The digital age demands seamless, uninterrupted experience – be it over a website, a mobile application or any software services. Major industries like banks and e-commerce groups among others heavily rely on their software platforms to reach out to their customers. Maneesh Jhawar, founder and CEO, and Gauraav Thakar, VP and head of marketing, QualityKiosk Technologies, speak about the importance of software quality assurance, the impact of test automation and their ROI propositions to businesses.
Q: How can quality assurance improve business for product developers?
A: The experience of the customer with a brand needs to be seamless. Quality has become sacrosanct. A mobile app or a website cannot be launched as long as it performs the way it was intended.
Enterprise-class customers do not use just one system – they use a complete ecosystem to get their business output. Pre-production quality assurance saves businesses substantial expenses on rework. The faster they catch a bug in the system, the quicker they can solve it with minimal faulty outcomes. Quality assurance is not just done at the code level – it is done at a system architecture level.
If quality assurance is not done properly, the defect might be found to have multiplied during user acceptance testing and that will lead to massive rework. At times, if the bug reaches post-production stage, it has a direct impact on business in terms of brand image as well as loss of finances.Quality assurance partners help developers, not just by saying “there is a bug in your system”, but by pointing out where the bug is and what is causing it. These greatly reduces time, effort and financial expenses in solving defects.
Q. What makes a good quality software?
Gauraav Thakar, VP and head of marketing
A. You should take into account the expected functionality of the software and whether it will be a standalone application or a piece of a larger IT ecosystem. Every functionality of the application should work exactly the way it is intended to. The second aspect is the performance. The customer experience has to be equal or higher than what they are expecting to create a reputation.
Q. What are the most essential technical components of quality assurance?
A. The first component is functional testing. Test automation is the key towards decreasing the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Performance engineering is the second essential parameter. It drives the root-cause analysis of issues and performance enhancement. Finally, digital testing, like testing of mobile applications is also important for usability and compatibility. Testing models decide the route of progress. Waterfall model is a tried and tested process for a long time. But with digital transformation, Agile model has taken up the market. DevOps is becoming a major contributor in the preproduction phase. Customer experience testing is a major post-production technology.
Q. Will IoT applications change the paradigm of quality assurance?
A. Let us revisit an old fundamental of IT applications – garbage-in and garbage-out. When we come to IoT, this rule takes a lot of dominance. Quality assurance will be around the big data that the IoT systems generate daily. In IoT softwares, the most important checkpoint will be to analyse if the correct data is being sent in the business scenarios. These will correlate to the test scenarios. The necessary data will have to be filtered, while the rest should be dumped. Another unique thing will be the predictive analytics. Quality assurance will ensure the proper interaction of machines and proper flow of data. In this way, it will drive how the predictive analysis will come out from IoT systems.
Q. Can quality assurance add to any security applications, especially in data-sensitive zones?
A. Well, the quality providers integrate security measures to their offerings. For instance, we at QualityKiosk, ensure that while providing our services to our clients, we embed the latest and most upgraded security measures to our solutions. We do not deal directly in creating security suites. Rather, we collaborate with ecosystem partners and experts to deliver security.
Q. What are QualityKiosk’s offerings? What is your ROI proposition to your customers?
A. QualityKiosk’s quality assurance services includes functional assurance, performance assurance engineering, test automation and real-time user experience management and monitoring. QualityKiosk’s USP is our synthetic monitoring platform, CXGuardian-Customer Experience Guardian. We simulate and monitor customer journeys on real mobile devices. We can navigate complex customer journeys including CAPTCHA, Mobile OTP and 2-Factor authentication. Our approach to quality assurance with test automation helps reduce quality assurance life cycle by at least 50 percent. That is a direct ROI.
Moreover, today, businesses want to do more with less. Customers may often say that, at a budget of the previous year, they need more test cases to be done. This is where test automation platforms play a role – so that providers can manage timely delivery of services without increased cost on resources or any other aspects. QATH, our test automation platform helps in Continuous Testing and is built to be a plug-and-play tool-agnostic platform for businesses in sectors like Banking, Insurance, Automotive and more.
