As software quality becomes synonymous with digital success, accelerating the process of testing is a critical requirement for digital transformation. Continuous testing has, for several years now, helped organizations identify (and resolve) bugs and issues quickly and easily; but very few have integrated it as part of their digital transformation strategy.
Reinventing the avenue of testing is irrefutably vital for achieving the speed and agility required to achieve remarkable results in terms of accelerating innovation while improving cost efficiency and reducing business risks. But how can organizations leverage continuous testing for digital transformation? Let’s find out!
Why Continuous Testing is Critical to Improvement in the Digital Age
For companies who’ve just started out, taking a continuous approach for software testing is easy. But for those who have been in the business for decades, the luxury of building a new quality process from the ground up is close to being non-existent. Such organizations need to address extremely complex systems and regulatory requirements while constantly driving efforts to enable quality and avoid disruption to business-critical operations.
Realigning well-established quality processes with the unrelenting drive towards continuous testing is the only way to enable (and ensure) software quality. In the digital age, continuous testing:
- Allows organizations to re-invent their testing processes, setting the foundation for high-quality software products that today’s digital customers demand
- Provides businesses with the agility needed to succeed in a digital world while delivering the sustainable advantage of faster time-to-market
- Acts as the fuel for every digital initiative, focusing on ensuring the highest level of quality to derive the desired customer satisfaction level
- Helps organizations keep quality in check while maintaining the required speed and effectiveness that the modern business landscape demands
- Allows teams to keep pace with disruptive innovations and leverage them to their benefit
- Greatly minimizes the chances of software failure while increasing the speed and frequency at which quality software is delivered
- Enables teams to identify risks as early as possible, take timely remediation actions, and prevent them from rolling onto the next stage
- Learn how DevOps solves the top 5 challenges in software product development.
The Testing Strategy to Adopt for Continuous Digital Transformation Improvement
When it comes to testing in the digital age, testing just during the development process is not sufficient; testing has to be inculcated as a culture across the software development life cycle – before the development process, during development, and even after the product is developed. It must be continuous testing, from the beginning, and at every stage of development and must work in tandem with modern software development practices, so organizations can achieve the benefits of quality, speed, and cost-effectiveness – all together. Here’s how organizations can leverage continuous testing for digital transformation:
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Implement DevOps
Continuous testing in the digital age works best when equipped as part of a collaborative DevOps culture. DevOps, through improved collaboration between various teams, makes it easy for everyone to focus on relentless improvement in software quality through continuous everything. Using DevOps, organizations can not only meet the goal of faster releases and enhanced software quality.They can also strengthen their shift-left approach, so testing is done more frequently and across every stage of the development lifecycle. Through proactive, cross-functional communication at all levels of the company, DevOps bridges the gap that has traditionally existed among development, testing, security, and the rest of the business – while fundamentally changing how they code, test, and deliver software.
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Enable Automation
To keep up with the speed of the market in a digital era, automation needs to be an integral aspect of continuous testing. Automating tasks across the testing process can not only reduce manual efforts, it can also help push tested software into production – far sooner.It can enhance the spectrum of continuous testing as well as improve test coverage. Through continuous automated feedback, teams can get insight into what truly works and what needs to be done better – to improve testing outcomes.
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Embrace Cloud
Although continuous testing can help organizations improve the quality and speed with which products (and new features and changes) are introduced into the market, using cloud to improve access to on-demand testing resources can be transformative for dynamic delivery.Using cloud, teams can improve collaboration, get access to the highly available, secure, and scalable tools and resources they need while enabling data storage, retrieval, and interaction throughout the business. What’s more, with cloud, teams can also more easily meet quality assurance metrics and reduce the costs of on-premises infrastructure and in-house physical installations.
Ensuring Continuous Digital Transformation Improvement
As digital transformation becomes deeply integrated across industries and sectors, organizations – irrespective of their type or size – need to drive efforts in modernizing their systems, improving business processes, and building better quality software to meet the needs of the digital customer.
A culture of continuous culture can allow organizations to deliver innovative software through tighter sprints and accelerate the delivery pipelines. Using DevOps, cloud, and the right amount of automation checks can help maintain software speed and quality as the sprint progresses, thus making sure the organization keeps up with the pace of change.
