Software development organizations are facing a seemingly impossible mandate: accelerate deployment frequency and continuously improve the customer experience.
Traditionally, faster development has been associated with a ‘fail fast’ mentality. Companies essentially bet that consumers would tolerate buggy or slow user experiences as long as it meant they had the most innovative product possible. But that mentality no longer withstands scrutiny, as consumers now value convenience and customer service above all else. Deloitte found that 78% of consumers place a higher premium on convenience than they did before 2020, making it one of the most important factors when making a purchase decision. Combined with the fact that 73% of all consumers say that the CX plays an important role in their purchasing decisions, the pressure to deliver seamless experiences at record speeds is at an all-time high.
Enter quality engineering, a discipline that integrates software testing throughout the development lifecycle to deliver positive user experiences that help organizations satisfy, retain, and acquire new customers. Like DevOps, quality engineering isn’t a final destination. Instead, both strategies capture a state where software development organizations can continuously innovate and improve with fast, iterative deployments. DevOps ensures that teams can deliver new features or products faster, and quality engineering ensures they can do so without risking defects or product performance. Since most teams are still building their DevOps practice, quality assurance is well-positioned to build a complementary quality engineering practice that enforces best practices through a culture of quality.
A key part of both DevOps and quality engineering: collaboration. The few teams that consider themselves full DevOps were most likely to have a strong culture of quality across their entire organization, making it easier to test, fix, and ship new products.
According to mabl’s 2022 Testing in DevOps Report, more roles are engaging in software testing across the SDLC. As teams establish a culture of quality, they’re seeing developers take on more unit testing and business stakeholders create tests for newly-identified user journeys in the application. Quality engineering teams can move into a leadership role that involves testing in staging and production, high-impact manual testing, managing overall testing strategy, and overseeing testing done by other team members. When entire teams collaborate on product quality, software testing is no longer a bottleneck in the development process and teams can ask bigger questions about quality, including non-functional requirements that improve the customer experience.
This theory is being proven in real-time by leading teams evolving their DevOps practices and CI/CD pipelines holistically within a culture of quality. Looking at the differentiators for teams that made the biggest gains in deployment frequency this year, quality comes to the forefront.
As seen in the above chart, teams that accelerated deployment frequency by 50-100% were 2.5 times more likely to have good or excellent test coverage, a key indicator of a culture of quality. Teams can move faster when they have a strong quality engineering practice that imbues the entire company with confidence in their product. That impact explains why more QA teams are taking on an influential role that encompasses strategic decision-making with the software development organization.
But as much as an organization may recognize the value of their quality and software testing team, rebuilding their development pipelines to maximize their impact is another task altogether. This guide will share the people, processes, and technologies necessary for building a sustainable culture of quality that unlocks DevOps success and higher customer satisfaction. You’ll learn how to break down testing silos, make your case to leadership, and establish effective feedback loops that fix bugs fast through our expert tips and real-world examples.