Consumerization and digital adoption are leading to polarization of Enterprise IT strategy. Today systems of engagement are transforming faster than ever with speed and experience as the driving factors. However, the slow evolution of systems of record are weighing down this transformation

Ramesh Pai, Director and Head of Wipro’s Digital Assurance practice, talks about how Quality is helping bridge this gap. Traditionally considered as the weakest (read slowest) link in a software development process, QA today is leading from the front to enable Digital Transformation.

Q: Is Testing really dead as some say it is?

A: Testing in the conventional sense is dead, but addressing quality in a Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) today (for digital enterprises) requires an engineering approach rather than a Testing approach. Addressing quality today is about enabling quality development rather than validating a work product post-facto. It starts with automating Tests and is in parallel to development. It is also about validating Application Program Interfaces (APIs) for function and User Interfaces (UIs) for form factors as well as time to market, as much as about quality itself.

As a corollary – Testers in their traditional form with traditional skills are dead too. An engineering approach in digital IT requires Testing aptitude to be married with development skills. Hence, the need for Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) rather than a Tester.

Q: What is changing in this new approach to quality?

A: The asks from QA are changing. In traditional QA, time (whatever time remains after development is done), cost (as low as possible) and quality (got to be perfect out of the door) were the key asks. Whereas today, digital channels are enabling enterprises to reach end consumers faster than ever with innovative products and services with experience at the core. Hence in Digital QA, Speed (Test as you build or even before), Experience (for personalized and omni-channel experience) and iterative development (building a Minimum Viable Product) is what both IT and business leaders are striving for.

Test Automation is moving beyond regression to enable parallel development via progressiveTest automation approaches. Behavioral Development Driven (BDD) methodology is one such approach where user expectation of behavior in natural language constructs is the premise for automated Testing. Enterprises are embracing more and more Open Source tools, not-yet-established frameworks and are open to experimentation more than ever and the skill requirements are changing too.

Q: By virtue of its very nature or where it falls in the lifecycle, isn’t it counter intuitive to think of QA as a function that enables speed or influences experience or effectively delivers Minimum Viable Products (MVP)?

A: It was, but not in today’s digital world. Digital products and services are evolving at a rapid pace which has led to consumers demanding these services with least possible delay. Shorter releases have meant that the priority of quality assurance has moved towards Test-as-you-build, with customer experience as the key.

In Continuous Testing approaches, Tests are automated before products are developed and then integrated with Continuous Integration pipelines. New age tools and accelerators like EggPlant, JBehave, Appium, SeeTest etc., enable Tests right at the development stage and crowd platforms (internal & external) enable early user experience feedback. All these are enabling QA to lead the Digital Transformation from the front rather than being the slowest link in the SDLC chain as in the past.

Q: The above mentioned trends are certainly true about greenfield digital development projects, but how do you support a large part of Enterprise IT that is still migrating from legacy architectures and infrastructure?

A: Digital Transformation today is not just about overhauling the UI, but about transforming the entire ecosystem, including infra (cloud) and software stacks (as a service). Quality Assurance, thus, is about supporting such transitions and is achieved through techniques like virtualization and, in many cases, SDETs, building custom tools for validation. Remember, engineering is an approach to QA for today’s digital enterprises.

Q: What benefits do large enterprises draw from QA initiatives in the digital age?

A: With competition at an all-time high, digital age enterprises strive for faster time-to-market with enhanced user experience. The end result: higher conversion rates and customer loyalty highlighted by a positive Net Promoter Score (NPS). These benefits are derived today by reducing cycle time through QA approach like Continuous Testing. This approach also provides much-needed flexibility and enhanced user experience by incorporating user feedback early in the iterative development. This eventually results in cost savings through early bug fixes. It is estimated that by 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. The ideal way forward is a user-centric and Continuous Testing approach for QA in digital.

To know more about Quality Assurance, write to digital.contact@wipro.com