Sofware Quality: Friend or Foe of your Digital Transformation?

An accelerated pace of innovation transforms every single industry. Existing players extends to new niches and new players disrupt entirely relevant segments of the economy, blurring the borders of long-established competitive arenas.

Digital Transformation plays a cause-consequence effect that triggers a self-accomplished prophecy of iterative innovation cycles.

Software, in a whole sense, is the basic infrastructure that supports this evolutionary process.

Software building has been, and still is, a permanent challenge of myriad of organizations. Some excel at it, some struggle. We can fairly state that despite a meaningful number of horror stories about wasted resources applied to software projects/products coming to public from time to time, the overall software building process has improved significantly.

Agile & lean methodologies and automation have contributed to such advancements. However, an apparent paradox emerged: the increase in software coding productivity did not translate entirely to working software. I mean, the actual interaction of clients (in this sense, customers or users) with digital platforms and software products produces value. In real life that happens when software is deployed in productive environment or channels available to clients. Software that is already coded but waiting to be tested, checked, or integrated is just work in progress. As with other classes of ´intermediate inventory´ those lines of code are subject to obsolescence, create complexity and administrative burden, and ´obscure´ system visibility.

DevOps came to help the whole software creation and deployment process. Proposing flow, feedback and learning end to end infused discipline across the software cycle from conceptualization to development to consumption.

A continuous pipeline of software integration and deployment (CI/CD) acts as the blood of that flow that maintains alive the working software, enabling value creation in the customer journey.

Fast movement means increased throughput. In some cases, represent hundreds or thousands or hundreds of thousands (literally, like in Google or Amazon)(1.) new pieces of software being made available for their consumption.

Large volumes and complexity of digital platforms and their CI/CD increase pressure on quality creating a tradeoff between diminished throughput and degrading customer experience.

Do we have to choose the venom to poison our Digital Transformation?

Certainly not.

Quality Engineering emerges as a renewed discipline with new paradigms of shift left(2.) evolving from fragmented testing techniques to Software Quality Management and Governance.

It´s not that the investment in testing is not already material(3.). What is changing is how present in the C-Suite agenda the software quality is(4.).

Software Quality and Testing, a once considered ´Ugly Duckling´ of the software spectrum is now key to support companies’ strategies and positioning. Customer journeys and loyalty, brand equity and digital assets monetizing & preservation, all dance to the rhythm of valuable, satisfactory interactions of our clients in a variety of channels glued by software.

Software Quality and Testing has evolved from a manual approach (identified sometimes as an IT entry point career) to an increasingly automated one. What we can expect is a next-soon automated automation function. AI and algorithms will define from the initial coding steps coming from development and from the actual consumption of software in production the tests and procedures needed to maintain a smooth, safe, and optimized user experience.

It sounds easier than the tough reality is(5.). The action item and advise here is old school. Avoid get stuck in analysis paralysis and at the same time look beyond the tangle of hype and put focus in the basics: process, people and tools/apps under a cultural umbrella that nurtures innovation and continuous improvement.

1.https://cloud.google.com/devops/state-of-devops/.

2.Shift Left is about doing things earlier in the development cycle. Source: van der Cruijsen 2017.

In this case is to involve testing teams earlier in the process and to think about testing at all stages of the process.

3.The average testing spends in the last 5 years according to Statista are 28% of the overall IT spend. https://www.statista.com/statistics/500641/worldwide-qa-budget-allocation-as-percent-it-spend/

4. https://hbr.org/2019/09/why-fixing-software-bugs-should-be-the-ceos-problem

5.”The level of automation is still below 20%, and that is a true concern. When we look at the overall maturity of how QA testing is being executed in agile environments, this is still holding us back.” — Mark Buenen, Global Leader for Digital Assurance and Quality Engineering, Capgemini Group — World Quality Report 2020–21

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.