Why is Digital Assurance and Testing Important? Give 6 Reasons.

In the current scenario, customers have become increasingly demanding. This is in terms of the range/scope/scale of products/services available, their seamless functioning, promptness of customer feedback and a rewarding experience. To offer the same, businesses adopt new strategies, technologies, business models, and processes. Also, the business objectives have to be redefined and recalibrated on newer parameters to achieve ROI. The quest to offer better products and services by leveraging latest technologies, mobility solutions, and social media has brought digital assurance and testing to the fore.

Furthermore, digital assurance and testing offer a sense of security and assurance to customers that their sensitive personal information remains safe. It assures utmost importance for it keeps businesses afloat in the turbulent waters dictated by competition. The bottom line is that digital software testing helps enterprises to deliver the following outcomes:

• Faster time to market
• Better customer experience
• Achieving the competitive edge
• Adding business value and profitability

Cybercrime has become a serious threat to businesses for its role in stealing confidential customer and business information. Cyber criminals take recourse to the use of malicious software, tools and techniques such as malware, trojans, viruses, social engineering, etc. to wreak havoc. They can potentially bring a business to its knees by destroying its market credibility. The possibility of cyber criminals targeting a software product increases manifold when there are vulnerabilities and glitches galore.

Digital software testing ensures a software product gets its vulnerabilities plugged and glitches removed. It does by so increasing the testing area and speed by way of test automation. It comprises of a test automation framework, reusable test scripts, accelerators, and a robust reporting mechanism among others. Digital testing ensures that a software works seamlessly across the domains of cloud, mobility, social media, and analytics. It is a great enabler for digital transformation and helps to optimize business outcomes and cost. Digital QA and testing create a seamless Omni-channel experience for the end customers. To enhance the scope and impact of digital QA and testing, it is run alongside the development process by following Agile and DevOps.

How can digital assurance and testing add business value in six different ways?

Gaining competitive edge: Digital quality assurance helps a software product to become resilient and face market dynamics in a better way. However, in order to do so, the use of a right testing framework and tools is required. When the quality of a product is ensured, it turns out to be market compatible leading to a better customer experience. Thus, customers, when assured of a better experience, often do not look for alternatives. This leads to better sales and a competitive edge for the product and brand in the market. Digital quality assurance is generally conducted on parameters such as performance, functionality, security and usability.

Enhancing customer experience: The paradigm of DevOps is ultimately aimed at enhancing the customer experience. It does so through continuous improvement, testing and delivery. DevOps integrates processes such as development, testing and operations and incorporates a better customer feedback mechanism. Once the customers find that the product meets parameters such as navigation, security, and performance, they tend to stick with the same.

Faster time to market: Test automation as a part of the digital testing services brings about a faster testing of products. It does so through repetitive testing or by using virtualization. As the test coverage and the quality of the product improves, the time spent on rework is reduced. Thus, the product reaches the market quickly.

Building products aligned to customer expectations: The development of a quality culture and an increased collaboration amongst stakeholders lead to the development of quality products. With Agile and DevOps adoption software product development gains agility and ultimately the software/application gets built as per the expectations of the customers.

Security proofing: Digital testing services remove the vulnerabilities of a product and enhance its security features. These pre-empt hackers from breaking into systems and stealing classified information.

Omni channel validation: Digital QA validates the functioning of a software product across platforms, devices, operating systems and networks. This leads to a better customer experience.

Conclusion

Digital QA enhances the quality of a software application and addresses the challenges of an ever changing business environment. It not only adds value to a business, but also helps it to gain competive edge.

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Michael works for Cigniti Technologies, which is one of the top Independent Software Testing Services company in the world to be appraised at CMMI-SVC Level 5, and an ISO 9001:2008 & ISO 27001:2013 certified organization.

5 Reasons Why Your New Business Ideas Need Digital Assurance

Digital transformation is all about leveraging technologies by businesses to streamline processes, improve the quality of products or services, and enhance the customer experience. In the highly competitive digital ecosystem of the day, innovation is the key to stay ahead of the competition curve. It can be done through implementing ideas that have the power to disrupt the existing ecosystem. For example, Uber brought the concept of app based cabs without even owning a single cab of the fleet. This idea has not only given a whole new experience to the customers in terms of convenience and cost, but has significantly added to the bottom line of the company as well. However, no matter how revolutionary or impactful an idea is, it should be tested for digital assurance.

Why digital assurance? 
When businesses adopt digital transformation to deliver better products and services and to gain the competitive edge, their processes, systems, networks and applications are exposed to risks. These risks could be in the form of glitches or vulnerabilities, which if not identified and eliminated in time, could lead to the following consequences. 

