quality engineering

Why Should Enterprises Focus on QA to QE Transformation?

sitemanager — Wed, 01 Apr 2020 14:28:32 +0000

Contents1. Why Quality Engineering? 2. Why Quality Engineering role evolved? 3. Why your enterprise should transform from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering? 4. Conclusion

Enterprises are in need of quality products in today’s fast-paced world. Software quality assurance is the key process to ensure quality products. Wikipedia defines Software Quality Assurance (SQA) as a “Means of monitoring the software engineering processes and methods used to ensure quality.” SQA typically encompasses the entire software development life cycle (SDLC) which includes requirements gathering, design, coding, software testing, release management, and the final product launch.

Software testing being a part of the Quality Assurance (QA) has become an important step during the SDLC. This software testing is a significant gatekeeper for businesses to determine when the code could move into the final steps of user acceptance testing (UAT)and further to production.

This QA ensures that the developed software meets and complies with the standard set of quality specifications for a given product. This sort of QA testing deals with testing the software to identify bugs or defects if any, and ensures a quality product is delivered to end-users. The QA function ensures that the product meets the requirements and ascertains the product quality is achieved.In the earlier waterfall model, the QA testing was taken up at the end of the SDLC which led to deferred project timelines, and at times, even the quality was not properly achieved.

The QA team was more involved only in the identification of errors and bugs and retesting them to ensure a quality product is launched. Earlier, even the products were not so complex and QA testing could handle the requirements specifications and test the product.

But, in recent times, the products and applications are complex in their outlook and needed much more effort from the QA teams to ensure faster releases and at the same time maintaining software quality. Thus, there emerged a need to transform from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering.

Why Quality Engineering?

In recent times, the process of software development has moved towards agile and DevOps processes as businesses are in need for faster releases to get to market faster. Evidently, with agile and DevOps processes on the go, the software testing process has taken a shift-left approach wherein the testing is done parallel to software development to ensure faster identification of bugs and quality releases.

The QA in the agile process tests the entire system based on the sprints to cater to software features development.The QA teams take up software testing along with the development process, from the initial stages of DevOps process to ensure continuous integration(CI) and continuous delivery(CD) to ensure faster releases.

The DevOps CI/CD and agile development processes have changed the world of quality assurance. The QA teams have less planning time due to continuous releases during sprints and hence they struggle to accomplish regression testing on time.

Today, the QA teams are required to think more creatively and realistically than ever before. Thus, the QA has taken a shift from Quality Assurance to Quality engineering, to ensure faster releases enforced with DevOps CI/CD and agile processes.

Software quality engineering (SQE) assures high standards during a software development process and specifically holds good for agile and DevOps methodologies. Even in Quality Engineering, the key role is played by the quality engineers who create, implement and maintain systems to ensure quality processes.

Why Quality Engineering role evolved?

1. This change from QA to QE has been evident with more stress given upon automation and automated testing solutions being in place

2. With the connected and complex systems and APIs in place, testing the backend services has become complex as there is no visible UI which led to Quality Engineering emergence.

3. Significantly testing moved differently from unit, smoke tests towards integration, performance, usability and security testing, requiring the QA to be involved much earlier in the software testing process.

4. Today, with the products being continuously evolved as smart products and apps, QA teams don’t always have weeks to analyze requirements and create test cases in isolation and they have to think smartly on the go and rapidly develop test plans as the products evolve

Why your enterprise should transform from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering?

1. QA team in close association with the developers and the operations (DevOps) teams ensure faster and continuous releases by enforcing test automation initiatives and shifting QA efforts towards quality assurance by distancing silos.

2. QA teams follow a shift-left approach of testing to find defects early and speed up the time to market. The shift left allows developers to fix defects more quickly and at much lower cost, speeding time to market and increasing customer satisfaction.

3. QA is involved today to think like end-users and ensure to deliver great customer experience irrespective of the industry they operate especially while testing mobile applications.

4. With the increasing complexity of mobile apps and with IoT devices in place, testers should be more informed with various real-time scenarios and should be able to find real-world defects effectively.

5. In today’s digital age, QA teams need to concentrate more on probable security risks that might arise when data is shared among systems, rather than focusing only on the security requirements of the standalone applications.

6. QA teams are also involved to implement new tools and various automated processes much early in the development lifecycle to ensure faster releases with test automation and even use test automation frameworks to achieve faster releases to deliver quality products.

All the above stated have culminated into a shift from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering and this shift ensures integrating quality into the entire SDLC to engineer better quality. Further, this transformation has also led to a new role of SDET (Software Developer in Test) responsible to build test infrastructure, identify test scope, and define quality criteria. These SDET’s start with unit testing and extend to all other tests and should even build a mitigation strategy in case the situation demands.

They are responsible to manage and maintain CI/CD pipelines to ensure the code keeps moving through the pipeline. They work closely with all teams of developers, operations teams and the product owners. They should also have a deep eye on what should be automated and should be able to plan quickly and efficiently based on the application under test.

As a final thought, though there has been a broader role given to the QA in the agile and DevOps processes with a move towards Quality Engineering, but still they are responsible for analyzing and validating requirements, developing and executing test cases placing effective efforts on automation qa and assisting in the resolution of bugs.

