#saasbasedtestautomationtool

by Sohaib Zaidi

August 24, 2021

“ERP systems are largely inflexible, expensive to upgrade, and poorly suited to modern digital businesses, we’ll now witness a new era of operations technology i.e. digital operations platform” – Forrester

With customers’ expectations sky-rocketing, enterprises are facing continuous pressure to embrace the cloud to cater to continuously changing market requirements to remain successful. Legacy systems are no longer considered a viable solution since they are inflexible and no longer adequately map modern workflows. Its high time that enterprises should embrace modern and more flexible alternatives to legacy ERP systems i.e. Digital Operations Platform (DOP).

DOP can be adapted to unique business needs, grows flexibly with an enterprise, and thus offers support in successfully scaling business activities. Regardless of whether you’re in B2C, B2B, wholesale, or manufacturing, a DOP can be used to exploit entirely new revenue potential. In other words, the DOP is Agile, Adaptive, and AI-Based.

Undoubtedly, DOPs have the potential to take your business to the next higher level. However, the million-dollar question is “How can you ensure that your DOP is always ready to deliver the functionality and business process execution that your company needs?”

The answer to the above question is “Testing”.

In this blog, we’ll discuss why a “new age testing strategy” is required to accelerate digital transformation and what should be included in this Testing Strategy.

Why DOPs require new age testing strategy?

According to a recently published report by Forrester, “Enterprises shouldn’t cut corners on testing the DOP during the implementation process and before going live. Investing the time and resources upfront will prevent a go-live horror story.”

Enterprises cannot lose focus on testing since inadequate testing can lead to software failures that can cause irrecoverable damage to your business. In the past also, software failures have wreaked havoc at banks, airlines, and the NHS, doing billions of dollars of damage and devastating disruption.

One of the most popular software glitches is Citi Bank’s $900 million misfires that happened during the switch from one software to another.

To support the agility of DOPs, enterprises need to think beyond traditional testing methods. Gone are the days when enterprises rely on a manual testing approach to validate the applications. It is no longer feasible to rely on manual testing to cater to the needs of Agile & DevOps. Enterprises that are looking to embrace DOPs need to afford new approaches to test a new ecosystem of highly interconnected, APIs and cloud-driven applications.

The New Age Testing Strategy in the age of Digital Transformation should support

Continuous DevOps Testing

Without continuous testing, DevOps could be like a one-legged horse in a marathon race. Traditional testing cannot keep pace with a typical modern delivery environment. If critical bugs are discovered after all development is completed, rework, redesign, and rethinking of strategy could adversely impact time to market. By introducing continuous testing in development, enterprises can reduce the time and effort involved in the code review process while providing developers and testers with more visibility into the overall development process.

Acceleration through Automation

Automating tests is vital to achieving continuous testing. With Agile and DevOps models on top of the testing curve, automation testing can help in fixing issues quickly that may slow down the development and deployment stages of the product lifecycle. Testing of new codes continuously will ensure timely feedback about the bugs and issues that will be fixed early in the cycle. Test automation will offer 360-degree quality assurance across horizontals and verticals and unparalleled testing scalability across multiple technology ecosystems.  

Emerging Technologies like AI/ML

The use of the latest technologies like AI and ML can make testing smarter and more efficient. With AI/ML-based test automation, QA teams can easily analyze security issues and identify test coverage gaps to deliver better codes faster. Furthermore, AI/ML can be used for self-healing abilities, enabling test automation platforms to automatically identify changes to test scripts and autonomously fix the issues, making test script maintenance effortless.

Omnichannel Assurance

A new-age testing strategy should focus on optimizing functional testing across channels. In today’s digitally-enabled world, you never know whether your customer is using tablets, phablets, ultra-books, or which mobile device/ browser/ Operating system. You need to design a test strategy with a view of all the channels and real user behavior.