• A bad user experience leading to the abandonment of the product

• Users facing issues like the compromise of their sensitive information including credit card details

• Disruption of the system leading to missing deadlines and angry clients

• Business falling foul of regulatory agencies and inviting penalties and censure

• Business facing costly lawsuits

• Loss of customer trust, brand value and revenue

Importantly, the digital landscape is fraught with risks of viruses, malware, trojans, and ransomware injected by hackers for malicious purposes. So, any software product deployed in the market should be subjected to a rigorous digital assurance testing. This is needed to assure customers and clients not to speak of the developers about the suitability of the product or service. Digital assurance testing ensures the product meets the desired quality outcomes in terms of performance, functionality, usability and security. Moreover, since digital products use a multitude of devices, platforms, operating systems, browsers and networks, they should be tested for their seamless performance across dimensions.  

The five reasons why business ideas need digital assurance

#1 Accelerated time to market: One of the best ways to beat the competition is to reach customers with an innovative and quality compliant product or service before others. This calls for the implementation of the Agile and DevOps model of digital QA where digital testing is part of the development sprint. The aim is to test the quality of code alongside its development and integration in the SDLC. By implementing test automation, businesses can carry out shift-left and shift-right testing approaches. Thus, with continuous improvement and testing, quality compliant products can reach the market faster.  

#2 Creates a quality culture: In the present DevOps guided SDLC, ensuring the quality of an application is not the job of the developers or testers alone. The onus of continuous improvement and testing lies with the operations team as well. Moreover, providing digital assurance solutions goes beyond mere deployment of a software, but lasts till its entire lifecycle. This calls for creating a quality culture in the organization where every stakeholder is responsible for enhancing the quality of the software to meet customer expectations.  

#3 Make the product customer oriented: Many a times, businesses are not attuned to the market dynamics and can go on needlessly adding features and functionalities. It is only through digital testing that businesses can understand the relevance of the product from the customers’ perspective and work towards achieving the same.  

#4 Makes the product competitive: When the right test automation tools and frameworks are used, they lead to a quicker identification of glitches. The product so tested and deployed in the market remains robust and secure. It is able to overcome the pulls and pressures of the market dynamics quite easily. 
  
#5 Make use of cutting edge digital testing tools: The requirement of a product to meet stringent quality parameters across digital dimensions can only be met by using cutting edge digital testing tools. The digital dimensions encompassing cloud, IoT, predictive analysis, big data, or AI need the use of the best digital testing tools, frameworks, and IDE’s in a collaborative way. 

Conclusion 
To ensure that innovative digital ideas meet the stated business objectives, digital assurance and testing is needed across the SDLC. This way, a product born out of an idea can meet customer expectations and remains resilient to the competing market forces. 

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Challenges of Testing an IoT Application.

The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its related technologies and software applications has confronted the testing teams with a number of challenges. With IoT, where most of the everyday objects communicate with each other, and where technologies upgrade every other day, new challenges have emerged for the software testing industry. 

For any given software project, QA teams need to ensure that a single app functions as designed and performs as per  the user expectations. As the IoT devices  seamlessly connect and communicate with a wide variety of platforms, devices and operating systems, the additional stress on the testing team is enormous. However, such challenges are completely outweighed when it comes to the security challenges posed by the software architecture of the IoT application. With innumerable devices connected to each other in the IoT, there are numerous potential attack vectors that can be exploited by the cyber criminals. If cyber criminals were to tamper with the settings of such devices, the consequences could be highly devastating. 

With the amount of detail that needs to be covered in an IoT testing, having a list of critical QA priorities is very important. Such priorities need to cover the length and breadth of the challenges of IoT testing. 

The different areas of testing an IoT application are as follows:

-      Functionality: Web/UI, embedded and back-end computing.

-      Compatibility: Multiple Configuration, Protocol and product Versions, Backward Compatibility and Mobile OS.

-      Connectivity: Communication between the devices, third party applications and the infrastructure.

-      Performance of the network, communication and internal computation.

-      Exploratory: Rare scenarios and beyond functional requirements and structured testing.

-      Security: Privacy, Autonomy and Control.

The top challenges and solutions that the QA can enlist are as follows:

-      The convergence of Hardware and Software: The ecosystem of IoT is made of devices, sensors and applications. When it comes to millions of sensors and devices in conjunction with intelligent software, only functionality validation is not enough.  

