By Sai Chintala, Senior Vice-President, Global Pre-Sales, Cigniti Technologies
As communication becomes an integral part of our lives with huge technological advancements, quality increasingly plays a key role in every aspect, be it voice, data, media broadcast or internet service. Operators are in an obligatory situation to keep their systems robust and stable for providing high quality uninterrupted service. Quality can be achieved through rigorous and continuous testing of the respective systems in a given ecosystem, which, in turn, would help in increasing customer satisfaction.
Focus areas for ensuring best quality
Quality being a sensitive area and a key aspect that has to be accomplished at lightning speed for faster time to market, a shift in the overall testing culture is required to drive things efficiently. The following are some elements that have to be given more importance to keep ahead in the race.
- Agile transformation: Being agile helps move things faster when compared to the traditional waterfall methodology. Everything becomes a parallel activity in the agile methodology, as opposed to the serial fashion of executing things in the waterfall method. This helps in maintaining the momentum. Development and testing go hand in hand and are carried out in iterations with frequent checkpoints to ensure that the product is in tune with current customer expectations. Agility always helps in the early identification of defects, thereby providing more time for the analysis required to deliver quality products.
- The automation way: In a typical large enterprise where integrated complex systems rule the
ecosystem to drive business, testing is a huge activity and the involvement of test automation shrinks the overall effort that is normally put into testing, in turn reducing the time to deliver products. Efficient test automation involves prioritisation of the application fitment with respect to release cycles, landscape complexity and functionalities, which get successfully translated into a powerful regression and risk-based test suite for on-demand execution. Greater automation in an application test life cycle paves the way for cost reduction. - Non-functional engineering: Traditional non-functional testing has to be shifted to an engineering thought process as it emphasises the performance, security and operationality of any given application. When this has to be delivered at lightning speed to accommodate the agile fashion, “engineering shift” helps in steering the entire process, which deep-dives into multiple dimensions pertaining to architectural analysis, benchmarking, dynamic testing, smart monitoring and production-readiness evaluation.
Process acceleration through DevOps
When the agile methodology already speeds up the application life cycle through its dynamic execution, DevOps (a combination of development and operations) adds value to it by forming a robust collaborative ecosystem, where the process, technology and tools from an engineering perspective are stitched together. When it comes to quality assurance and testing, DevOps helps at each and every stage through efficient automation with respect to build promotion, environment facilitation, application testing and post-production monitoring, thereby making the agile world more dynamic and helping deliver superior quality products.
