Quality Built-in

Quality built-in is the best approach for any industry to adopt for creating a better customer experience and lean delivery cycle. In the software development process as well, that is the desired approach. In a typical software delivery model, we all want to embed the concept of quality from inception to release so as to avoid- “Quality as an afterthought”. However, it is easier said than done.

Common challenges we hear in this journey are:

“Unfamiliar with testing tools and processes beyond QA team“.

”We don’t have enough time to test, prior to hand-over to QA team."

Let us look at the avenues of how we can overcome them and adopt the Quality built-in approach.

“Unfamiliar with testing tools and process beyond QA team”

For a long time in the software testing world, testing tools had their own ecosystem. You need to install the tool, do the configuration set-ups, and learn the features and navigations of the tool. The setup and learning processes were detractors for the team beyond testing, to adopt the tools. We have seen a paradigm shift in the testing tools over time. Several tools have evolved that are essentially embedded within the development of workspace as code packages. That broke the ice! 

Developers started adopting the tools and leveraged them during their testing process thereby implementing the quality built-in approach in their day-to-day work life. They could cut the chase off learning a completely new testing tool, IDE, or language or set up to use a testing tool. They could leverage their development experience and get started on using tools in no time. These tools also allowed them to play around programmatically and build innovative ways of developing re-usable and maintainable tests resulted in minimizing the time of testing. Testing tools can co-exist in the development package and do not need to have their own separate ecosystem or IDE. As more tools tied to the development workspace comes to the testing world and organizations leverage them, the adoption of a quality built-in approach will become a reality. 

Data and AI will become the future focus areas of testing. The testing in these areas needs more engineering minds and will have a minimal response-time to address quality issues. “Quality as an afterthought” will become a bottleneck. As tools are developed in these areas they need to be embedded in development platforms to facilitate Quality built-in across the IT industry.

“We don’t have enough time to test prior to hand-over to QA team”

This is now a reality! Today’s development team is racing against the time to build complex solutions for the business world. On one hand, they are challenged to use new technologies every day and on the other hand, they have to think about all the complications of use cases, edge cases, performance, data and cloud, and many more. The way to assist the development team to adopt Quality built-in would be to build an automated test pipeline that they can hook up to from their development space for their check-in and execute them on demand. Tighter the pipeline is integrated with the development process and easier it is for them to execute, without having to worry about set up, test data, or design tests to run. They will definitely embrace the Quality built-in mindset and start seeing the value and assist QA to champion the culture of Quality across the entire product development lifecycle.

Quality is a partnership among all the teams and it is best built when all hands come together.