How Quality Engineering (QE) Can Drive Better Business Outcomes
QE enhances software quality, improves planning, saves costs, optimizes testing, and ensures DevOps pipeline sustainability
July 19, 2023 | Read time: 5 min
Introduction
Big data, cloud computing, AI, and cybersecurity have revolutionized our lives, propelling businesses to move forward.
From start-ups to large enterprises, even governments, digitalization has become an essential aspect. Technology has enabled us to access information, goods, and services more efficiently than ever before, while transforming the competitive landscape of business. As a result, organizations of all sizes rely on digital technologies to remain competitive and meet the needs of their customers.
Why is quality engineering important?
Nowadays, the success of any business revolves around the quality of its digital technologies, such as applications, software, or websites. The quality factor determines whether clients choose a particular service or select a better competitor. As a result, quality engineering has become an essential requirement for every digital product or service.
Quality engineering is an important aspect of digital product development. It can significantly enhance product quality while reducing costs, through more efficient processes. The effective implementation of quality engineering practices also improves communication between engineering and manufacturing teams and ensures that the voice of the customer (VOC) is integrated into product design and development.
In today's ever-evolving digital landscape, companies that prioritize quality engineering are better equipped to stay ahead of the competition and provide customers with the best experience.
Quality engineering core principles
Quality approach is a team approach, not something separately conceived and executed by quality consultants. Working with these principles requires a shared understanding and involvement from all roles in the company— CEO, CTO, Heads of departments, Program Managers, Developers, Product Owners, and more.
The most important quality engineering (QE) principles are:
1. A collaborative approach. Solid cooperation between manual testing, crowd-sourced testing, user testing, and automation is the key to success. Companies like Qualysoft who are product-independent have the freedom to choose the right approach in each specific case.
2. Ownership. Every member of the team must feel accountable for the quality of the deliverable, understand how they contribute to that, and actively accomplish those responsibilities.
3. Small changes translate to big wins. While auditing every process, there will be a major overhaul of processes, some changes will be more subtle and easier and quicker to implement. These are the changes that will give the earliest benefits and help to build confidence and trust within the team.
4. Collaboration. It’s vital to encourage strong collaboration between all stakeholders such as business, operations, development, and QA, driving towards a common goal. This approach not only identifies better ways of working but helps management understand the whole approach.
Embracing the digital transformation - The evolution of business practices
Digital transformation revolutionizes the way businesses function, leading to a fundamental shift in their operations. It implies superior product delivery and the adoption of the latest technology trends. Translated in technical goals, it requires aligning with modern work practices like Agile, DevOps, and Quality Assurance.
More than that, in these modern times, customers have plenty of choices to make, and creating a high-quality digital experience by leveraging new software or applications can be a convincing differentiator. Factors that matter are, for example, scalability, responsiveness, functionality, feature integration, and many others. Therefore, it is important that businesses with digital initiatives understand the importance of incorporating quality into the entire development lifecycle itself. This positions QA at the core of every business.
Quality engineering sustains digital transformation by optimizing the value chain with more efficiency and reduced flaws. This not only helps a business to create more functional products but even produces better financial outcomes.
Driving business success - The synergy between digital transformation and quality engineering
Quality engineering plays a crucial role in sustaining long-term digital transformation, from identifying potential risks to addressing bugs that could hinder build quality.
1. Automation. Quality engineering implies using test automation to validate implemented functionalities against specified requirements in a timely manner. This approach allows quality analysts and developers to work on (further) implementations that are more precise and compatible with a given set of tools and frameworks.
2. Improved Integration. Quality engineering allows enhanced coordination between the development and operations teams when it is necessary to make quality products with a faster turnaround time.
3. Test Driven Development & Behavior Driven Development. TDD and BDD aim to define the process to test. They improve the collaboration between quality engineering services, business stakeholders, and developers. While TDD helps to test small pieces of functionality, BDD allows testing the product from the end-user perspective, which ensures the final outcomes are aligned with the defined objectives.
Improved business outcomes through QE
In today's fast-paced software development landscape, QE plays an important role in ensuring that software products meet high standards of quality, reliability, and performance.
- Enhanced Quality - Software is more complex than ever, and traditional testing methods may not be enough. QE helps by providing more thorough testing, for example, a gray box approach that allows for more thorough testing of the system as a whole. This leads to improved overall software quality.
- Improved Planning - There can be some parts of code that require rework and that translated into costs and extra time added to the process. QE implies planning the entire process for improved ideation and development, saving expenses and valuable resources. Even higher savings are made when QE identifies limitations related to product implementation, issues that can appear at any stage of the development process.
- Time Efficiency - QE optimizes the testing approach by automating time-consuming tests, identifying tools that increase efficiency, and building infrastructure that can be valuable for multiple projects.
- Cost Reduction - When you identify, from the beginning, where issues reside within a complex system, developers spend less time tracking down bugs during the development process. Both time and money are saved in the long run. More than that, by eliminating revenue-impacting bugs, teams can avoid costly fixes and keep their focus on a quality experience.
- Enhanced Test Coverage - When it comes to integrating a value chain, the entire process comes down to keeping the focus on testing, both the shift-left and shift-right approaches.
Shift left is the practice of moving QA early in the development processes to anticipate the changes that arise before any code is written. In this approach, teams verify designs, requirements, APIs, container configurations, and interactions between microservices.
Shift right is the practice of performing testing, quality, and performance evaluation in production under real-world conditions. Shift-right methods ensure that applications running in production can withstand real user load while ensuring the same high levels of quality. DevOps teams test a built application to ensure performance, resilience, and software reliability. The purpose is to detect and remediate bugs that would be harder to anticipate in development environments.
In conclusion, QE works on all phases of SDLC, from test setups to managing test environments.
- Sustaining The DevOps Pipeline - Right from management to idea generation, design systems, and operations, DevOps for QE allows the creation of safe, reliable, and scalable solutions.
- Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) - The CI/CD pipeline brings an endless loop of feedback, integrations, and deliveries for improving the products. More importantly, CI/CD counteracts any flaws in quality and sustains quality at every step of the development lifecycle by involving every stakeholder.
A deeper understanding of Quality Assurance (QA) can reveal its big importance for both businesses and customers. QA is an integral part of software development that can be challenging for developers and testers to achieve. By ensuring that software products meet high standards of quality, reliability, and performance, organizations can enjoy the sweet fruits of their hard labor.
Qualysoft sustains your organization by ensuring that products and services meet your customers' expectations. With our extensive experience and expertise in QA and testing services, we provide reliable QA services that guarantee quality, efficiency, and peace of mind.
Test Us in an Assessment Workshop
The starting point of a cooperation is usually a customer-specific assessment workshop, in which we analyze the status quo of an application or your IT landscape. You will receive a detailed plan from us for the further procedure, an estimate of the costs and the ROI you can expect.
- Enterprise Assessment
Together we take a look at your IT landscape, your value streams and your tech stack. Based on the applications that offer the greatest added value and require an increase in quality or speed of change, a customized plan for the introduction or optimization of test automation is created.
- Application Assessment
When introducing test automation for an application or a small number of applications, a detailed assessment of all required aspects of the application and its surrounding systems is made. For the assessment, we use our Maturity Matrix to define the maturity of the domain in different categories and create a risk matrix. Based on the evaluation, the test approach is defined and planned.