Impact Of Digital Transformation In Software Testing

By Author: Kuldeep Rana
Total Articles: 3
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Wikipedia - ‘Digital Transformation is the use of new, fast and frequently changing digital technology to solve problems.’

Salesforce - ‘Digital transformation is the process of using digital technologies to create new or modify existing — business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements.’

Both definitions portray digital transformation as the use of digital technologies that help the organization or impact the organization in a way that will result in improved processes. When processes are improved in any organization, the products or services provided by the organization will also improve.

Digital transformation is not only about using new technologies or better tools but also about using them in a manner that will produce better output, better results.

Nowadays, every organization wants to develop products faster than ever with the highest possible customer satisfaction and quality. To achieve every element mentioned in the previous sentence, every phase of the software development lifecycle needs to be efficient with well-planned ...
... processes and the use of new technologies, that result in high-quality product/service for the customer and high productivity for the internal team.

One of the most crucial phases of any life cycle is ‘Testing’. Quality assurance and testing teams are majorly responsible for making sure that the product passes all the required quality standards. With digital transformation, software testing is also changing extremely and rapidly.

Let’s discuss some of the impacts on software testing due to digital transformation:

Automation - As discussed earlier, to get rapid delivery and increased customer satisfaction, organizations are moving towards the use of Agile and DevOps methodologies. Such methodologies require the testing process to be more efficient.

Traditional processes such as manual testing are not helping much as it tends to take more time and resources. Moreover, where human intervention is more, more mistakes are likely to be made. If you want fast delivery and high quality, you cannot afford to have any mistakes.

To overcome these challenges and stay up to date with the testing trends, testing team prefer automation testing. For today’s projects, automation is mandatory and if you look at the way new tools are emerging in the market, you can understand how important automation is becoming. Automation tools not only save time while running the test cases but also generate faster and accurate results.

Increased Productivity - As the new tools and technologies are used by testing teams, productivity and efficiency of the teams are increasing. Even with the fewer resources, digital transformation makes it possible to optimize resources and give higher output.

AI and ML - The role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in software testing is to design systems, that help teams in the testing process; they help in creating systems with the ability to analyze past data and improve the testing process.

Importance of User Feedback and User Experience - Today, more than ever, the focus of any organization is the customer. User experience is the prime important thing while testing the system. Teams participating in or responsible for the testing process need to turn their focus not just on testing features of the system but also the user experience. It is becoming quite necessary to test the product on all the possible devices, browsers, networks, etc. Teams do not just need to blindly test the system, but they need to try to identify areas where improvement is required based on the user feedback. User feedback is one of the major ways of making sure that the system developed for customers is useful.

These are some of the positive impacts that digital transformation has left in the software testing world, but at the same time, there are some challenges that the organizations are facing due to digital transformation. Let’s look at some of them:

Increased Complexity - As more and more new tools and processes are being used in the organization, for people it becomes difficult to adapt all of them. In the rapid delivery culture, where automation is required, in many organizations, there are still many test cases that need to be converted into automation scripts. It takes time to move from manual testing to automation testing. Moreover, not everything can be automated. There will always be some test cases that require manual handling.

Lack of Time - The faster delivery demand gives less time for testing preparation that includes designing a test plan, getting the test environments ready, etc.

Lack of Resources - New tools are used by the organizations and as these are new in the market, finding skilled resources is becoming very difficult.

Conclusion

Even with the challenges, the benefits of digital transformation are heavier. Digital transformation is here to stay, and in the next coming years, we will be able to see more improved processes not just in software testing but also in other activities of the software development lifecycle as well.

Kuldeep is the founder and lead author of ArtOfTesting. He is skilled in test automation, performance testing, big data, and CI-CD. He brings his decade of experience to his current role where he is dedicated to educating the QA professionals. You can find him on LinkedIn.