Quality Engineering for the Digital Enterprise: Overcome the Challenges of Security, Speed, and Quality

Businesses need to reimagine the what and how of quality when they implement digital at scale. Quality today encompasses more than just functioning; it also includes customer experience and regulatory compliance. The path forward demands reimagining QA to ensure success in digital considering the increasing adoption of DevOps, Agile, and the influx of AI.

Strong quality assurance is crucial as businesses streamline, upgrade, and secure their legacy environments for the digital era. Quality must encompass both legacy and digital systems from beginning to end.

A well-defined customer experience testing strategy is essential for businesses to adopt and implement because practically every part of our personal and professional lives is now digitalized.

As a result of digital transformation, new and better customer experiences are being created, and software is primarily used to create these experiences. Many businesses now use DevOps to develop swiftly and guarantee quality. Businesses that adopt DevOps can provide higher-quality releases with fewer performance issues.

How DevOps best practices can improve the customer experience

The demand for continuous delivery of customer experience skills is driven by digital transformation. The strategic importance of software development has increased for businesses across all sectors. Delivering cutting-edge customer experience features swiftly and flawlessly is a challenge for businesses.

For companies to meet the challenge, “DevOps for Customer Experience” is the key.

According to Forrester, “Companies pave the way for digital transformation by deploying processes, tools, and organizational approaches that enable them to quickly deliver applications that codify high-quality CX.”

In order to enable speed and quality, DevOps for Customer Experience adapts DevOps methods to concentrate on the distinctive features of CX software. The viewpoint of the consumer is one of the main focus points in DevOps for Customer Experience.

The needs of the customer must be considered during the design and testing of customer experience software. Today’s customer journey is omnichannel and frequently involves both digital and voice channels.

One design strategy is to base software development on typical customer problems and pinpoint the consumer paths to problem resolution. To make sure that the changes across channels are seamless, those customer journeys must be tested utilizing omnichannel testing.

CX DevOps adapts current DevOps techniques to the unique requirements of customer experience software, and one such DevOps technique is Service Virtualization.

The future of software development and testing, as well as IT project management, is dependent on service virtualization.

How Service Virtualization facilitates testing and eases project management

Service virtualization enables frequent and thorough testing even when essential elements of your system architecture are absent by allowing your DevOps teams to employ virtual services rather than real services.

Service virtualization removes major bottlenecks that would otherwise delay production and time-to-market for an application under test by simulating the behavior of critical components that will be present in a final production environment.

This allows complex applications to undergo integration testing much earlier in the development process.

Service virtualization “fills in the gaps” of missing system components for the development of most enterprise systems, which depend on a mixed array of system components cooperating in harmony. It does this by simulating the answers to demonstrate how the various components interact.

It is particularly helpful when creating intricate cloud-, API-, and SOA-based systems, as well as if crucial hardware and software components aren’t immediately accessible for testing during the production cycle.

Service virtualization is being used by more and more businesses to boost output, lower testing expenses, and accelerate the deployment of higher-quality software.

The virtual assets can be reliably shared and used by your entire production team in addition to simulating significant software programs, third-party services, and even entire backend systems, enabling more effective parallel development techniques.

You can get a competitive edge over other businesses still stuck in the linear-development limbo by rapidly and easily removing dependence constraints throughout your organization using virtualization.

A major game changer is effective test data management (TDM), which is becoming increasingly important as businesses rush to become “digital-first” with software quality as a strategic enabler.

Putting in place and improving the Test Data Management process

This data is crucial due to the fact that both manual and automated tests in your test suite depend on test data. Validating common or highly valuable user journeys, testing for edge cases, reproducing faults, and simulating failures are all made possible by good test data.

Effective management and use of test data is challenging, though.

Your tests may become brittle and more expensive to maintain if you rely too heavily on data that is defined outside the parameters of the test.

Dependence on external data sources might cause delays and have an effect on test results. Copying manufacturing data entails risk due to the possibility that it contains sensitive data. You must manage your test data carefully and strategically to overcome these obstacles.

According to the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), successful teams approach test data management using three core principles:

• With sufficient test data, complete automated test suites can be executed.
• On-demand test data acquisition is possible for automated test suites.
• Teams’ ability to execute automated tests is neither restricted nor limited by test data.

Make an effort to fulfill each of these requirements in all of your development teams if you want to improve the test data management process. Your entire test automation and continuous integration capabilities can benefit from these principles as well.

Conclusion

Businesses today are making all attempts to improve their present IT initiatives and techniques to stay competitive and accelerate digital transformation while embracing new technologies and software development approaches. This has led to exponential growth in the digitization drive for almost every sector. As a result, there has been the development of a massive interest in software quality due to concerns such as security, quality, speed, and cost.

Against this backdrop, join us for an insightful digital dialogue series where Cigniti’s thought leaders give you an in-depth look at how businesses that adopt DevOps can provide higher-quality releases with fewer performance issues and how best DevOps practices can enhance the customer experience. They will also talk about how virtualization facilitates testing and eases project management, and how the future of software development and testing, as well as IT project management, is dependent on service virtualization.

As companies race to achieve digital transformation with software quality as a strategic enabler, effective test data management (TDM) becomes a game changer. Now more than ever, there is a need for robust TDM solutions that allow organizations to provide unrestricted access to high-quality test data whilst protecting against the risk of customer PII breaches. In this context, this webinar will also delve into how investing in an effective TDM strategy in enterprises can reduce the cost of storing and processing test data, increase coverage, and enhance test cycle efficiency for delivery excellence.

Hear from Shamim Ahmed, CTO – DevOps at Broadcom, Raghuram Krovvidy, Chief Delivery Officer at Cigniti, and Sairam Vedam, Chief Marketing Officer at Cigniti as they share insights on quality engineering for the digital enterprise.

If you need help with overcoming the challenges of security, speed, and quality, visit Cigniti Quality Engineering Services for the digital enterprise.