Media: Times of India
These are testing times for businesses. Today’s customers, employees and partners demand memorable experiences delivered seamlessly across channels and interaction points. With rapidly evolving customer expectations, it becomes critical to ensure the quality of the experience, and as a result the quality assurance function needs to evolve and transform to Quality Engineering (QE).
Traditional QA Fails to Deliver Quality of Experience at Speed & Scale
Traditional QA fails to meet the demands of today’s market as emerging technologies, paired with the need for evolving existing technology architectures for future readiness, add significant complexity to the testing scope. According to Gartner, cloud, social, and differentiated experience scenarios have considerably raised end-user expectations for application quality and delivery.
“Quality” now entails UX, Quality of Service, Availability, Performance, Security, and more importantly, business impact. Customers demand personalized experiences from brands in real time across channels. Loyalty to the brand is how customers repay the superlative experience. A positive mobile experience raises the odds of getting recommended by a user by 89%, according to Think with Google. New technologies coupled with evolving customer expectations demand consistent UX that stands out.
Traditional QA has not kept pace with the rapid transformation in the market. Here’s why sticking on to the traditional approach fails:
The dearth of qualified talent with the right mix of skills aligned to business & siloed knowledge with reliance on SME’s. High training costs as finding testing resources with desired technical & domain skills is a challenge.
Lack of standardized QA process and need for sharing best practices and tools across the board. Inconsistent automation coverage that doesn’t go the whole yard.
Decentralized setups that drive high maintenance cost where everybody reinvents the wheel.
Fragmented governance that works in silos, which is further complicated by various approaches and methods of working. Lack of metrics-based ROI tracking and a single pane of view on quality across projects.
Lack of focus on adopting emerging tools, technologies, and frameworks to test new technologies.
QA processes and systems not updated to align with organizational goals—The need to reduce testing time without compromising quality and managing the issues of defect leakage and missed delivery deadlines.
Moving Beyond Traditional QA Focused on Cost of Quality
Gartner states that traditional testing-oriented software quality methods fail to drive innovation swiftly and lack the agility to respond to defects.