How Quality Engineering Services Can Help Businesses

By Author: Oliver Moore
Total Articles: 52
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With Information Technology disrupting the entire global landscape, individuals, enterprises, and entities are embracing digital transformation in a big way. And in this pursuit of transformation, enterprises are updating their legacy systems and migrating some (or all) of their products, services, or databases to platforms like the cloud. Amidst such disruptions, software (system or application) has emerged as the key for enterprises to remain relevant and competitive. However, the software can often end up with bugs or glitches, thus adversely impacting its performance. Also, a glitch-prone software can dilute the user experience and render the brand ineffectual.

Digital technologies, in addition to disrupting the business ecosystem, is impacting the IT environment considerably. Interestingly, the entire thrust of digital transformation is towards obtaining better customer experiences. The latter can, however, get impacted when the software or system does not function to its optimum thanks to the presence of glitches or bugs.

So, how does one ensure the software leaving the development and testing pipeline ...
... to be quality compliant? The answer lies in following a robust quality assurance service. However, in the shift-left testing approach, since the focus is on identifying and mitigating errors early on in the build stage, there could be chances of errors slipping through. With DevOps being embraced by enterprises to achieve faster release of glitch-free software, the focus has come to quality engineering. According to this, enterprises should work towards preempting the presence of glitches instead of finding (and mitigating) them later.

How QA has evolved due to the new digital challenges
As enterprises across industry verticals are embracing digital transformation to increase efficiency, there are opportunities and challenges galore. With the advent of quality engineering services, enterprises can look at the below-mentioned outcomes.
• DevOps and Agile driven shift in priorities and strategies
• Getting access to devices, new technologies, and form factors
• Integrate new technologies with the legacy systems and overhaul them
• Better integration between development and testing teams
• Incorporate user feedback mechanism into the build and test pipeline
• Increase the use of automation in testing
• Training resources in alignment with the requirements
• Maximizing the scope of testing within budget constraints
How a quality engineering strategy can help matters?
As opposed to traditional QA processes, quality engineering services involve analyzing the design of a product and working with the development and operations teams. These aim at managing the development, operation, and maintenance of IT systems, architecture, and frameworks to obtain a superior quality standard. In enterprise quality engineering, every stakeholder is made part of the planning, development, and delivery pipeline.
Shift-left and strengthen right: With the change in business priorities and technologies such as IoT, AI, and SMAC, among others, the world of QA is facing transformation. So, in shifting left and strengthening right, the software quality engineering services cover a few aspects. These include test and analytics-driven development, virtualization, security testing, API testing, continuous automation, and performance engineering to manage quality.
Agility: Automation has emerged as the key requirement to meet the goals of Agile and DevOps. By implementing test automation in the shift-left driven development and testing pipeline, glitches can be identified and mitigated early. It also enhances the quality coverage of software products across multiple channels. Moreover, test automation can offer advanced analytics and reporting mechanism to predict bugs or defects in the test environment. Thus, the impact on user experience can be reduced drastically and the business made more agile and responsive.
Business value: Leveraging digital quality engineering can help enterprises in offering glitch-free products tailored to customer requirements. This can add to their business value due to reduced defects, faster processes, and minimum user acceptance testing efforts.
Improved security: Vulnerabilities in IT systems and networks have become a cause for concern. The rising graph of cybercrime and the potential threat it poses for businesses and their end-customers need to be tackled head-on. Leveraging a quality engineering strategy in the form of DevSecOps can focus on enhancing security and making the software hack-proof.

Conclusion
Enterprises should leverage the latest tools, technologies, and methodologies to develop quality products or services. As the presence of defects or bugs can hit the user experience and thereby the brand value, implementation of quality engineering should be prioritized. The ultimate aim should be to achieve rapid delivery of quality products or services and reduce the cost of operations. A robust quality engineering strategy can deliver SLA-driven and outcome-based quality-compliant products or services in real quick time.