outcomes, enterprises need to integrate quality engineering deep into their SDLC.
- Test early, test often, and test everywhere: Vulnerabilities and glitches can make ingress at any point during the development, testing, and delivery cycle. This can happen as enterprises demand shorter delivery cycles and faster turnaround time to stay competitive. To pre-empt the above developments from taking place, teams can automate their testing processes and allow QE to check the quality metrics throughout the cycle. The test automation process should test the codes early, often, and everywhere in the SDLC thereby validating the quality of build.
- Streamlines inter-departmental processes: One of the prime reasons for glitches to often remain unnoticed is due to the teams following a siloed approach towards quality. Each team, while following its intrinsic work culture, can overlook the quality metrics or standards and pass the buck. Such a lack of collaboration among teams can be telling on the overall outcome. Quality engineering, on the other hand, can streamline the processes, break the siloes, and eradicate any ‘passing the buck’ approach. The greater cohesion among teams delivers outcomes like continuous integration and continuous delivery.
- Enhances productivity and reduces efforts: QE underpinned on test automation reduces labour-intensive iterative test processes leading to improved productivity. The test experts thus removed from the monotony of conducting manual testing can better utilize their expertise (and time) in innovation and improving the workflows.
Conclusion
Achieving the quality of products/services and customer satisfaction is a continuous process requiring the adoption of QE by enterprises. It dwells on testing the codes early, often, and everywhere to prevent glitches at the outset. By strictly following QE, enterprises can achieve customer satisfaction by ensuring functionality, performance, accessibility, usability, and performance of software applications.
See additional Huddle Resources available for software testers and quality professionals.
