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Technology has made it to every aspect of our lives. Talking robots, online assistants and smart home devices no longer surprise us.
The influence of technology is growing, and businesses strive to take full advantage of it. For many companies, digital transformation is a way to speed up processes, support innovations, and embrace and open up new opportunities.
Quality assurance, being the indispensable part of the software development life cycle, has a key role along the path of digital transformation. Introducing quality checkpoints ensures the achievement of the planned business outcomes and flawless end-user experience and satisfaction, which is the objective of every digital endeavor.
Digital transformation has significantly influenced the ways QA and software testing are performed and how the results are achieved.
Here are the main improvements:
QA is no longer done at the end of the software development life cycle. Digital transformation has brought about the need to perform testing continuously. More and more often, testers are not asked to check the app functionality once the developers have deemed it to be ready. Today, testing and dev teams work in collaboration, doing their best to deliver a high-quality solution. To ensure testing accuracy and flexibility, organizations adopt Agile and DevOps practices.
But there are some exceptions. Many organizations still run software testing once the development is finished. Mainly, these are the companies representing highly regulated business sectors, such as the healthcare domain. For the projects that use medical devices, a key component for the product to be released to market is the approval by the FDA. To receive this approval, the company has to submit test results obtained on different stages of software development, including the final test results.
The obligatory final testing, however, doesn’t count out the need of testing throughout the development life cycle. As a rule, such projects are tested during all development stages with the end-to-end tests run at the very end, and the results are documented as required by FDA policies.
On the other side of the coin, there are IT-driven companies engaged in social media or digital marketing business who tend to be much more agile. Due to their nature, they have to respond to feedback from users and implement changes as fast as possible. Of course, testing of new releases and new products will run continuously. Fast feedback allows these companies to support their loyal audience and minimize business risks.