“The closer you look, the more you see” is the theme of this year’s World Quality Report: by probing deeper and utilizing appropriate tools and resources, we can gain a better understanding of whether IT solutions will provide a benefit to our end customers and achieve valuable outcomes in terms of business performance.
Here are five takeaways that I found interesting in the context of my work.
Takeaway #1. Use value stream management
One of the expectations of the quality and test function is to assure and ensure that the software development process delivers the expected value to the business and end-users. In practice, many teams and organizations struggle to make the value outcomes visible and manageable. However, quality engineering and testing activities have a prominent role to play in assessing, measuring, and managing value streams.
Value stream management is needed to implement a practice aimed at managing, controlling, and visualizing the value of software development and delivery activities both for the business and for IT. Highly promising visualization tools have the potential to help quality teams elevate themselves from pure technical validation to assuring value outcomes for the business.
• Make sure you define with business owners and project owners the expected value outcome of testing and quality activities.
• Define concrete and measurable value indicators that are connected to business objectives for each project – and ensure that quality and test results are connected and related to these value indicators.
• Implement a value dashboard by which stakeholders and team members can continuously view the progress and development of the value indicators.
Takeaway #2. Train full-stack quality engineers
Quality orchestration in Agile enterprises continues to see an upward trend. Its adoption in Agile and DevOps has seen an evolution in terms of team composition and skillset of quality engineers. The concept of the full-stack quality engineer is evolving. This year’s data shows an increase in the blend of technical and cross-functional skills of quality engineers embedded within Agile scrum teams.
Takeaway #3. Automate everything!
All organizations need a proper level of test automation today as Agile approaches are pushing the speed of development up. Testing, therefore, needs to be done faster, but it should not lose any of its rigor. Research leads to the following recommendations to increase the value of your quality automation initiatives:
Work earlier with quality automation experts.
Automation starts as the requirements are being created; build an automation-first approach into the requirements and stories
Review your tooling and frameworks on a regular basis.
One tool doesn’t do everything. Pick the best tools for the job. Don’t try and make one tool do everything.
Takeaway #4. Care about the quality of your test data
Test data provisioning is an essential part of the software testing lifecycle. Organizations must look at automated test data provisioning as an integral part of the continuous integration and delivery pipelines. Value stream management related tooling can help to integrate test data provisioning to the CI/CD pipelines. This approach may also help in ensuring that the right test data is deployed to the right non-production environment in the cloud.
With the growing use of data to drive business decisions, we expect that the validation of the accuracy and quality of data is becoming hugely important. Hence, organizations need to devise strategies that include effective validation rules and related standards to address the barriers to effectively implementing data validation approaches.
Takeaway #5. Be Agile in practice, rather than in theory
To stay successful, organizations must be highly responsive to change. Also, they must more than ever focus on generating value for their customers. Continuous change is required. Value outcome is the objective. Agile development and digital transformation continue to be the key drivers for further investments in IT. All these developments have direct implications for the continued development of both IT quality and software testing. When it comes to Agile quality methods, processes, and orchestration, there are six recommendations:
Make quality engineers an integral part of Agile development programs. The right talent and a blend of technical and business skills are critical for quality engineers in Agile. While SDET roles are becoming the norm, business domain knowledge is an essential skill.
Grow end-to-end test automation and increase levels of test automation across CI/CD processes, with automated continuous testing, to drive better code quality. This will enable improved product quality while reducing the cost of quality.
Make sure that your automation tests are running as part of the regular CI pipelines so they can be easily integrated with the day-to-day work.
As business owners are becoming more involved in testing activities, make sure they have the right tools and processes to allow them to test effectively.
Use package-specific tools for enterprise systems and increase levels of automation with pre-built libraries that are fit to use in an Agile approach.
Track and monitor metrics that are holistic quality indicators across the development lifecycle. Example: failed deployments metrics give a holistic view of quality across teams.
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