2022 saw significant shifts in how organizations are transforming their technology, development practices, and their customer experiences. Heading to 2023, the need for transformations with a rapid, quantifiable impact on business success will continue driving quality engineering adoption. Mabl co-founder Dan Belcher and Head of Product Gevorg Hovsepyan shared the trends at the heart of these changes at mabl Experience.
Quality-centric teams relying on mabl can now lean on a growing technology ecosystem that enables them to integrate best-of-breed development tools like Jira, BigQuery, and Bitbucket for highly efficient pipelines. New partnerships with the Google Cloud Marketplace and Atlassian Marketplace for easy intelligent test automation adoption. This momentum has been driven by industry leaders like Barracuda, Stack Overflow, SmugMug, and FOX embracing quality-driven development as part of their digital transformations.
Quality is at the Center of Business-Critical Transformations
These innovative leaders are at the forefront of the software industry. Gartner Senior Director Matthew Mowrey noted that 94% of CFOs surveyed in the “CFO Perspective on the 2022 CEO Survey” reported the need to maintain or accelerate the already-intense pace of transformation incited by the pandemic. Whether it’s DevOps adoption, migrating to the cloud, or digital transformation, these urgent shifts are centered around quality. Consumers do more online than ever before, and demand engaging and inclusive experiences that make their digital lives easier. Every transformation impacting how software is built and tested must reflect this demand in order to support overall business success.
How Software is Built Impacts the User Experience and Business Outcomes
DevOps seeks to make software development faster and more collaborative through automation. In doing so, it enables software development organizations to be more adaptable and resilient. But most companies are still navigating the journey to this transformation, according to mabl’s 2022 Testing in DevOps Report.
The report found that the 11% of companies identified as DevOps leaders were those who evolved their pipelines and practices holistically. Google’s 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report found that high-performing DevOps teams were 46% more likely to practice continuous delivery, 39% more likely to practice continuous integration, and 33% more likely to use version control. These advanced development practices have matured into Enterprise DevOps, a sustainable DevOps practice that quantifiably improves product quality and velocity at the scale needed for global organizations.
At the same time, the shift to cloud-based architecture and greater integration between partner software, often facilitated through APIs, is making infrastructure more dynamic. Quality is essential when managing changing products and changing infrastructure. Quality engineering, the practice of integrating testing early and often into the development cycle to ensure better customer experiences, is emerging in response.
Quality engineering ensures quality across the entire customer experience by validating functional and non-functional attributes. The entire team engages in testing to discover defects earlier in development, accelerating delivery cycles and reducing the risk of customer-facing bugs. When quality is a cornerstone of digital transformation, teams can evolve with confidence and deliver better experiences for their customers.
The Quality-Driven Future of Stack Overflow
Vice President of Product Engineering at Stack Overflow Dale Cook joined the mabl Experience keynote to share how his team is innovating with a focus on customer quality. Mabl has been a pillar of transformation for the Stack Overflow team building Stack Overflow for Teams, an enterprise tool that centralizes information for development organizations. Stack Overflow for Teams builds on their rich legacy of collaboration, learning, and knowledge sharing to help development teams innovate faster.
The platform’s wide range of rich features requires comprehensive end-to-end testing. Prior to mabl, the Stack Overflow for Teams group had solid unit and component-level testing established through manual testing. But achieving coverage goals with this strategy proved challenging as tests were slow to execute, expensive to run, and required significant maintenance. To maintain a seamless experience on Stack Overflow for Teams, they needed automated functional testing at scale.
As Dale’s team began the search for a test automation platform, they focused on identifying a solution that was easy-to-use, executed tests quickly, could run against any environment in their development pipeline, provide insightful reports, and partner closely with their team with attentive support. They realized that mabl fit their needs and could adapt to their evolving product.
The results speak for themselves. Mabl has become a cornerstone of Stack Overflow’s QA processes. Dale’s team has been able to automate existing test cases and expand their testing strategy through comprehensive automated end-to-end testing. They’ve increased test coverage by a magnitude of 1.5x, even though testing effort has been reduced from 3 weeks of manual testing to 90 minutes of automated testing. The Stack Overflow for Teams is happier and more confident in their ability to provide a delightful user experience.
Quality Engineering is Essential for Sustained Growth
The quality engineering journey supports and enables critical digital transformations and DevOps adoption. Elevating testing as an integral part of the software development lifecycle allows development teams to find and fix defects faster, while intelligent test automation enables quality professionals to validate the entire user experience, including non-functional quality. Test coverage can grow to ensure quality across different browsers, and ensure that accessibility and performance issues are managed before they impact customers. Development organizations benefit from low-stress, high-frequency deployments while users enjoy new features that provide delightful experiences.
Achieving digital transformation and DevOps success must be based in quality engineering practices to innovate and exceed customer expectations. When testing is elevated, quality engineering is unleashed.
Watch all 2022 mabl Experience sessions and see how teams at JetBlue, Chewy, and Barracuda are harnessing quality engineering as the foundation for better customer experiences.
