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Today’s digital age has brought customers much closer to businesses, which in turn has a significant impact on testing and quality assurance functions. The new age customer loves to stay connected and expects to get the desired information at his/her fingertips. No wonder that they have made companies rethink their business models and operations, accelerate the necessary changes and respond to emerging external market forces to offer customers superior products and better customer service. However, in their quest to embrace the digital future, quality shouldn’t be compromised. Rather, emphasis should be given on quality assurance and testing as they will reduce the time-to-market, thus helping to enhance performance, security and customer satisfaction, all of which will let businesses easily adapt to the digital revolution.

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QA and testing trends and how they will affect the transition to digital

Though customer experience, security and corporate image remain the most vital strategic IT drivers for ensuring the quality of digital transformation, the emphasis is also given on efficiency and effectiveness as significant testing and QA objectives.

According to the World Quality Report 2016, higher QA and testing spends wasn’t triggered by a higher level of digital focus. Yet, in their bid to improve the time to market, businesses are increasingly adopting DevOps and continuous integration, which in turn influences the QA process.

The report predicts that among the entire budget allocation for QA and testing for new developments, new digital solutions like mobile, cloud, IoT and BI/BA will claim a significant share of 60%.

To stay ahead in the competition, agile testing and continuous delivery will be increasingly emphasized upon. When it comes to agile methods, the development and test teams need to have a string relationship and collaborate effectively. For example, agile scrum is a holistic, flexible product development strategy that’s changing how testers function by encouraging teams to self-organize and ensure regular communication. Continuous delivery too is going to be in the limelight as it would help in early detection of problems, help in assessing the effectiveness of a change and decide whether such a change can meet the end-user expectations or not.

Setting up of TCOEs to align quality efforts in sync with business needs is another trend that’s going to stay. Focus on mobile testing and cloud-based testing is also going to pick up and QA and testing teams will increasingly need to find ways to allay fears related to privacy, security and control of data.

Recommendations for beating the competition

• Security: With digital transformation, security would demand a multi-layered approach. For example, you can correlate multiple events from different systems using artificial intelligence and machine learning, which would help spot sources of a breach and learn adaptively how to offset it. Companies should research new technologies, such as ephemeral systems, software-defined security and homo-morphic encryption together with considering new processes like bringing the development, testing and operations teams together to offer smart, pervasive security.
• Automation: Virtualization and automation are increasingly replacing human interactions with codes that handle everyday tasks, thus bringing a huge change in how business process, IT infrastructure services and interactive customer services function. To get ready for a future where more complex tasks will be performed by software apps, small steps can be taken. This could include automating interface creation or testing and coding hand-offs from requirements through deployment. Leveraging emerging tools like modeling languages is also a good option as you can use it to describe processes that a human and a computing system would both understand.
• APIs: As APIs become an integral part of company resources that encourage innovation and drive revenue, businesses will need to find ways to develop, share, use, secure and monetize APIs. One way is to design services that don’t just support technical functions but even specific business capabilities like an inventory check etc. A successful strategy for API-driven ecosystems would also need continuous integration, DevOps, testing, logging and tracing, messaging, monitoring, service registration and discovery among others.

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Final words 

QA and testing is crucial for any digital transformation journey. So, businesses need to identify the right tools, measures and methodologies to make their organization future ready and assure top-notch quality of their products to enhance customer experience. With TechArcis, you can stay ahead of the curve by being ready to undergo a digital transformation without sacrificing quality. Contact us today to know more.

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