Quality Engineering – it’s the way forward!

By James Eastham, Head of Delivery - Roq

During the 20 or so years that I’ve worked in this field of expertise, I’ve seen a lot happen.  Technologies have evolved, been advanced and replaced.  The introduction of automation changed the game in terms of speed and accuracy, and the need for the testing processes, practices and standards to be upscaled grew and grew.

As technology has changed, the world has changed to.  The demands on businesses to deliver the best experience through technology has gone through the roof.  Customers, who expect their technology to work first time, every time will vote with their feet (or, moreover their fingers). One study suggested that a quarter of consumers had switched loyalty from one company to a competitor whose technology – website, app and payment system – delivered a better customer experience – a figure that jumped to 41% among those aged between 18 and 34.  And the employee experience can and will do the same. In 2022, Freshworks reported that 94% of employees in the UK report being frustrated due to inadequate workplace technology, and more than one in ten (11%) say this makes them want to leave their job.

The risk to businesses is immense

• The measurable cost of downtime can be huge.  According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is about £4,000 per minute and 98% of businesses claim that a single hour of downtime costs over £80,000.

• Unmeasurable and sometimes unconsidered costs will take their toll.  These can be anything from the knock-on effect of often irreparable brand and reputational damage; to the impact on employee morale and productivity.  Not-so-fun fact.  Did you know that it can take up to 23 minutes to refocus your mind after an interruption?

• Customer opportunities are missed - According to a McKinsey insights report, digital transformation and a focus on customer experience can generate a 20-30% increase in customer satisfaction and economic gains of 20-50%.

All of these things have put pressure on the testing process in a world where skilled people aren’t always immediately available. In fact, thanks to the growing digital skills gap, it’s a little like finding and keeping a unicorn!

Building Quality into technology from the outset is the future

It’s never been more important for businesses to take a holistic, end-to-end approach to implementing and managing their technology.  Overheads are bad enough with the cost-of-living crisis and energy costs spiralling out of control.  Nobody needs unexpected costs from their technology.  And mid-to long-term savings and efficiencies are a welcome return on investment.

Evolving to meet the needs

All of this is why I find myself so excited about the evolution of our service portfolio, and what it has meant for our team.  It’s the crux of why we relaunched our brand in December.

Software testing has needed to shift, to give businesses what they need.  We’ve long thought of ourselves as an independent Quality Engineering company and strongly believed that we needed to make a bolder, statement around this.  As our Test Architect, Steve Mellor eloquently put in his blog that we shared in December:

“The Quality Engineering mindset helps build, deploy and operate technology solutions that work for you, at pace.”

Testing, testing…

In the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), testing has traditionally, typically takes place in the ‘Validate’ phase.  This was true regardless of the scale of a project.  Whether it’s replacing a large-scale business system, or simply improving user experience for a new client portal.  From the inception of the initial idea, the approach is defined, implemented, the work is validated and then deployed to use.  Testing has been commonly associated with validating something that has been bought or built meets the demands of the business, typically by assessing it against the requirements, testing it and recording confirmation that the technology works in a way that meets the agreed criteria.

Great. Until something goes wrong that is.  By this time, so much time has already gone into the project before the problem comes to light.  Back to the drawing board – taking the long route to identify what went wrong, where, and why.

Quality… Assured

The much-misused phrase Quality Assurance has become synonymous with extending testing into the ‘Build’ phase of delivery, which goes some way to shortening the feedback loop when reworking is necessary. 

Building tests whilst building software does provide faster feedback, and the ROI really kicks-in when you can run automated tests (such as regression suites) on demand or as a scheduled job.  It eliminates some aspects of manual testing (the repetitive bits), giving you faster and more consistent test execution and feedback on the stability of a piece of software. And of course, it frees up humans to do more useful things, like asking awkward questions.

But Quality Assurance isn’t perfect.  Discovery of problems in the latter stages of a delivery or development lifecycle can be very costly to address!  As Steve rightly says:

“You can’t test in quality or easily ‘assure quality’ – despite the phrase quality assurance would have you believe because you’re assessing things when some decisions have already been made.”

We need more

In most sectors, speed of change is important.  We’ve already talked about the impact of not getting things right.  If you can’t out-innovate your competitors, then you lose market share.  The cost of not building the right thing is high – not only is it a missed opportunity, but you create additional work and costly situations, and risk damaging your reputation with your clients and your people. It’s essential that you don’t go so fast that you cut corners.

Consider quality holistically

In essence, that’s exactly what Quality Engineering is.  Not just a left shift, but a right shift as well.  It’s consideration of all aspects of a product or solution from the very first steps in the process to the value being realised when it’s in the hands of the end-user - to help ensure you get a quality outcome.

We take the approach of embedding a quality-first mindset with our clients, to ensure quality is engineered across the whole Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), from inception right through to deploy and maintain.  An easy way to understand how we do that is to look at our Quality Engineering Ecosystem.  It shows how our three core services of Consultancy where the focus is on reviewing and providing recommendations on practices, processes and standards, to help organisations adopt industry best practices, Functional - manual or automated test delivery, through to overall test governance to provide fast feedback on the state of deliverables, and Non-functional – providing the necessary information to enable organisations to scale their technology to a level that meets their business ambition.  These are carried out along with a comprehensive set of accelerators, that integrate to make a complete service offering that meets specific business needs to exacting standards.

We’ve built our QE Ecosystem based on five core principles that we believe are crucial to delivering Quality Engineering that makes a difference:

• Automation first – using appropriate tools and techniques to drive efficiencies and work towards technical excellence.

• Continuous improvement – open, honest, straight talking to continually look at making small, but impactful change to deliver excellent products and services.

• 360 feedback – commitment to continuous learning, so that we can identify and address issues as early as possible.

• Management – An accurate, straight-talking approach to providing visibility of delivery progress.

• Coaching – a passion and commitment to coaching and development of a client, leaving their teams in a better place.

The core tenet of the Quality Engineering mindset is when to apply the appropriate practices to produce high-quality solutions whilst reducing unnecessary costs and delays, and making delivery of great products and services possible.  It’s a mindset shift from traditional testing and quality assurance, whereby quality is considered as early as possible within a product, project or delivery activity and any risks are mitigated before they become difficult to effectively manage.

I (and the rest of the team) would welcome the opportunity to talk more about this.  We enjoy a debate and take every chance to gather feedback.  That’s what continuous improvement is all about!  Drop us a line at ask@roq.co.uk or use our contact form.  Look forward to hearing from you!

Thanks for reading.