According to a recent InformationWeek article by John Edwards, “Good times or bad, digital transformation is a firmly established reality. Yet many business leaders are still struggling with how to approach, deploy, and manage a seemingly endless string of disruptive technologies.” Edwards goes on to argue that technological factors are one of the chief issues impeding digital success and, as any reader of this blog will know, this is a problem Eggplant is passionate about solving.
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In a recent piece on how organizations are grappling with the pandemic, CIO’s Clint Boulton wrote, “As the COVID-19 coronavirus rattles industries, it’s more important than ever for IT leaders to ensure employees have the tools they require to work remotely and securely.” This is certainly true, but it’s equally important that business continuity plans include strategies for ensuring that customers and partners are able to receive the digital products and services they rely on throughout the pandemic’s duration.
2019 was a banner period for technology innovations, with the rise of 5G networks, increased adoption of biometrics, advances in robotics, and new regulations paving the way for more widespread drone deployments among the year’s milestones. It was also a busy time at Eggplant, as we focused on enhancing our solutions to give companies unparalleled testing precision and helping more organizations realize the power of intelligent, AI-driven testing.
"The quality of your company’s software has a direct impact on the quality of your company’s financial results. You know it. Management knows it. And the importance of quality will only continue to grow with the need for 24x7 operations, high availability requirements, aggressive service-level agreements, and the need to roll out innovative new web-based services."
This was the first paragraph of a paper I wrote in 2005 about how to build your organization around a Testing Center of Excellence.
15 years on, we are still struggling with these concepts. The focus has turned towards project outcomes rather than business outcomes. Reasons include faster release cycles, more complex technology, and more technically astute end-users, with the result that QA lost sight of who was really using their applications.
You’ve tested the latest release of your application, and it works just fine. From a functional perspective, it does everything it’s supposed to.
But what if the user experience has changed in a way that wasn’t picked up in functional testing?
With the Shift-Up series thus far, we have explored the importance of testing and thinking as a customer. The basic premise is that we need to add another dimension to Quality Assurance other than Shift-Left and Shift-Right. This new dimension focuses on how your customer is actually using your application and if the intersection of your application, customer behavior, and your company’s business objectives all align.
We recently released the much-anticipated Eggplant Functional 18.2, which includes some truly exciting innovations.