Today, industries across the globe are leveraging innovations in the field of digital technology and transforming their businesses accordingly. As it is turning out to be in 2014, a whole bunch of digital trends are poised to reach entirely new level of mass acceptance. Organizations are fast aligning themselves to keep pace with this transformation through Digital Lines of Business, mobile first product strategies, emphasis on digital marketing and an omni-channel strategy for customer engagement. These changes are resulting in new trends to meet assurance needs of increasingly digital organizations. Following are some of the key digital assurance trends that I have seen:
- Digital Assurance has moved focus from functional validation of "commerce" on multiple channels in silos towards an omni-channel experience. The focus here is on user "engagement", uniform brand experience and seamless interaction across channels. Regression strategies need to ensure multiple channels are validated, cross-channel use cases are validated, multiple platforms and form factors are validated while optimizing testing efforts at the same time.
- Content has never been more important. Be it enterprise content, creative content for marketing, digital media assets - assurance strategy should account for validating content workflow, authoring tools and media rendering. Automation & performance testing of content has markedly different focus and tool requirements compared to functionality validation.
- Digital evolution has brought user experience at the center of organizations design strategy. Quality Assurance (QA) plays an equally important role in engineering consumer experience by testing for usability and accessibility. Analytics from social media can shrink user feedback cycles and enhance test conditions.
- Today Digital Assurance strategy is characterized by Agile methodologies with focus on continuous delivery, progressive functional test automation (BDD/ATDD), shorter release cycles, appetite for open source (Cucumber, Ruby, JBehave, Selenium), crowd platforms for collaboration (Wiki) and DevOps. As opposed to the enterprise side of organizations (package applications, legacy platforms or custom implementations) where consolidated testing, establishing tool framework and ALM platforms, focus on productivity improvement, regression automation and cost of quality reduction are the initiatives at the forefront.
Digital World from Assurance Perspective