Quality Engineering: Prevention is Always Better than Cure

Quality Engineering is an approach to software development and testing that’s getting a great deal of attention. It refers to a system of quality control embedded into the development process, rather than tacked on at the end, in contrast to its predecessor Quality Assurance.  With QE, emphasis is placed on test automation and the ability to successfully deliver continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

There are lots of reasons why enterprises might turn to QE. Here are the top five ways we see businesses benefiting.

Supersize your ambitions

Maintaining your competitive edge is a challenge against a backdrop of spiraling development and testing complexity. Furthermore, the pressure is on for enterprise architects and software teams to find methods of leveraging all-important interlinked data streams within organizations. The QE approach, by contrast, enables huge leaps in productivity and re-tools your digital initiatives for a new era. If IoT, AI or machine learning are on your future agenda at all…. then QE is going to help you get there. QE enables you to dream big.

It’s all about the quality

The underlying driver for QE is quality. However you measure improvement, automated test practices and continuous releases raise the standard of your digital initiatives. Typically, this means happier customers and fewer glitches that max out resources as the team scrambles to fix issues.

Speed

Everyone appreciates that digital initiatives are under pressure to execute faster, from inception right through to delivering continuous product updates. So one of the basic (and correct) assumptions about QE is that it speeds things up. Here’s how that plays out in real terms.

• QE cuts time-to-market drastically. For instance, we worked with DailyUse to develop a platform-as-a-service for contactless mobile payments. We helped DailyUse get its mobile wallet solution to market 12 months faster than originally projected. We see this result time and again (take a look at International SOS, for another example).
• Productivity improves too, which represents substantial financial savings. It’s been estimated that a 5% hike in developer productivity could save a team of 200 developers up to $1 million per year.
• Finally, time-to-value is transformed because the speed at which you deliver means you extract return from your initial investments faster.

Data-driven digital experience

Improving feedback loops is a sure-fire way of improving quality, and QE helps join the dots between what customers demand and what the product delivers. This is partly a result of frequent integration. A QE transformation, especially when it goes hand-in-hand with an enterprise-wide digital transformation, can also help unlock engagement between large customer databases, back-end systems, other data sources and connected devices. Decision-making becomes more data-driven, and enterprises are better placed to observe market changes and turn these into competitive advantage.

Healthier, happier systems

The old adage says ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’ and so it goes with QE. In a QE world, enterprises seek to eliminate issues as they come up, rather than at the end. This is as true for the end product as it is for systemic issues that crop up. While it would be great to be at the point where systems self-heal, it’s definitely much quicker and easier to treat software health problems along the way, ultimately saving time, money and a good deal of frustration.

Hopefully we’ve convinced you to take a closer look at deploying quality engineering in your organization. If you’re unsure of how to take the next step, chat with us. We’re always available for informal, objective preliminary guidance tailored to your specific situation.