Why Digital Assurance Must Move Beyond Testing

This blog is provided by Cigniti, a Kobiton partner. Cigniti provides thought leadership on the emerging field of Digital Assurance.

Topics discussed include:

• The Long term impact of Digital Tech
• The Constant need to deliver seamless customer experience
• Key factors for successful Digital Assurance
• Digital Assurance and growing concerns around Cybersecurity

A recent study has outlined the technologies that organizations are investing in, and has estimated that the largest area of technology being invested in by businesses is voice-activated technologies. This is broadly how a new technology gets tested each day for relevance and for building a need-based business strategy. Digital technologies in many ways are creating innovative business streams and opportunities for old and new entrepreneurs.

With Digital Transformation, the equation is not only changing for businesses, but also for the customers who are looking out for new and dynamic experiences.

Technologies are tested on various fronts – functionality, relevance, cost-effectiveness, profitability, and business sustainability. However, due to constant innovation and experimentation, customer preferences keep changing continuously. Businesses have to keep up with these changing demands and also ensure that whatever experience they promise is delivered with precision and without even a minor glitch.

Digital Assurance to the rescue

Digital assurance can be an all-encompassing strategy for ensuring that the technologies that you have chosen are relevant for your business and continue to garner higher RoI over a period of time. It takes a multi-dimensional stride towards digital testing and quality assurance.

It is not just sufficient to confirm on the non-functional and functional aspects of an application or software. It is equally imperative to go beyond and look at the larger canvas while ensuring the sustainability of digital technologies. The digital assurance strategy has to be backed up by extensive experience in the digital domain along with the needed test assets, testing tools, and accelerators.

Implementation of digital solutions is bound to create new testing challenges equally for the testing and development teams. It could be related to the integration of services across the local or virtual platforms, or testing the end-to-end workflow, or synchronizing performance of data and services, or ensuring omni-channel experience across diverse platforms.

This is exactly how organizations will have to deal with their digital experimentation, and constantly look at the larger picture while defining a digital assurance and testing strategy. This implies that implementation of digital technologies has to be directly connected with validation of customer experience through various channels, namely, customer accessible portals, customer facing mobile applications, or social media channels.

Digital Assurance is a ‘conscious’ effort

Conceptualizing the impact of digital transformation and digital technology adoption is probably the first step towards ensuring successful digital assurance. Forget about what others conceive and the value that it has brought for them, the question you got to ask yourself is, ‘what’s in store for me?’ This will help you to bring in the right tools, methodologies, and eventually the needed outcome from your digital assurance and testing strategy. Your application is a by-product that will be delivered effectively if the larger picture is kept intact.

The ultimate game plan is to manage customer experience, venture into new markets, and deliver products and services that bring constant business value for the brand.

‘Agility’ is inevitable

Has Digital Transformation led us into a state of anarchy or disruption? Yes, we could say so, but on a positive note. Challenges and confusions have translated into opportunities for diverse businesses, which has been a blessing for most. On the same note, organizations have accepted the truth that nothing is constant. This has made them more flexible and built agility over the years.

The technology that works today, could be obsolete in the next couple of months. Acceptance of change and incorporating the same in tandem with the organizational challenges has become a norm, as it is inevitable. That’s the very reason organizations cannot confine their digital assurance strategy to mere testing. It has to be more inclined towards embracing the digital future, rather than getting disrupted.

Perspectives from Kobiton:

We live in an age of disruption. Companies are under increasing pressure to maintain a competitive edge. And in this age of digital disruption this means leading on all fronts of digital technology, ranging from customer experience solutions touching the customer, to driving efficiency in back-office processes.

This drive to digital has created the necessity that organizations embark on well-defined digital assurance initiatives to deliver quality in a digital world. Digital Assurance is more than traditional QA, and actually requires QA to adopt both a product management mind-set and a DevOps mind-set. A product management mind-set in that QA should now be concerned with the overall customer experience, the brand and how the technologies are being adopted by consumers. A DevOps mind-set in that digital transformation is happening “at the speed of digital” and QA can no longer afford to be a bottleneck in rolling out new digital solutions.

Cigniti has long helped organizations embrace this changing face of QA and instil Digital Assurance best practices.

Compounding the difficulty in adopting Digital Assurance is that inevitably and by its very nature, digital transformation equates adopting a mobile first policy. Supporting the new mobile landscape poses new, unique challenges for companies. Mobile customers expect an “always on” world, an omnichannel experience, and full compatibility regardless of the devices being used.  And in today’s fragmented eco-system, this means testing on literally hundreds of devices.

At Kobiton, together with our partner Cigniti, we provide assurances that mobile applications work as expected. This allows organizations to release with certainty, ensure mobile app adoption and lower overall app abandonment. Kobiton provides access to over 350+ real devices to ensure that app testing is being performed on the same diverse set of devices used by consumers. The cloud based platform allows for full integration into modern DevOps CI/CD processes and supports both manual and automated testing. For larger enterprises, Kobiton provides a full device lab management platform, allowing organizations to manage on-site device labs with cloud devices, in one centrally managed platform.

Digital Transformation is an imperative. Digital Assurance provides the ROI. Executing well on both these fronts will allow organizations to be “customer-obsessed” and let organizations deliver high-value experiences, for both customers and employees.