Legacy : Where were we?
Software Testing, as I’ve seen and practiced as a profession, was primarily a phase in software development in the early years of software revolution. At the start of IT boom that happened around 1999-2000, only a handful then believed that software testing can be offered as an independent service. This opened up a new horizon of third party testing teams and testing companies that were not in-house to the software development teams. They offered a wide range of “software testing” solutions. In other words, software testing phase got a new perspective of being independent and unbiased in ensuring pronounced quality. It churned out altogether a new set of roles, responsibilities, career domains and admittedly new challenges and problems to solve. In fact a range of software testing tools were in the market for that matter. By 2010, software testing as a service had become an inseparable and an integral aspect in decision making war rooms of software development. Practically, without a “Testing Sign Off”, even a single patch of software was a “No-Go” into live.
Transformation: where are we?
At the start of the previous decade, the leadership in most of the companies realised “Quality” as a primary indicator for software solutions. Dedicated investments in software testing domain were made to ensure top quality is achieved. The word was “No Compromise on Quality”. SLAs, although were in practice since the beginning, got a new found significance from quality perspective. Traditional waterfall models of software development declined with increasing demand on quality. V & V and Iterative and Incremental models of development became popular with primary importance and focus on quality right from the initial stages of software development life cycle such as Requirement collection and elicitation. This was indeed the transformational phase where software solutions went from being “Business Need” to “Business Need with Quality”. And for the record, with the advent of internet that eventually became faster by the day, a whole new level of products and solutions saw the light of the day. Web applications became ubiquitous. They in effect transformed the user experience. “Who is first in the market?” was the trend in the later part of the previous decade. This gave Software Testing an all the more impending challenges of lesser “Time” and better quality, although automation of redundant tasks addressed this challenge to some extent. Faster the testing, earlier to the market. Meanwhile, software testing no longer remained as an independent service. Nevertheless, it remained unbiased in nature. It became increasingly to be known as Quality Assurance. Transformation from “Achieving Quality” to “Quality Assurance”. Quality Assurance was defined as an essential process into the software development. Back to the trend, Agility and Agile processes began replacing V and V models. These processes and methodologies gave a new breath to software testing and provided the much needed scope to introduce automation in chunks without compromising on quality. However, the challenge of “Time” still remained as elusive. This can be attributed primarily to certain aspects such as resources including tools, skill sets and necessary training. Automation has become a mandatory skill set.
Data Driven : Where next?
Can you imagine a world that is data driven? Yes. We are at the cusp of taking that leap. Indeed it is inevitable. I remember myself giving a short technical talk on Data Science back in 2014 but then, I had, in-principle, little idea how QA fits into it. You see numerous buzzwords these days such as Data Science, AI/ML, Digital Transformations, Big Data, et cetera, floating around. However, at the core of many of these is The Data. It is this Data that is providing new insights and perspectives that define new problems. Again it is the same Data that is being used to solve those said problems. If you notice, most of the startups and even business enterprises these days talk about “what problem they have solved?”
Have you not seen LinkedIn profiles of many leaders with a keyword “storyteller”? I would rather recommend you do it first, which I figured it out lately. Again, How did they solve the problem that they are narrating? The Answer is, the same Data from which they defined the problem statement. But then you must be pondering how is QA relevant here. Well, with increasing significance on Data, QA becomes heavily dependent on the same Data. QA here has the challenge to ensure the problem defined is indeed solved. Testing including automation has to scale up and be Data Driven by remaining independent, unbiased, time bound and more importantly “No compromise on Quality”.
P.S.: I intend to make this as a series of articles around Quality Assurance and this is the first of such articles to start with. Also, the years mentioned are approximations to indicate the period of time.
