One of the most important issues faced by the
retail industry is digital transformation. The pressure, which has been created
by the digital customers, is forcing the brands to adapt to the transformation.
It is an intensive transformation of the business activities, processes, and
models in order to leverage the advantages of digital technologies in a
strategic way. They have revolutionized their engagement procedure with the
customers.
Along with the digital transformation of the business,
software testing also needs a parallel transformation. Testing and Quality
Assurance face many challenges, as it requires tackiling two divergent demands of the business. The
first demand refers to the greater centralization of testing resources, whereas
the second demand is to ensure that this centralized testing and QA is able to
support the digital agenda of a business.
The changing demands of the customer is intensifying
global competition. The reach of social media channels and new trends such as
the cloud and mobile are a few challenges, driven by the market. These need to be dealt with, by an
organization, on its road to digital transformation. Customers always expect a
good quality and seamless experience. The digital touch points of potential
customers help in introducing the value
into the entire process.
To cater to different emerging technologies, the
skill sets of an organization requires keeping up in order to leverage the
market and and consumer’s behavior; and resultantly
foresee the future possibilities.
The ultimate goal of a business is to ensure a
consistent user experience across all channels of interaction. Applications
need to be uniformly available across all categories of devices that provide
seamless user experience. Hence, the QA team needs to use optimized test automation tools for
testing across all devices, platforms and operating systems. The ability to
strategize automation testing and manual testing is a key factor of consideration
in the digital transformation of a business.
Higher process maturity is another key challenge
in order to adapt to the latest technology. Quality assurance is an inevitable
phase for establishing digital transformation more effectively.
Few additional challenges of testing in digital transformation
are as follows:
Budget
Pressure: There exists the forever requirement of
expecting more from the less. Furthermore, as testing is continuous, the
investment is required for it is also continuous.
Technical
Diversity: With
every release, there are changes in device features, OS support, browser
display, etc. Even if the application features are not changed, testing is
still required in order to ensure their seamless performance in the newer
versions.
Time to
Market: It is a constant race against time, to deliver
newer features earlier than the others, to deliver extended innovations. This
race starts with design phase, then comes development and then testing.
Releasing a software application earlier and faster than the others is a
constant goal and challenge.
STLC:
In order to achieve all the above factors, the software testing life cycle has
evolved with testing at different places in each of Waterfall , Agile and DevOps.
Being able to adopt and implement the best STLC as per the organization structure
is also one of the key testing challenges before a digital transformation.
Conclusion
A digitally transformed system is completely
dependant on customer interaction through the digital channels, the performance
of the client-facing applications and the back office systems. This creates
great challenges in terms of software quality. User experience testing,
security testing, performance testing, load testing are all critical in terms
of providing the best digital experience.
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