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Creating, executing, and maintaining reliable tests has never been easier.
Unsurprisingly, quality professionals are extremely invested in product quality. They track how the definition of quality is changing for consumers and for developers, how testing is adapting to support DevOps, and how quality engineering is improving delivery pipelines. But as quality practices mature and demand for better customer experiences, development organizations need scalable, sustainable tactics to embed quality into the entire software development life cycle. They need to become quality-centric.
Elevating Software Testing with Quality Engineering
To help their companies respond to rising demand for better digital experiences and faster delivery cycles, quality teams are adopting quality engineering. Quality engineering is a discipline which integrates software testing throughout the development lifecycle with the purpose of delivering a positive user experience that helps companies satisfy, retain, and acquire new customers.
“Quality-centric” is a mindset and culture that comes with quality engineering as testing teams build collaborative workflows and cultures of quality. The transformation impacts both the role of people and technology in delivery pipelines.
Building A Quality-Centric Mindset
A quality-centric team understands that testing is a shared responsibility and a shared benefit. Though quality professionals lead and expand software testing strategies, developers and product managers contribute to planning and execution in order to maximize test coverage. The result: smoother delivery cycles and happier customers.
Internally, developers have more confidence in their work as they run end-to-end tests in the background as they code or trigger API tests that ensure APIs used in new features are working as expected. Considering that 44% of software developers say they spend too much time fixing bugs, low-friction testing early in development is a valuable way to start building a quality-centric software development team.
Externally, organizations that successfully embrace a quality-centric approach to development not only benefit from smoother, less buggy product releases, but set the foundation for matching testing to evolving customer standards. Consider that one billion people worldwide are living with some form of disability, many of whom have different accessibility needs for digital experiences. That translates to 38.6% of companies now reporting that customers specifically mentioned accessibility as a reason for their purchase. Yet most software teams aren’t satisfied with their accessibility testing capabilities.
When just 27% of companies report great or best-in-class performance on a critical consumer priority, something must change. With quality engineering and a quality-centric mindset, incorporating accessibility testing becomes much faster and easier. Automated accessibility checks that help identify common issues like low-contrast visuals and a lack of labeled form elements can be embedded into existing end-to-end tests to ensure that accessibility is the norm for product releases. In a culture of quality, this process can take as little as ten minutes.
Building Quality-Centric Development Pipelines
Quality-centric development pipelines harness automation to ensure that code is thoroughly tested as it moves through the SDLC. Unlike the old model of software development, where testing was often relegated to right before a product was released, quality-centric pipelines have manual and automated testing embedded throughout for faster, more thorough quality practices.
QE metrics are embedded into development pipelines and aligned with the entire SDLC. Automated tests of all types (functional, integration, E2E, performance, load, API, etc.) are created to find defects earlier in the pipeline so issues can be fixed at a much lower cost, compared to escaped bugs that are first reported by customers. This way, the entire defect discovery and resolution process - issue identification, the delivery of bug fixes, and ensuring new features don't break existing features - is accelerated. The benefits of quality-centric pipelines speak for themselves.
According to the 2022 Testing in DevOps Report, teams with high test coverage are 7.3 times more likely to have successfully embraced automated pipelines. Teams have higher confidence in their work, even as rote tasks are automated and they can focus on higher-level tasks. A quality-centric organization can build faster, spend less time on rework, and empower their people to innovate with confidence.
Quality-Centric Software Development Teams Are DevOps Leaders
The mature pipeline automation enabled by high test coverage and a quality-centric culture cumulates in DevOps success, according to the 2022 Testing in DevOps Report. When quality is integrated into development pipelines through expanded testing strategies and viewed as a shared goal, it’s easier to collaborate across the SDLC and trust automated pipelines.
Leveraging quality engineering as a pillar of DevOps transformation is a proven strategy, especially as consumers expect more from digital experiences. Being quality-centric ensures that teams have the confidence to innovate, even as consumer needs evolve and pipelines become more automated.
Start building a quality-centric organization with mabl’s 14-day free trial. Our low-code test automation platform is designed to make testing easy, efficient, and collaborative, so you can focus on building the best products possible at DevOps speeds.