-      Additional factors along with a working system: IoTworks with sensors and devices communicating with multiple software back-ends with complex algorithms.It is not only enough to ensure a working set of device software. It requires a robust validation process with extremely complex real time scenarios. Obtaining such scenarios is an extreme challenge for the QA team.

-      Sensor Interactions: The biggest challenge lies in the creation of an environment in order to test the real-time implementation of the IoT application. Setting up such an environment requires numerous analytics engine and a significant experience in technical simulation. Although the hardware and the protocols are well tested beforehand, understanding the application intelligence and the device complexity is an extremely big challenge for the QA experts. 

-      The device interaction layer: Here the software and hardware components interact in a real-time IoT environment. Their conformance to standards, interoperability, backward compatibility and security are the additional challenges in addition to typical software testing.

-      The user interaction layer: The success of the overall application depends on the user receiving a seamless experience. The main testing challenges include the simulation of network modes along with device level validation, the real time usability along with the back-end IoT environment.

Conclusion

The IoT ecosystem puts forward a plethora of testing challenges. These challenges can be thought of as opportunities to build new solutions. Some of these new solutions are Protocol Simulators, Data Recorders and Service Virtualization. The software industries need to empower their QA team with reliable IoT products and services. It is important for the QA teams to upskill themselves beyond the traditional functional testing and get ready for the integrated testing of such embedded software.

Cloud Testing – Issues, Challenges, Needs and Practices

The concept of cloud computing is gaining a lot of popularity due to its ease of access, security and disaster recovery process amongst other things.

With cloud computing, companies can store, manage or process all their files and data using internet servers instead of local storage. Due to a lot of benefits offered by cloud computing, companies have also started using this technology to test performance of software and applications. Cloud testing includes testing of applications using cloud based resources (hardware, infrastructure and software) for a cohesive, end-to-end solution. 

Why Use Cloud Testing

Previously, testing of applications was done internally by the testing team of a company. But as more and more services are moving to the cloud, the testing process is becoming a lot better. There are numerous benefits of using cloud software testing compared to regular testing methods.

-  Lesser cost of testing: Due to the flexibility offered by the Cloud, the computing resources can be easily scaled up or down whenever required to provide a cost-effective website and application performance. Companies essentially have to pay for just what they use. Unlike the regular in-house testing process, businesses do not need to invest a lot of money to set up hardware and infrastructure for long term testing. They can go to the cloud provider directly, who takes care of the tools and licenses.

-  Test under different circumstances: Cloud infrastructure is built to handle different testing scenarios for optimum results. Companies can replicate virtual users in various locations across the globe to test how the application responds when used far and wide. Cloud services also support enterprise testing due to its scalability.

- Faster testing: Tests can be run virtually on-demand with scalable Cloud infrastructure. Companies can easily schedule testing times and resources are allocated accordingly. This eliminates long delays as is seen with hardware allocation and deployment procedures of in-house testing.

Challenges in Cloud Testing

Cloud testing can be an effective way to test applications and websites for businesses. But just like every other testing process, it has its own set of challenges.

-  One of the major cloud testing challenges faced by companies is the level of service provided by the vendor. Often after a company has moved a major part of its operations to the Cloud, it cannot be accessed when required. The Cloud service provider can thus cause delays in the testing process.

-   With cloud testing it can be difficult to isolate root causes for multiple problems encountered in load testing. Also, when trying to precisely measure effects of minor changes made to application code or its settings, cloud testing can make it difficult due to differences in internet traffic and bandwidth availability.

-   Sometimes during load testing, one particular IP address can generate a lot of traffic. Apparently, security teams identify the pattern to resemble a DoS attack and shut down the tests. In such cases, the traffic might even be real and lack of a proper testing strategy or schedule can cause undue delays.

Best Practices in Cloud Testing

1. Preparing for a two-stage process: The initial stage should be for internal testing, where minor performance issues can be sorted out under medium load. Companies should proceed to the second cloud testing stage only after preliminary internal tests, by increasing the load gradually for large-scale application testing.

2. Using multiple cloud providers: Using different cloud providers enable companies to test in more geographical locations and get more realistic results. Also, the testing can be more scalable. Network issues can also be sorted at the provider level in this case.

3. Keep your data secure: It is wise to encrypt data transferred between controllers and load generators. This secures both the data sent and received. Also, securing the load generators with their own firewalls prevents external threats.

In a world of Cloud Computing, it can be extremely beneficial for large companies to move their application testing to the cloud.

 With cloud testing best practices, a lot of bottlenecks can be avoided effeeffectively ma results