Conclusion

Software quality assurance by the QA teams plays a key role in the SDLC to enable a quality product. Earlier, as the products and applications were relatively simpler in their outlook, the QA teams tested the products and ensured quality is maintained. But, today with agile and DevOps processes on the go and with the evolution of smarter and complex products, there has been a need for the QA automation services to evolve as QE to support smarter and quality testing. This transition from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering assures faster releases with DevOps CI/CD processes and ensure quality is delivered to end-users.

Talk to our industry experts for more queries on QA to QE transformation.

The post Why Should Enterprises Focus on QA to QE Transformation? first appeared on TestingXperts.

Evolving from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering

admin — Tue, 09 Apr 2019 04:50:50 +0000

but for now, just glance at the World Quality Report 2021-22 that surveyed 1750 CIOs and other senior technology professionals (10 sectors and 32 countries)

Contents 1. How to Evolve from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering 2. The Big Burst – Choices, Challenges, and Complexities 3. Why QA needs an intervention? 4. But – How to evolve from QA to QE? 5. QE – More than a Vowel Change

How to Evolve from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering

The report unravels how ‘user satisfaction’ is coming on the top of the stack of most Quality Assurance (QA) and testing strategies. The advent of customer-centred innovation, digital transformations, agile and DevOps approaches, Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud, etc. is fuelling this change. But above everything else, what stands out is a list of recommendations that make you reconsider the very role of QA. The report urges professionals and managers to: – Amplify the level of smart test automation – Transform QA and test function to support agile development and DevOps teams – Invest in smart QA and Test platforms, and – Define a test platform strategy and QA strategy on an enterprise level But these are no surprises. When the report noted that 99 percent of respondents are using DevOps in at least one of their projects and that automation is emerging as the biggest bottleneck that is holding back QA and testing today – is it not just iterating what you see in your office and scrum-huddles every now and then?

The Big Burst – Choices, Challenges, and Complexities

We are in a time where devices are proliferating at a never-before speed, where 97 percent of respondents (in the report) show some kind of IoT presence in their products and where Cloud, DevOps, and Agile have ceased to be mere powerpoint enhancers. They are now stark realities that software and application teams encounter and leverage every day. No wonder, there is a pressing need to bring Software Development/Design Engineer in Test (SDETs) into the team; and to inject skills in security, nonfunctional testing, test environments, and test data management among testers. The challenges and context of this modern software/applications world have created a seismic shake. It is a post-Uber planet where only the best will survive. And relying on QA alone is not going to make the cut here.

Why QA needs an intervention?

Quality Assurance (QA) only entails activities for ensuring quality, spotting flaws early enough, code review, analysis, and refactoring. But the users need a stronger and broader variant of this approach. One that goes beyond testing cycles, one that percolates into the culture and the very way developers and designers think about software. Yes, get set for the arrival of Quality Engineering (QE). Quality Engineering transcends quality control, quality assurance, and testing. It is proactive, strategic, forward-looking, intuitive and is way bigger in scope than QA. It is not limited to processes and procedures. It expands into the realm of the way these processes come up – right at the nucleus of ideation and user-empathy. It straddles across all areas of QA and testing and lifts quality to an altogether new level. You will notice that QA is inclined towards some earlier stages of the software development, and had a postcode-writing role wherein QA teams checked what developers had written. But QE is not the fag end of a software cycle. It is a radical way that starts way ahead of where code begins. It permeates the entire development flow. QE helps organizations and developer-tester teams to come together against the onslaught of the diversity as well as the exponential rise of too many devices, platforms, applications, and content needs. QA alone would not suffice to match the speed, persistence, and thoroughness that the Agile development and Shift-Left world demands today. Quality Engineering ensures that quality is embraced early on and is enhanced at every step and desk – and not just at the exit door doormat of software code. It undertakes end-to-end and architectural approaches for comprehensive software quality.

But – How to evolve from QA to QE?

Organizations have to embrace this new culture and mindset to embark on this massive shift. This is where a continuous integration model between developers and testers would come into play. Testing becomes consistent, embedded into code design and gets easy to integrate into the entire chain. Development becomes iterative, collaborative and adaptive. It also entails localization of problems and fixing of individual parts so that all red flags are addressed before the whole software adds up. Organizations will have to usher in a new way of looking at and designing the software development lifecycle. This has to be fortified with sustainable test automation frameworks and methodologies, as well as Continuous Integration endeavours. Resources and bandwidth would have to be furnished so that a test infrastructure can flourish and integrate without any scalability or latency hiccups. Test environments and production environments would also need to be conjoined in a way that quality becomes a precursor rather than an afterthought. Automation of tests might be called for. QA folks might be asked to think and code like a user. This is where the culture and habit parts would face a makeover. Helping and empowering others – beyond organizational silos, dependencies and software hierarchies – will be the new norm for Quality Engineering to get into action. Even the delivery aspects would change- get set for a scenario of multiple releases and entire-system-checks. QE teams are involved and impactful in software design at a new degree and depth; so that core functionality tests can be planned for with a proactive edge. In short, the move to QE reflects but is not limited to, the switch-over from waterfall era to Shift-Left era of software. With QE in place, quality travels right up to the north-most point of any software. QE is about thinking of quality all the time, at every level and by everyone around.

QE – More than a Vowel Change

Businesses in the current era of impatient customers cannot afford to have even a small disruption in their business-uptime. That gives a different gravity to quality. That is where QE shines. And a QE professional is much more than a coder or a tester. Project managers and CTOs are gearing up to tap this new face and fuel of quality. It’s time for a new regimen – one that does more than simply measure.

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