How to Improve DX Success with Digital Assurance

Digital transformation is changing how organizations operate from the top down. As a result of this revolution, the importance of digital trust is growing.  For example, governments around the world are paying serious consideration to how they can assure citizens of the reliability and authenticity of newly-digitized services. A secure, trusted digital environment correlates with higher levels of digital maturity, as shown in a recent HBR study. The same is true in business. Put simply, businesses leaders need to trust the data for it to effectively drive their decision-making.

Quality Testing vs Digital Assurance

Traditionally, businesses have turned to quality testing and quality assurance (QA) to ensure trust. Although the terms are often used in the same breath, testing and assurance refer to two distinct disciplines. With testing, we check if the software is working as intended. With assurance, we engineer processes that ensure quality outcomes.

Businesses need to go beyond validating functionality, which has traditionally been the role of testing. They need to embrace a new approach, often called digital assurance (DA), that can assess the health of the whole digital business. This approach builds on the valuable techniques in testing and QA, rather than replacing them.

Leveraging Digital Assurance for Digital Transformation

By adopting a digital assurance approach to quality engineering (QE), businesses go beyond their usual QA practices across platforms such as cloud, social, analytics, big data, and IoT. We already know that isolated functional testing doesn’t guarantee a cohesive  end-to-end testing have been specifically designed to address the overall experience, not just the functionality. A comprehensive digital assurance strategy will align outcomes, goals, and measure overall effectiveness—not just whether testing passed or failed.

Turning Digital Challenges into Opportunities

Business and IT leaders have experienced a seismic shift in priorities driven by digital transformation. DevOps and agile methodologies; access to many different technologies; devices and platforms have rapidly changed how businesses operate. The reality facing digital businesses today is that with the benefit of increased business agility comes the pressure to deliver with precision, accuracy, and speed.

Digital assurance techniques can be deployed to ensure a digital initiative is working as intended. For instance, a common challenge is the need to connect new solutions to existing (often legacy) systems. A digital assurance approach would start by utilizing the specialist test services you would expect in a QA scenario. These include performance, regression, functional, mobile, compatibility, visual, security, Salesforce, IoT, service virtualization, and wearable testing.

But traditional techniques alone cannot keep up with the amount of coverage that is now required. So, a specialist digital engineering company – like Apexon – would expand on those test practices. Automation and AI-powered testing are two options used to boost the scale, speed, and accuracy of the whole operation.

However, the difference with digital assurance is quality engineering. With a digital assurance approach, digital engineering specialists can help businesses adjust their software development and delivery processes to achieve consistent quality. For instance, we help our clients build specific testing centers of excellence to support their critical business requirements.

Digital Assurance at the Heart of the Digital Enterprise

Digital transformation is changing how enterprises operate and engage with customers. Take, for example, omni-channel customer platforms that enable contextual, targeted, relevant interactions. These experiences can very quickly make or break a brand. A poorly targeted ad or a clumsy customer service interaction occurs because the appropriate checks and balances were not in place or carried out properly.

With digital assurance, businesses seek to embed quality measures into the process all the way from inception through testing and deployment. This allows organizations to shift from reacting to problems to anticipating them before they happen, therefore reducing errors and satisfying customers. Similarly, practices like chaos engineering are gaining popularity for reducing the chances of an unwanted scenario occurring by exploring the resilience of systems and examining underlying engineering. In summation, the impetus of digital assurance and all associated methodologies is identifying problems before they happen.

The Bottom Line on Digital Assurance

As systems become more complex, IT leaders are coming to realize the implications of technical debt and the cost of quality. Many IT leaders admit regretting decisions where they prioritized the fast solution over what they knew to be the better solution. Even without factoring in faster vs better IT implementation decisions, quality issues and technical debt creep in gradually as enterprise systems grow and become outdated. Assuring quality will become more challenging as IT leaders ramp up digital initiatives to meet the growing demand for digital products and services. In these circumstances, a systematic approach to ensure quality becomes a must.

Digital assurance helps businesses prepare for the new requirements and expectations resulting from digital transformation. By looking at development and testing together, digital assurance initiatives equip businesses with strategies, methodologies, and tools for success.

To learn more about how to enhance your organization’s digital assurance capabilities, check out Apexon’s Quality Engineering services or get in touch directly using the form below.