5 Patterns in QA That Help Achieve Business Goals In 2021
When it comes to software development, it is important to continue adjusting the approaches to quality assurance. The global pandemic COVID19 has prompted many companies to develop and adopt new responses like work from home policies, regular video conferencing, online services, etc.
In such cases, the IT industry, which has proven to be the main source of business continuity during the pandemic has had a huge responsibility.
This is when you should focus on proper software functions to achieve coherent business operations. And to prevent any failures, here are the five areas of quality assurance that can help to solve most potential economic problems in 2021 and in the post-pandemic world.
The transition from performance testing to performance engineering culture
Users are becoming more critical about the variety of choices of solutions designed to help them overcome daily tasks during the pandemic. Therefore, a user-centric approach is a priority now, which means performance testing is no longer enough.
In order to analyze the root causes in product development and eliminate late solution deployment, as well as to avoid possible throughput issues, you should put performance engineering in place.
Performance engineering is techniques applied during the software development life cycle to make sure that the non-functional requirements for performance will be met. It will allow your software development team to create applications, focus on relevant metrics, and speed up the potential performance issues detection from the beginning. Not to mention, it provides a high degree of transparency while achieving consistent production performance results as it is an ongoing process applied through the entire development stage.
Cybersecurity testing
Since the number of cybercrime cases surges during the pandemic, sometimes it is the users’ responsibility for these incidents. Factors like weak passwords can be the reason behind this. Of course, prudence is necessary. But what else can you do to protect your own personal data?
Preventing is always better than cure. Hence, we recommend applying security testing methods to identify sensitive areas where information is more likely to be breached.
If you are trying to formalize the design of your organization’s infrastructure and embed security in its IT management processes, you can implement the security-by-design solution. If you are responsible for storing highly sensitive data like credit card information, you can opt for penetration testing to ensure compliance with PCI DSS.
Embed QAOps into Agile and DevOps
The current pandemic has triggered the wave of agile software development methodologies and DevOps transformation since they allow faster delivery, high scalability, and a customer-centric approach. But despite the constant changes in apps, how can we improve the required quality level?
Well, QAOps is the answer. It is the practice of quality assurance being integrated into the CI-CD pipeline. And because QAOps requires the quality assurance team to work closely with the software engineering and operational team, it ensures that the ongoing collaboration between all teams is observed throughout the SDLC.
By switching quality assurance from supporting function to the key aspect of software development, it is expected to see better team productivity, higher quality product are developed and deployed, punctuality, and fast solution modification.
Enhance your test automation strategy
As an essential part of any quality assurance strategy, automation allows engineers to simplify testing activities, and improve the software testing’s ROI. In order to improve, here are the three effective continuous deployment techniques:
- Use hyper-automation to focus on organizational productivity and agility so as your organization won’t be left behind in the competition.
- Consider using scriptless tools to accelerate the development of reusable and scalable tests using AI and ML algorithms in no time, with less effort. Manual intervention to maintain and support tests
- Focus on AI-based robot process automation (RPA), cognitive computing, and IoT to improve automation functions and simulate real-world user behaviour when interacting with engineering systems to perform business processes.
Cultivate Organizational Excellence Testing Center
Testing centres of excellence can assist in making full use of testing methods, ensuring process standardization and confidence in innovation, and improve quality.
Testing centres of excellence is especially useful in situations where time to market pressure is too high. Sophisticated organizational structure, software bugs, and the needs to coordinate processes and toolkits among multiple groups or products.
Regarding the introduction of test automation’s best practices consolidated within testing centres of excellence, organizations can reduce test time and optimize the QA costs by applying QA-related expertise, so that value can be obtained with a minimum of the manual work, and through executing similar scripts in parallel against a wide range of devices and platforms.
Conclusion
In order to be successful during this critical time, you should apply QAOps, set testing centres of excellence, transform performance testing to performance engineering, and increase the cybersecurity level.
If you want to know more about software testing, its importance, or any information regarding software outsourcing, follow our blog post for more information.
