What CxOs need to know about Software Testing

It’s human nature to ignore things that haven’t impacted us yet. But that shouldn’t stop us from being prepared for the worst.

Most CxOs of organizations across the globe still do not accept the criticality of software testing until their own organization faces the heat and threatens their bottom line, brand and personal reputation, and the risk of losing precious customers. That the privacy of data is also at a major risk is sort of an understatement.

What CxOs need to realize is that to be successful in this race for digital transformation, the change has to be drilled top-down – from the Board & CEO – and then implemented across the organization. Additionally, implementation of agile and DevOps practices along with software testing are going to play a critical role for accelerating this desired organizational growth.

That said, there is little room left for CxOs but to experiment with, and implement the best testing practices and methodologies that the software testing world has to offer.

A few trends to watch out for

Test automation

A lot of organizations have gained ground by adopting Agile and DevOps-based automation testing practices today. However, there are many others who have not made as much progress as they would want to as they still rely heavily on manual testing. Manual tests not only are time and effort consuming in nature, but also do not indicate if all the right tests were performed as required.

Test automation that is risk-based helps improve time-to-market and also leads to better quality. With organizations competing with each other in a mad-melee of deployments every few seconds, continuous automated testing has become a prerogative to remain in the market.

To be successful, CxOs need to focus on whether or not these tests took care of all the risk-based scenarios. Using practices such as automation of continuous risk-based software testing helps improve the whole process, saves costs, and helps CxOs make futuristic decisions.

DevSecOps

DevSecOps is a recent offering making it’s foray in the world of software testing. DevSecOps is a practice where the development, security, and operations teams across the organization work together in tandem using the quality engineering process to create the best quality products. Implementing DevSecOps helps test, expose, and fix the risks and drawbacks of the new software being designed way ahead in the software testing cycle. This helps save precious amounts of time, efforts, and costs, finally leading to achieving the much desired faster-time-to-market, and thereby quicker ROI. A robust and great quality product also helps gain new customers, and wins the loyalty of the existing clients. The fact that Facebook promotes developer-driven testing, while Spotify has its team of Squads, tribes and chapters, and for Microsoft, where engineers and testers are one, DevSecOps seems to have arrived.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML) based testing

It’s no secret that AI and ML are being hailed as the harbingers of the tsunami of digital transformation. What CxOs need to realize, however, is that AI and ML can also play a huge role in the testing world. For example, the data collected can be used to optimize the test suites, generate analytics that are predictive in nature, identify test cases for automation, and also improve traceability and defect analytics.

Big Data testing

With the explosion of data all around, Big Data testing has become critical as it can provide precious amounts of business-critical information that has a great impact on product quality, performance and functionality. What is important however is to be sure to verify the quality of the data being tested – lest it may lead to wrong assumptions, forecasts, and decisions.

IoT testing

Internet of Things (IoT) has created a plethora of connected devices all around us today. With so many people using it, and so many lives dependent on it across the globe, IoT testing is something that cannot be overlooked. A few critical types of IoT testing include testing of IoT systems for compatibility, data integrity, performance, reliability & scalability, security, and usability. As is obvious, none of these areas is less critical than the other, and can play a tremendous role in making or breaking an organization.

Performance & Quality Engineering

Performance and quality engineering are a rage in the digital world today as the focus is on analyzing the entire system in-depth (for business value, configuration, hardware, performance, security, software, and usability) to be able to provide the ultimate experience to the end user.

Digital customer experience

The entire world has gone mobile and if organizations have to provide the best digital experience, they need to ensure that all the apps are working seamlessly without any security loopholes for hacks to happen. Providing thorough, strategic, end-to-end testing is one way of assuring the experience – which will definitely lead to savings in terms of costs and time, as also guarantee customer delight.

Summary

Software testing used to be boring as a subject – not so any more. For CxOs who wish to lead their organizations tread the path of digital transformation successfully, and also stay ahead of competition, software testing has become a business-critical initiative that helps provide the best quality products and services.

CxOs today need to continue to invest in technology to serve customers better, improve operational efficiency, and drive revenue growth. While with the obvious and massive need of continuous, end-to-end test automation, they can easily sway the board-room discussions in favor of implementing software testing practices, they also need to be able to rationalize the decisions that they take and not fall for just going for another set of automated testing tools.