Why is Quality Assurance essential for Your Utilities Software?
We are all aware that the energy and utilities sector is going through a gigantic revamp in 2021. The clean energy movement has brought significant investments into renewable energy resources. Experts predict that this industry will see more peaks into this decade.
The current unprecedented pandemic has indeed plateaued the growth of utilities for a while. The sector was hit with limited supplies, yet the demand for the essentials was huge. As we enter the post-vaccination phase and businesses are finally starting to open up again, there is a growth ascent in near sight.
So, how do you, as a utilities service provider, keep up with the growing demands to enhance your digital capabilities?
The answer lies in testing your software for compliance, user-friendliness, and safety.
Advantages of testing your utilities software:
In a highly regulated industry such as utilities, the importance of software testing for energy management software, cannot be stressed enough. After all, millions of people will be dependent on your utilities software.
When it comes to quality assurance, apart from delivering a flawless software product, it is more about building your brand’s reputation when customer loyalties are fickle, and they waste no time in switching to a competitor’s product. Testing your utilities software can:
- Ensure implementation of benchmark technology
Creation of an outstanding industry technology is possible with quality software solutions. The energy management sector is rife with software, yet customer-centric solutions are less. To deploy software that is cutting edge, reliable and secure, companies must focus their efforts on comprehensive testing.
2. Drive down costs
Quality assurance can help you cut down future expenses by eliminating flaws at the very beginning. By adopting innovative testing strategies, you can improve your performance and get a cut above the competition.
3. Improve and channel further innovation
Innovation is an essential ingredient for continued success. To catalyze digital innovation, the presence of effective testing strategies for your software is not only necessary but an indication of the dynamic nature adopted as a core value by your organization.
4. Assure compliance to set regulations
Energy management and power systems, in particular, need to comply with specific regulations like SAIDI, CAIDI, SAIFI, and other governmental compliances. Testing your software frequently and exhaustively can help you comply with these standards and run uninterrupted services.
Quality assurance of utility software:
Different types of testing processes can assess and improve your utility software’s quality in terms of its performance, functionalities and security. A certified software tester will recommend testing your software on several fronts to deliver a flawless product. These testing types include:
Legacy application testing
With utilities being an incessant necessity, its software (applications containing inherent business logic) would be years old. It is challenging to test these legacy applications in the absence of documentation.
However, the implementation of regression test suites and having a dependency-driven testing approach can ensure comprehensive test coverage, thereby saving you time and effort.
Storm readiness testing
Weather is a vital real-world condition to test the reliability of your utilities applications. The importance of IT system resiliency is paramount for uninterrupted communication and business. It can be ensured through storm readiness testing.
Gaining an insight into your storm readiness helps you identify issues in the IT systems, thereby helping you pinpoint and rectify costly performance issues, ultimately saving you revenue and enhancing customer experience.
ERP system testing
The utilities landscape is hugely dependent on ERP systems. From taking care of its supply chain to managing its vast workforce, and creating the balance between finance, manufacturing, procurement, and other business facets, the organizational success in a utilities industry purely depends on the robustness of its ERP solutions.
Testing these solutions for stability, dependency and scalability is essential. It ensures that the applications are ready to integrate data over different subsystems and avoid costly technical glitches that affect the workflow.
Integration testing
A hardcore integration test strategy helps your utilities software identify critical modules that need to be tested on priority. Utilities software has various modules that need to work in coherence. The modules are affected by changes in requirements from the client.
To ensure the quality of your utilities software, all the application modules in your software must be tested. It will rule out errors in database handling, exception handling and interferences from external hardware.
Website testing
UX and usability are also important elements when ensuring your digital success. After all, your website is the digital gateway to your business. The Utilities sector is a dynamic industry that is constantly innovating; therefore, it is pertinent that its websites also reflect the same.
Test your utilities website for easy navigation, search engine optimization, data consistency and integrity, cross-browser compatibility and performance across multiple devices.
Web Services testing
To ensure seamless data communication between two applications/machines, the implemented interface that connects them must be tested for proper functionality. Whether your energy management system is aimed at data collection and reporting or monitoring and engagement, appropriate web services testing is key to verify that all APIs operate as expected.
Data/ETL testing
Being a part of a data-rich industry, energy management systems are often heavily dependent on the accuracy of the input and output data. Extract-Transform-Load testing’s underlying purpose is to detect problems with the source data early on, that is, even before it is loaded to the data repository.
Data testing helps check for inconsistencies and ambiguities in business rules that lead to data transformation and integration.
Accessibility testing
Accessibility testing of your utilities software is a stringent requirement that needs to be fulfilled to ensure that your software complies with legal regulations. Various governments have passed acts in favor of IT software systems to be built in compliance with disability-friendly software such as
● Speech recognition software
● Screen reader software
● Screen magnification software
● Special keyboards etc.
Your software product can cater to this market too if it’s made user-friendly for the differently-abled.
Security Role testing
Energy management software handles data pertaining to cities, countries and the world at large. The data of this measure, if compromised, can cause catastrophic losses. It is, therefore, essential to safeguard it by testing the data against various threats and vulnerabilities.
Uncovering the loops and weaknesses of your utilities software system can help make it impenetrable to malicious programs. Reliable security testing ultimately helps in building a safe and secure software application with reduced risks.
Automation testing
Automation testing is the need of the hour for energy management software. The enormity of data and its interrelated nature make automation testing an utmost necessity. Also, for the data of this size, which is tedious and repetitive, automation testing comes as a saving grace by increasing the speed of test execution and the test coverage.
Summing it up:
Quality assurance of your energy management software is a vital step to power up customer satisfaction with uninterrupted quality. To help achieve safer, user-friendly utilities software, you will need an experienced team of quality assurance experts that can help you improve performance and assure more significant business and user value.
As a result of software testing, the reduced risks and increased reliability can help move towards your digital transformation swiftly and more effectively. Moreover, Quality assurance makes way for innovation and thereby fuels customer satisfaction with more advanced and efficient systems.
