Digital transformation is influencing business processes at all levels. Companies of all sizes and in all industries are looking for new opportunities to leverage digital technologies in order to improve performance and consequently achieve better business outcomes. But there is so much more involved in digital transformation beyond existing as a means to the end product. Areas like quality assurance and testing should not be overlooked or neglected, as they are integral to every business’ digital transformation strategy.
QASymphony, a leading provider of software testing platforms and test management tools, believes that quality software releases paired with dramatically reduced cycle times are the keys to surviving and thriving in today’s changing digital landscape. And to achieve this, it’s essential for organizations to identify the right tools, methodologies, and measures to streamline the development and the delivery of quality software at speed.
SourceForge recently caught up with Kevin Dunne, the Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at QASymphony, to discuss the role that quality assurance and testing play in the changing digital marketplace, and how QASymphony’s qTest platform helps QA and testing teams keep pace with digital transformation.
Q: Please tell us a bit more about QASymphony. What is the company’s mission and who are some of the clients that trust you for their quality assurance needs?
Kevin Dunne, the VP of Strategy and Business Development at QASymphony
A: QASymphony was founded to address a glaring gap in the market: solutions for agile development teams that significantly improve speed, efficiency and collaboration throughout the software testing process. Testing efforts for agile have historically been underserved when it comes to new tooling to support the latest approaches to testing including DevOps, test-driven development, and open source automation. QASymphony steps in to fill this need, with a specific focus on enterprise companies which require support for more complex types of testing. We work with 500+ large companies across all industries like Samsung, NetApp, Visa, and Amazon that span the spectrum from just experimenting with Agile to Continuous Development and Delivery.
Q: Digital transformation is one of those buzzwords that has been nearly used to the point of saturation. But what exactly does it mean? What are the fundamentals and its key aspects?
A: Digital transformation is certainly one of the most overused buzzwords in the market. In our opinion, it is the shift in focus from internal systems of record to external, customer-facing systems of engagement. We think the key driver in a shift in focus from internal stakeholders to external is the changes in customer expectations. We now see a shift towards a desire for mobility, ease of use, and proactive interaction. Plus, new technology enhancements allow startups to come in and disrupt larger players.
Though the startups seem to be the ones driving the change, really the shift is caused by changing tastes and expectation of the customer, with the smaller firms quickly gaining market share by addressing their concerns faster through a closer relationship with the end user. Larger, established companies typically use digital transformation as a term to encompass their efforts to keep up with the startups disrupting their industry, but often fail to understand they really need to grow closer to their customers. Failing to distinguish this key difference can leave larger companies often struggling to imitate their more agile competitors to just maintain market share rather than innovate and keep in front of the latest trends.
Q: In what ways has the age of digital transformation disrupted quality assurance and testing operations? What role does quality assurance and testing play in digital transformation?
A: Quality assurance is integral in digital transformation, as consumer expectations are ever increasing. Whereas internal stakeholders may only have one choice of system to use to complete their daily work, external stakeholders can (and do) quickly find other substitutes quickly if solutions don’t meet their needs and continue to evolve.
Given the number of different user flows, platforms, and personas, there is now a huge list of potential scenarios to consider for testing. Additionally, the shift towards external stakeholders introduces much more aspects to quality besides just functional testing including usability, security, performance, and localization. Overall, there is less time to deliver features in today’s environment, with an ever-growing list of tests to build and maintain, leaving test teams squeezed.
Q: Why is it crucial for companies to consider (and prioritize) software testing in their digital transformation strategy? What are the direct benefits?
A: Many teams are focusing purely on automating testing, which for at least some tests is becoming a requirement to survive in today’s environment. We believe that automation is essential but even more critical is building in a process to highlight and prioritize the key automated tests, with a sustainable process to maintain and reuse tests and identify the root causes of test failures quickly.
Automated testing tools on their own tend to miss the larger business objectives of the greater digital transformation, and need a closer tie into the business side of the development process. Additionally, the customer usage paths become more complex and expand to cross multiple platforms and automated testing frameworks, requiring a solution that can tie in across the journey of the user.
Q: Tell us a bit more about qTest. What is it, what does it do, and what are its key features?
