Published: 06 Feb 2017
The Crucial Role of QA in the Era of Digitalization
Last Updated: 10 Jan 2024
During the last 20 years, the world has seen exponential growth in the form of digitalization. Digital services and products have become an integral part of our lives. We have started communicating via digital phones, read digital newspapers, watch digital TV, the information we get is mostly via the internet, the shopping experience has suddenly transformed as we shop digitally and we have started documenting our lives with social media. There is barely any part of our lives that has not been left untouched by digitalization.
Contents
1. What is Digitization
2. Role of QA
3. Leverage TestingXperts’ Digital Testing Services
Digital innovation has affected a large part of our lives. With digital advances such as mobility, analytics, smart embedded devices, and social media, executives in all industries are able to improve their use of traditional technologies such as ERP. These digital advancements have been enhancing internal processes, customer relationships, and value propositions. Seeing how rapidly digital technology disrupted the media industries in the past, other industries have also started to embrace digitalization for creating a competitive advantage. Let’s understand the term digitalization.
What is Digitization
Many people confuse digitalization with digitization. Digitization is about ones and zeroes whereas digitalization is fundamentally vast concerning how businesses and lives are transformed bringing technology and people closer. Digital business applies extraordinary amalgamations of new technologies to generate more value and revenue. Digital services, products, and customer experiences conducted through digital channels adds value to the businesses. Various factors prove the significance of digitalization in today’s world.
1. Businesses are being reborn digital
2. Consumers are embracing digitalization
3. Technology outbursts are leading to digitalization
4. The IT world is moving primarily towards digitalization
Role of QA
The digital economy is transforming the way businesses are being run, causing substantial shifts in the way QA is done. Assurance has taken center stage for attaining nearly flawless system performances in security and user experience. Digital assurance is not only testing applications across SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, and cloud) but also assuring the desired business outcomes of digital transformation initiatives.
Briefly, QA should be able to support all digital initiatives. Digital assurance solutions must surpass functional validation of SMAC and incorporate network capability, performance, interoperability, and security aspects. Digitalization has shifted the focus entirely from traditional testing towards assurance of integrated testing of embedded devices, software, big data and most importantly customer experience. QA process requires some modifications to keep up with the digital landscape, a few ways by which these changes can be made are given below.
1. QA should adopt a DevOps Model for Agile Delivery:
Organizations have high expectations that the DevOps will accelerate digital transformation, as it broadcasts a collective IT lifecycle methodology across testing, development, business, and operative teams. Continuous delivery indicates application changes are made recurrently.
Small changes allow less service disruption. DevOps model, therefore, requires QA to collaborate with development for continuous integration, to contribute in the operation phase for engaging with the business to support business-assurance activities and for monitoring and validation. These shifts will allow QA to assure agility.
2. QA must focus on Brand Value and Customer Experience:
Allowing customers to have a seamless experience and satisfying all the demands of the customers by providing personalized service should be the main focus of the organizations. Digital assurance must measure user experiences across all channels such as mobile, web, and other digital devices. Using automated solutions for assessing accessibility, consistency, user wait times, and seamless experience should hold utmost importance.
3. Advanced Analytics should be used for Decision Support:
Organizations entirely depend on customer feedback, surveys, and production defects. With the help of digitalization and advanced analytics, mining data from various sources such as social media platforms become easier. It also helps teams to create actionable intelligence on the customer experience that can help in further prescriptive and predictive QA decision making.
Leverage TestingXperts’ Digital Testing Services
TestingXperts is a trusted testing partner to serve all your digital QA needs. With proven experience and end-to-end service portfolio, we address challenges in the areas of security, performance, functionality, usability, and cross-device compatibility across the entire digital gamut. We work closely with our customers in their lifecycle transformation to DevOps and Agile to ensure faster time to market for your digital applications.