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New Year’s Testing Resolutions

It’s 2017 and we’re entering a new era of ever-increasing customer interaction and expectation.

~ Written By Lara Irwin

Never before has a faster time to market, hacker-proof security and seamless customer experience been so critical to business success. IT is in the spotlight – for delivering business innovation and for having to adapt as quickly as possible to meet the overriding goals of the organisation. In turn we are seeing increasing pressure on the QA and Test function to be more innovative and flexible, facilitate Agile and DevOps adoption, achieve higher levels of automation and shift both left and right. What better time to make some serious New Year’s Resolutions to update your test strategy?

The following resolutions are all taken from the findings of the 2016-17 World Quality Report. The first 5 have been developed from the 5 key recommendations of the report and the remaining 5 are devised from other key QA trends that have emerged from the reports’ data.

1. Commence the journey towards intelligence-led QA and testing.  

Use predictive analytics tools to ascertain what to test and how; identify potential quality issues earlier in the product lifecycle; determine the efficiency of test sets; predict risk and prioritise test cases.

2. Shift testing left then right.

Initially shifting the QA function left and deploying strategic automation are a necessity to break down silos, fully integrate testing and realise the benefits of DevOps. When you’re successfully using automation, cloud, service and environment virtualisation to scale, and you’re achieving Test and Behaviour Driven Development, you can shift the testing function right to create a continuous Testing strategy.

3. Create as-a-service solutions to provide test environment management, test data management, and test execution to serve both the Core QA and Business QA Functions.

If your TEM team is allowed to concentrate on optimising core IT test environments you’ll find that, over time, you can make significant cost savings. Providing virtualised and cloud-based environments will speed up the entire lifecycle so you really can achieve better, faster and cheaper.

4. Do not become one of the 68% of businesses that lacks an IoT-specific Test strategy.

If this is a particularly challenging area for your business then take a look at our book “Testing in an IoT Environment” here.

5. Balance quality and speed by gaining better visibility into enterprise quality.

The most effective way to achieve better insight into cross-functional self-empowered teams is to create a real-time dashboard. Use this to track simple balanced scorecards against speed and quality metrics for individual lines of business, each application and each specific process.

6. Address the skills shortage to ensure that testing doesn’t become a development bottleneck.

The WQR data shows that the industry is lacking many of the skills required for intelligence-led testing. So, if you are determined to make significant progress with our #1 New Year’s Testing Resolution, you’ll also need to upskill in non-functional and test environment virtualization skills, and improve your teams understanding of business processes, TDD, BDD, test data setup and predictive analytics.

7. Make digital a top level priority.

Follow the lead of the 66% organisations who have appointed a Chief Digital Officer, or the 17% who have integrated the responsibilities of the CDO into IT leadership, or even the 16% who have done the same within business leadership. Where Digital is a senior level priority, enterprise-wide Digital Transformation is sure to follow.

8. Develop a proper cloud-based test strategy.

In the next three years, we predict the strongest growth from private cloud and on premise cloud applications. There is a strong desire to move away from public cloud to private and on premise environments, which offer greater control over security. However, our study reveals that many organisations are currently ignoring the need to validate their move to cloud. The percentage of respondents that do not follow a specific test approach for testing cloud-based applications is increasing, up from 24% in 2015 to 49% this year. So get ahead of the competition by testing and validating your cloud migration.

9. Modernise your mobile testing strategy.

Security, efficiency and performance are stated as the top 3 priorities and yet paradoxically the actual effort being put into all 3 is down. These competitive differentiators in the complex mobile landscape should not be underestimated. Take a look at how Sogeti can help you refocus and update your Mobile and Digital test strategy here.

10. Automate the right things at the right time.

Don’t just look at automation as a quick fix per project but take a wider, longer term view. We suggest you focus initially on the things that can be automated and carried throughout all future projects. Overcome challenges like high maintenance scripts, clashing tools and incongruous frameworks by refreshing your tooling strategy; create a centralised automation team and don’t be afraid to adopt new strategies like progressive, scriptless and lifecycle automation.

These 10 New Year’s Testing Resolutions are just a fraction of the invaluable insights and advice available in the World Quality Report. To give you a deeper dive we’re holding a live, interactive video debate on the report’s key findings with Sogeti UK’s CEO Brian Shea, COO Darren Coupland, and Ian Wales and Toby Marsden from Hewlett Packard Enterprise. If you would like to join us for this webinar @1pm on 26th January, then click here.

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