A: qTest is a platform that allows testers to accelerate their testing and adopt the latest developer-friendly testing techniques. At its core, it’s meant to remove the typical challenges to Agile development that legacy tools introduce while maintaining the control and enterprise visibility that larger companies demand. Allowing developers and testers to collaborate closely will reduce the amount of time it takes to complete testing, which accelerates time to market.
Additionally, our solution streamlines the typical bottlenecks that occur more and more frequently in an agile development process, seamless integrating the various best-of-breed tools in the DevOps pipeline for smooth transitions in the release train. Our solution is adaptable and scalable to meet the needs of teams doing all different types of Agile development and testing in the organization, providing a single repository for test results with easy migration of current tests off of legacy platforms. So the barrier to entry is low, and the ceiling almost limitless for teams as they can continue to accelerate their testing without outgrowing the platform.
Q: How exactly does qTest aid companies in their digital transformation journey?
A: QASymphony’s solutions allow testing to keep up with the pace of Agile development, so teams can align their ever-accelerating development processes with their typically slower testing processes. Without rapid testing, organizations cannot capitalize on faster development cycles and new features in demand from customers are delayed by inadequate testing tools and processes.
Beyond time, large enterprises are spending a significant amount of their budget on testing, with upwards of 25-30% of IT budgets spent on quality every year, with a large portion spent on manual, non-value added processes. CIO’s are typically struggling to find the budgets they need to facilitate digital transformation, as more than 80% of budgets are tied to legacy systems of record, with only 20% left afterward to spend on the most strategic initiatives. With qTest, we can control the cost of testing and gain leverage through a properly implemented, scalable testing process so more budget can be shifted to critical digital transformation initiatives.
Q: In your opinion, what trends and /or technologies will impact testing come 2018? How is QASymphony addressing these head on?
A: The three major trends we see influencing testing are:
- Shift Left – testing becoming an upstream part of the process, a trend gaining steam recently given the closer collaboration between developers, BA’s and testers in Agile and desire to automate testing first
What QAS is doing: working on the first Enterprise BDD platform for JIRA – qTest Scenario and qTest Pulse
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) – with thousands of tests being run everyday as part of continuous integration, it becomes important to predict which tests need to be run based on changes made to the code and predict what actions should be taken based on test results, which is now possible given the wealth of testing data being created
What QAS is doing: collecting data from qTest products, JIRA, CI/Build tools, Source Code, and Automated Testing Frameworks in our analytics platform, qTest Insights. We are currently working with early customers to find patterns in their data, and AI suggestions are being added as a research area to explore with customers in 2018 to allow for proactive test planning and management
- Cloud – revolutionizing expensive and time-consuming test environment creation and management through leveraging cloud testing environments like SauceLabs and Blazemeter, and generic cloud providers like AWS and Azure. Many of the largest bottlenecks in the testing process for large enterprises is getting the test environments and test data they need to complete the tests they have planned
What QAS is doing: releasing a new product qTest Launch in 2018Q1, which will automate the interaction between the test management system and test environments to manage the various test environments available and simplify the creation of test environments for less technical users
Q: QASymphony raised $40 million in May of this year. So that begs the question: what are your plans for the near future? Are there any new offerings or developments that customers can look forward to?
A: We are excited to be a part of Insight Partners’ world-renowned software portfolio, establishing our position as the emerging leader globally in agile testing solutions. It is critical to incorporate our customers’ feedback into our platform to maintain our lead in the industry, so a large portion of our funds will be allocated to continuing to grow our development team.
Beyond continuing to advance the technical capabilities of our tools, we are also investing a great deal of our attention towards customer success and implementation to ensure the large enterprises we work with have a trusted partner they can count on to always be available with support and advice on how to approach their testing.
About QASymphony
QASymphony was founded in 2011 with the mission to help companies create better software through their software testing and QA tools. The company’s qTest platform encompasses test case management, test analytics, exploratory testing, and behavioral driven development (BDD). More than 500 customers spanning 30 countries trust in QASymphony to help them work smarter and test faster. QASymphony was recently ranked No.44 on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 500.