The Importance of Quality Assurance and its Maintenance for Digital Products

If the world continues to depend on paper or traditional efforts, enterprises are ultimately forced to experience a digital transformation to remain competitive. Adapting the digital transformation journey involves a complex variety of processes, which creates a demand for a faster transformation cycle and persistent service excellence.

Thus, assuring the quality within the digital transformation cycle is essential for enterprises that focuses towards customer experience. If there is a miss in quality it would lead to huge costs of ramifications for the brand or service. Which is why Quality Assurance (QA) plays a key role in the transformation cycle because it allows enterprises to focus on maintaining their entire customer experience while at the same time ensure to deliver high quality applications or digital products with respect to funtionability, design, reliability, durability, & price of the product.

Importance of Quality Assurance in Software Testing

Quality Assurance in Software Testing (also popularly known as QA Testing) is defined as a procedure to ensure the quality of software products or services provided to the customers by an organization. Any company’s success after the digital transformation relies heavily on its customers, which is why QA focuses on enhancing their infrastructure, thus replacing existing redundant procedures and instead adopting more efficient and effective ones.

In order to ensure the quality and stability that customers expect of an organisation, Quality Assurance and Testing teams need to:

• Manage numerous applications, services and platforms to ensure smoother development of sophisticated products
• Implement universal value chain automation that streamlines test execution
• Blend integration tests into the overall app lifecycle, which cleans up a product from top to bottom.

Both the digital and non-digital platforms in which the customers interact must be configured for functionality testing. Testing conditions must mimic user behaviour to ensure a well-defined and consistent customer experience. In order to automate and perfect the whole customer participation environment, QA teams preferably should repeatedly test automation on multiple platforms and operating systems.

The whole process of creation, production, promotion, distribution and final delivery must cover QA and testing teams.

How does QA work?

Quality assurance has a defined cycle called PDCA cycle or Deming cycle. The phases of this cycle are:

• Plan: Organisations should plan and establish the process related objectives and determine the processes that are required to deliver a high-quality end product
• Do: Development and testing of processes and also “do” changes in the processes
• Check: Monitoring of processes, modify the processes, and check whether it meets the predetermined objectives
• Act: Implement actions that are necessary to achieve improvements in the processes

QA Contribution to the Digital Transformation

1. DevOps Testing: DevOps is becoming an integral part of every organization’s strategy as it provides higher speed, frequency, and reliability while engineering products, applications, and solutions. The emphasis is on organizational resilience and fast delivery cycles with continuous integration and continuous execution.
2. Cloud Testing: Cloud testing is a method to assess the performance and functionality of software applications implemented in the cloud environment. Simulated real-world network traffic is used to assess web applications implemented in a cloud environment.
3. IoT Testing: IoT testing is conducted to ensure that IoT devices operate as expected and are able to connect successfully with other devices on the network. Testing these devices in a managed laboratory setting would be somewhat different from testing them in the real environment where they will be installed.
4. Cognitive QA: Advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning have helped create predictions in the QA phase. This involves changes in the mindset of the company and the approach to user experience testing for the consumer. Cognitive QA is for the application of machine learning, statistical and prescriptive research strategies. The secret to cognitive QA is a self-learning and self-adapting environment.
5. Chatbot Testing: Conversational apps or chatbots can transform the way consumers communicate with brands and companies. Many market leaders claim that conversational interfaces can replace websites and apps by using the most common means of human communication — dialogues.

Maintenance in QA for Digital Products

Whenever a new product goes live after a digital transformation, product owners are worried with how it can be maintained. In order to better understand how project maintenance works, one has to dig further into what has to be achieved after the work has been finished.

There are many activities that need to be carried out while a commodity is alive, so that it is in what is considered a repair process. Understanding the essence of these activities is essential to the day-to-day operation of every digital product. They’re normally organized as follows:

1. Preventive Maintenance: conduct routine activities that ensure the operating status of the program (e.g. security updates)
2. Corrective Maintenance: refers to a situation that has affected the correct function of the system (e.g., intervenes on a server failure and bring it up).
3. Evolutive Maintenance: activities that fall beyond preventive and corrective maintenance (e.g. rewrite a module to increase functionality and help more users, implement a new function, add a new server to support development, etc.).

Quality Assurance is meant to verify if the product produced is safe for use. In order to achieve this, enterprises should have protocols and guidelines to be adopted, which need to be strengthened on a periodic basis. It reflects primarily on the nature of the product/service that we offer to consumers before or after the deployment of the program.