Get testing and QA right – or your Agile and DevOps could fail at scale

Within Agile and DevOps teams, quality is now clearly everyone’s responsibility. The organization and execution of quality, validation, and testing activities have blurred among team members. But the reality is that without proper enablement and the right guidance, teams often fail to implement continuous testing with adequate risk coverage in their continuous development and continuous integration process.

This puts business performance and business outcomes at risk. Teams that lack proper Agile QA orchestration typically encounter the following issues: 

• More failures in production that impact customer experience and business performance 
• Fewer and slower deployment of features in production 
• Unhappy teams stemming from insufficient support and a lack of enablement in setting up adequate Agile testing and validation.

If we delve a little deeper, these issues are caused by a combination of quality challenges that we encounter across many organizations:

• Integration tests across teams get skipped because of a lack of time 
• The level of test activity automation drops below 20%  
• Teams waste up to 40% of their time getting the test environment and test data up and running 
• Teams use many different QA automation tools, but these are not always integrated and are difficult to sustain 
• Product owners and business owners do not have any visibility on the actual quality levels and risks they run with each release 
• Tests are not optimized (it is common for 30% of tests executed by teams to be irrelevant).

Five key areas of improvement

So, what’s the answer? How do you ensure your Agile and DevOps don’t fail at scale? Organizations must focus on five improvement areas to implement and provide QA and test activities in and across all Agile teams. These will ensure heightened business performance and customer experience through:

• Increasing the level of in-sprint test automation with QA automation frameworks and solutions that are easier to use 
• Removing redundant tests by leveraging smart analytics and predictive models 
• Providing continuous transparency to product owners and business leaders with smart application quality dashboards 
• Fostering self-improvement with transparent quality performance dashboards and production feedback loops 
• Enabling quality strategies, test automation, and test environment provisioning of Agile teams through an Agile QA support team. 

Introducing Capgemini’s Quality Engineering with ADMnext – Your QA partner of choice

Within Capgemini’s Quality Engineering with ADMnext, we have the capabilities and solutions to address these challenges. Our ambition is to be your QA partner of choice and help your Agile development teams attain heightened business performance outcomes. To achieve this, we’ve bundled our Agile Quality Assurance services and capabilities into our Capgemini Agile QA partner model, which consists of five areas: 

• Agile Quality Office 
• Agile QA Support 
• Agile QA Engineers within Feature Teams  
• End-to-end QA Squad 
• Specialized Test-as-a-Service. 

With this model, we can commit to the following tangible results: 

• Increased test velocity 
• Better quality outcomes and efficiency 
• Higher test automation success rates. 

In my next post, we’ll delve deeper into this model and how we can apply it to help you achieve more effective continuous automated testing and smart test data provisioning within your Agile teams.

In the meantime, to learn more about what Capgemini’s Quality Engineering with ADMnext can do for your business, visit us here. 
You can also learn more about Capgemini’s wider ADMnext offering here. And to get started right now, drop me a line here.