Importance of Quality Assurance and Testing in Digital Transformation

The Scenario Today

As the world moves on from relying on paper to becoming wireless because of constant changes in technology and competition, businesses are eventually forced to undergo a digital transformation to stay relevant in a dynamic marketplace. Any organization is going to consume a lot of time and resources whilst undergoing a transformation, but the sacrifices made are absolutely crucial to secure customer retention in the long run.

When an organization invests so heavily in a digital transformation, there’s one question that needs to be asked: do the costs justify the reward? Do they get substantial returns on their investment? The answer is: yes, if, and only if, the Quality Assurance and Testing departments play a key role in the transformation cycle. For example, the early participation of the ‘Assurance Organization’ [QA and Testing] allows them to focus their energies on resolving issues that are discovered from the very beginning of the transformation cycle.

QA organizations need to maintain the entire customer experience while ensuring the production and delivery of high quality applications. This can be managed by unifying silos across the whole range of business processes, combing development, QA, and marketing teams to improve process validation, setting up mobile testing labs, and implementing risk-based testing based on comprehensive analytics.

The Importance of QA and Testing

The success of any company after its digital transformation hinges heavily on its customers. During a transformation of any kind, organizations are going to focus on upgrading their infrastructure and therefore remove existing obsolete processes and implement newer efficient ones instead. Thus, it is in this crucial period of transition that QA is indispensable. As any anomalies encountered early can be rectified and are very unlikely to be reflected in the the delivery of polished, high quality products. To be effective in maintaining the quality and stability that customers have come to expect from an organization, QA and testing teams need to:

1. Blend integration tests into the overall app lifecycle, which cleans up a product from top to bottom.
2. Implement universal automation throughout the value chain, which streamlines test execution.
3. Manage multiple apps, services, and platforms to guarantee smoother development of complex, sophisticated products.

Functional testing has to be optimized across all digital and non-digital channels that customers interact with. Test environments need to simulate user behavior to ensure that the business experience is well-laid out and consistent. QA teams should ideally test automation repeatedly on different devices and operating systems to simplify and perfect their whole customer engagement ecosystem.

QA and Testing teams must have the entire process covered from beginning to end: creation, development, marketing, distribution, and then finally delivery.

An example of transformation success

The major American cellular service provider T-Mobile focused on its customers from the very first stage of its transformation process. Customer service, sales, and marketing – every department underwent a thorough digital transformation.

T-Mobile’s IT department had also adopted a unified, automated end-to-end testing process in a consolidated environment that cut down heavily on time and cost. In fact, 83% of test scripts were automated, which meant that testing experts had the freedom to focus on more difficult test scripts. The consistency and smoothness of the company’s new automated testing also lowered the chances of error and delay in delivery. And at every step of the development process, a number of experts had been assigned to oversee operations and ensure that everything worked in harmony as a well-oiled machine.

And, crucially, T-Mobile had made the data of literally all its customers available to the various departments, which encouraged customized offers based on a lightning-quick evaluation of each customer.