QA transformation

  In the DevOps approach of developing, testing, and delivering software applications, there is a need to accelerate testing within the constraints of budget and time. This entails automating the testing process as part of the testing strategy. In many cases, continuous test automation is often considered as a discrete step in the build pipeline rather than a sequence of steps. For any continuous testing strategy, all software applications need to pass through a series of tests before they pass muster in the crucible of quality. These may include unit testing, integration testing, functional testing, smoke testing, performance testing, security testing, and others. For DevOps QA testing, each of these tests should be subjected to automation to enhance quality, reduce test time, and improve the certainty of software behavior. However, merely automating the tests left, right, and center does not augur well when it comes to achieving an optimal quality level as well as minimizing the ...

  The COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a body blow to the global economy, with scores of businesses ending up on the losing side. As governments scrambled to contain the spread of the pandemic through massive and prolonged lockdowns, most sectors of the economy took a hit, leading to job cuts, revenue losses, and the shredding of reputations. The pandemic has destroyed the livelihoods of millions of business enterprises trying to come to terms with a hitherto unseen situation. The blow came as a double whammy for everyone as the world was coping with a prolonged recessionary trend in the pre-pandemic era. However, with signs of the pandemic fading in many parts of the world, albeit unevenly, global economic growth is expected to be 4.9 percent in 2022 (Source: imf.org). The economic rebound, though robust, is expected to be uneven across countries and sectors. So, on one hand, we have seen companies across domains going out of business. Many managed to sustain themselves and sail throug...

  Intense competition has driven enterprises across sectors to invest in DevOps and manage their digital systems. It helps to enhance developer velocity and enable digital transformation on a wider scale. At the same time, IT departments are embracing DevOps transformation to meet the evolving requirements of the organization and its customers in a rapidly changing digital economy. With the DevOps approach, large enterprises are able to develop software applications more rapidly than previously thought possible and keep upgrading such software applications on a continuous basis. The impact of the DevOps methodology is so apparent that enterprises having tightly coupled architectures have realized they have to either embrace it fully or be left behind. Thus, after realizing the benefits of adopting the DevOps approach, enterprises want to scale its adoption by cutting across the barriers of teams, applications, toolsets, workflows, processes, pipelines, and release cycles – both on ...

  The banking domain has become all-encompassing by embracing digitization in a big way. It is multifarious and omnichannel with mobile, cloud, social media, and portal forming the overall ecosystem. Banking applications have brought conveniences that were unthinkable a decade ago with activities such as money transfer, paying utility bills, booking tickets, and many others, being done at the click of a button or a swipe on the screen. However, given the fact that these applications deal with sensitive customer data including their financial details, they should have impregnable data protection measures. And banking domain application testing helps in ensuring the accuracy, scalability, reliability, and most importantly, the security of data across digital touchpoints. Let us understand what banking application testing is all about. What is quality assurance in banking? With the banking sector riding the digital wave, there is a critical need to ensure the digital elements and/or a...

  The customers of today want superior personalized shopping experiences with quick dispersal at the turnstiles. The retail sector understands this shift in expectations and has invested heavily in technology, including the use of POS systems, to achieve a slew of business objectives. This has become all the more important with e-commerce making inroads into the customers’ shopping habits. To buttress the argument, e-commerce is expected to take around 18.1 percent of the worldwide retail sales and may account for 22 percent by 2023 (Source: eMarketer). Thus, the growing penchant for e-commerce among a large section of the customers has forced retailers to pull up their socks and deliver an omnichannel shopping experience. With competition looming large, retailers need to have advanced touchpoints offering a seamless customer experience at the frontend and secure transaction processing at the backend. And to ensure the POS systems perform consistently, efficiently, and accurately, ...

  Any software released into the market should fit into the crucible of customer acceptability with respect to attributes such as reliability, responsiveness, and stability. Designing and developing such high-performing software applications is a continuous challenge for enterprises due to their complexity and changes in customer preferences. In a day and age of powerful ERP software being deployed by enterprises to run their operations, connect with their clients, vendors, and end customers, and develop and deliver products or services, ensuring their quality on a continuous basis has become a challenge of sorts. Thanks to digital transformation, there is a thrust towards developing innovative software products that are competitive and capable of monetizing the business value of speed. This can often leave enterprises to ignore the crucial aspect of testing, thereby leaving the software applications vulnerable to failure. As per the CPSQ report of 2020, the total cost of poor soft...

  Any technology, system, or software needs to be maintained and upgraded from time to time to ensure it functions at its optimal level. At the time of such maintenance and upgrades, developers may need to change the code or add new features. This is to ensure the software or technology solution performs well in its operating environment and offers a great interface with dependencies. However, the outcome of such technology upgrades may lead to system malfunctions or the ingress of bugs. A simple code change in one part of the program may affect the performance of a feature or functionality in another part of the program. This may be in the form of reducing the page load time, increasing the utilization of system resources, or others. Software regression testing can help to mitigate such issues and ensure the upgrade works as intended. A case study related to the banking sector has shown that QA regression testing helps save around 60% of the time, which otherwise would have been s...

  Data has become the new gold, as is often bandied about in the media. The remark is not off the mark as data has seen a phenomenal expansion with the level of IT tools being leveraged by businesses worldwide. It has certainly become the new frontier to be conquered or dealt with by companies that look to gain insights into their business processes and workflows. The humongous quantum of data floating all around and generated from various sources is expected to reach 79 zettabytes in 2021 (Source: Statista). If that seems mindboggling to even fathom, then brace for the fact that it is going to double by 2025. However, one thing that needs to be taken with a pinch of salt is that 90 percent of the data swirling around is replicated, with only 10 percent considered to be unique. So, when so much structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data is available from a variety of sources (social media being one), enterprises are struggling to make sense of it. Further, they not only nee...

  The scalability and performance of IT applications and systems are supposedly the key non-functional requirements for any business enterprise. These also help enterprises understand the readiness of any project for implementation. Due to its decentralized and distributed model, which enables peers in a network to collaborate, Blockchain shares similar considerations with Bitcoin. Here, each peer node needs to compute and communicate with other nodes to validate transactions and update a shared ledger. The salience of blockchain technology has hit home in recent times, with digital and cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin becoming the talk of the town. According to techjury.net, the global blockchain market is estimated to garner revenue to the tune of $20 billion by 2024. Also, the total worldwide spending on blockchain technology solutions in 2021 is expected to be around $6.6 billion (Source: Statista). So, with so much buzz around blockchain technology, it is imperative for busine...