The COVID-19 outbreak impelled more and more organizations to automate their IT processes. During the pandemic, firms across the world began spending on cognitive capabilities, artificial intelligence, and robotic process automation (RPA). As a result, comprehensive software testing has become even more vital to ensure these increasingly complex systems function flawlessly.

Did you know? Software testing is the leading cause of delivery delays; manual testing is still prevalent (only 15% is automated), and testing expenditures consume an average of 23-35% of total IT spending. Nonetheless, many elite organizations find a method to overcome these traditional methods by turning testing into a catalyst for their digital transformation, accelerating delivery, and freeing up resources for innovation.

Enterprises looking to future-proof their software testing efforts can learn a lot from how the world's most successful companies manage their testing and quality assurance activities.

Here are some key components of how some of the world's most well-known tech companies organize their QA activities and what you can learn from them.

Modernize Your Testing Strategy

Companies modernize and upgrade their core applications and transition to a cloud-centric IT strategy. Modernizing business will necessitate modernizing testing methodologies. You must empower your own DevOps team, create business-readable tests, and ensure that everyone in the team can do testing to some extent.

1. Embrace Agile Testing

Using an Agile methodology to modernize your testing strategy can greatly increase the productivity and efficacy of your development process. Agile techniques emphasize iterative development, collaboration, and customer feedback, necessitating a change in testing methodology. Agile development, in particular, entails shifting testing to the left side of the development process. Encourage close collaboration between developers and testers, building a culture of shared quality responsibility. This guarantees that issues are detected and fixed early in the development cycle, lowering the possibility of costly fixes later in the cycle.

Embracing an agile model with a test-and-learn culture driven by self-organizing, cross-functional teams will unlock and unleash innovation - Microsoft

1. Encourage Teams to Be Autonomous

Giving teams the freedom to work independently will help you build a proactive, innovative testing atmosphere. This will ultimately encourage creativity and a sense of ownership, which will help modernize your testing strategy.

Clear vision and objectives: Communicate a clear vision and set of objectives for modernizing your testing practices. Ensure that the teams understand the objectives and the broader impact of their efforts on the organization's success.

Encourage teams to be innovative: Encourage teams to explore new testing tools, techniques, and procedures, helping them to innovate and create effective solutions.

Provide opportunities for training and development: Provide workshops, training, courses, and certifications to keep them up to date on the newest testing trends and technology.

Encourage cross-functional collaboration: Encourage cross-functional collaboration across teams to ensure that testing practices are in line with organizational objectives.

Trust and support teams: Give them the necessary support and guidance while allowing them to experiment, learn from failures, and drive constant improvement in testing practices.

1. Focus on Technological Excellence

Continuous focus on technical excellence is essential for attaining the best testing results and delivering high-quality software solutions.

Increase automation: Automation reduces delays and speeds up innovation. It also frees up team members to spend more time producing value by easing the irritation and monotony associated with manual labor.

Boost risk coverage: Risk coverage measures the business risk that your test suite addresses. Risk-based automated testing methods allow you to focus testing on the functionality that is most important. Rather than attempting to test all functions equally, dedicate greater resources to areas with the highest risk.

Increase collaboration: Effective teamwork is critical to a successful testing transformation. Create a method that allows communication among different teams so that issues may be addressed efficiently.

Implement continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD): Build a solid CI/CD pipeline to allow for continuous integration, testing, and deployment of code changes. This practice ensures that any flaws are discovered early in the development cycle, boosting technical excellence while maintaining overall program quality.

Data management strategy: Test data management consumes 44% (according to Sogeti) to 60% (according to IBM) of testing time. Developing a test data management approach will not only save time and resources; it will also allow for greater automation, increased coverage, and a reduction in false positives.

Optimization and performance testing: Prioritize performance testing to detect and address scalability issues or performance concerns in the product; use load testing and stress testing methods to maximize the application's performance to guarantee a responsive and high-performing solution.

Security testing and compliance: Integrate security testing into the development and testing processes to detect and mitigate potential security vulnerabilities and hazards. Ensure compliance with industry norms and standards to boost the technical perfection of the software.

1. Adopt Modern Testing Trends

The automation testing market is anticipated to increase at a CAGR of 16.03% during the forecast period (2023-2028), from USD 27.65 billion in 2023 to USD 58.16 billion by 2028.

• Consider new technologies such as IoT, AI, and machine learning, which are quickly expanding across the automation industry. Most business processes are now managed digitally, with risk-based testing methodologies. AI is becoming increasingly significant in testing as it shortens the test lifecycle.

• If your company is serious about delivering fast releases, you must optimize and orchestrate quality across teams, projects, and apps. Choose the test automation tool that is capable of meeting all enterprise-level requirements.

• The market for testing automation is being driven by a growth in demand for testing process automation and solutions that provide a smooth customer experience. Next-generation test automation solutions have a no-code or low-code interface that enables manual testers or non-technical users to quickly set up and generate test cases.

• Adopt a shift-left testing methodology, in which development proceeds concurrently with testing and testers begin drafting test cases as soon as the requirements are apparent.

• Automation trends are being driven by the shift to Cloud-based applications. However, data stored in the Cloud is vulnerable to security threats. Adopt data regulation standards such as HIPPA, GxP, GDPR, CSA, and others to protect data from unauthorized access. Choose test automation solutions that adhere to the world's most severe IT security practices.

Conclusion

We would like to encourage and focus on testing modernization. After you've automated and improved testing for one product or team, it's time to move on to the next. Even if your entire organization is adhering to testing best practices and agile concepts, there will still be untapped value to be realized. Above all, strive for constant innovation, because if an organization stops inventing, it will be overtaken by better, more motivated competitors.

The majority of the key drivers to modernize testing, including those described above, are associated with process improvement. This category includes things like team collaboration, shifting left, improving Agile, and, most importantly, test automation. Test automation not only helps to scale testing but also lowers testing expenses by freeing up manual testing hours. Indeed, organizations that modernize their software testing find an ongoing drop-in testing costs, a reduction in quality risks, and an improvement in time to market.

We can assist you in every step of your testing modernization journey, from identifying obstacles to giving a baseline evaluation and implementing improvements.