#digitalqa

Customer experience or CX has become the fulcrum around which all digital strategies drawn by enterprises revolve. It decides the success of enterprises and the latter are splitting their hair on how to enhance the digital touchpoints of customer access - websites, web applications, and mobile applications, among others. To understand the critical role of delivering superior customer experience, let us cite an example:

A big brand decides to undergo digital transformation and move its products and services online a la the eCommerce model. The entire exercise, including the launch of the portal, is done with precision and fanfare. However, on D-day, the portal flounders, leaving the customers frustrated and the brand’s reputation lying in tatters. The reasons could be many; the pages loaded slowly, the images were not attractive, the payment gateway did not function properly, and many more. So, instead of the enterprise moving to the new realm and improving sales, the outcome was exactly the opposite.

Remember, whenever customers interact with a digital touchpoint, they expect it to work seamlessly. And should they face any issues, they are likely to disown the portal, product, service, or brand, and reach out to the nearest competitor. Hence, enterprises should aim at delivering superior customer experiences across digital devices, namely, desktops, smartphones, notebooks, laptops, and others. So, how to go about this without robbing a bank? The answer lies in conducting extensive digital testing in the SDLC. 

Further, when new technologies are leveraged to develop fast, attractive, robust, secure, responsive, and feature-rich software products or solutions, customer expectations tend to rise. This is because customers want the best experience across devices, browsers, operating systems, networks, and others. This makes the task of developers and testers challenging when they go about incorporating advanced digital assurance solutions into the SDLC. Let us discuss how modernizing the digital testing strategy can garner better customer experiences.  

Modernizing digital QA strategy to achieve superior CX

The role of digital testing in any digital business transformation journey is clear. And with the pandemic still looming large, businesses need to modernize their digital quality assurance strategy to accelerate their transformational journey. They need to grapple with challenges such as remote client management, fluid work environments, security issues, and automated customer experiences. Formulating and executing a digital testing strategy is not only about fixing bugs and accelerating the development cycle alone. It includes the coexistence of development methodologies, multiple tools and applications, and planning cycles.

Digital-first testing: The emergence of such methodologies has allowed businesses to strengthen, quicken, and streamline their testing processes by causing minimal disruption. And with test automation being adopted across domains, there is a significant reduction in testing time and the emergence of a feedback system driving the deployment to market. Also, businesses should avoid the use of legacy testing frameworks in their test automation process to prevent the below-mentioned challenges:

Handling different touchpoints, data, applications, and processes across technology environments.

Compatibility problems among multiple systems.

Requirement of high-skilled QA testers to manage major interdependencies.

Lack of cohesion between digital-first testing objectives and legacy integration goals.

Implement shift-left testing: In this type of digital quality assurance approach, development and testing take place simultaneously to ensure any defects are identified and fixed early. This way, the development and testing team can mitigate risks and prevent a host of post-development and delivery issues. Shift-left testing allows for shorter feedback loops, continuous testing, and better quality-driven workflows. It enables better collaboration between development, QA, and management.

Test automation: Automation in QA has accelerated the process of identifying bugs or anomalies, improved the quality of software in the SDLC, and increased the speed to market. Test automation lies at the core of Agile-DevOps where quality issues are sorted on a continuous basis and the product reaching the deployment stage is generally sans errors. It enables 360-degree QA across verticals and leads to superior user experiences.

Continuous improvement: Since CX lies at the core of making any product ‘great’, the user should be placed at the center of any product design. The digital testing approach should aim at delivering CX as a whole. This means the products should be tested by specific demographic groups mirroring real-world scenarios. Moreover, CX testing should not be a one-off activity but a continuous process.

Conclusion

With more people moving to the virtual world using new devices and channels, testing CX and creating user journeys as a part of digital business transformation is important. The focus should be on keeping the software codes bug-free along with accelerated implementation to deliver stable releases to production.

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James Daniel is a software Tech enthusiastic & works at Cigniti Technologies. I'm having a great understanding of today's software testing quality that yields strong results and always happy to create valuable content & share thoughts.