Quality is a crucial element for the success of modern businesses and industries, although it may manifest in different ways. In software and systems delivery, quality is equally important to ensure that organisations can achieve their business objectives and support them.
Software and technology are at the core of the digital world that businesses operate in today. Organisations must ensure that the digital channels they use to communicate with their customers, employees, and stakeholders are reliable, secure, available, and accessible. The failure of a software product to meet its intended objectives could mean loss of revenue, poor customer satisfaction, brand damage, and possible legal and regulatory issues.
As technology is so tightly integrated with how business operate today, many modern organisations are adopting an engineering approach to building better quality software from the start. Quality Engineering (QE) offers a holistic approach to quality, with a focus on delivering better quality business outcomes, with far less business risk.
QE isn’t just about doing testing - in QE, quality is embedded throughout the entire software development lifecycle. It is also about getting it right first time, to deliver higher quality software faster, and avoiding costly rework.
Planit has been delivering quality engineering and testing services to our customers for over 20 years. With our guidance and support, our customers have realised the following 5 key benefits of QE that can create value for businesses:
Enhanced customer experience
The increasing reliance on digital channels and consumerisation puts pressure on organisations to provide higher levels of software quality to meet customer demands for excellence, and to remain competitive. Customer experience is the impression your customers have of your brand, based on all the interactions they have with your business, and today many of those interactions are in digital form. To ensure not only your customers, but also your employees and partners, receive an excellent experience, you need to start looking early at what the expectations are from users. By setting your objectives early about what experience you want to offer your customers, you can then apply QE principals to ensure the technology fully supports and delivers that experience.
Reduced cost
Most organisations need to make some difficult decisions on how and where to invest. Building in quality from the start will save money in the end. The value from the quality spend should always be higher than the spend. When quality is embedded into the software lifecycle from the very beginning, it will reduce the cost of software delivery, as processes and practices are elevated from the start, and poorly optimised processes can be identified and addressed to eliminate wasteful activities. This in turn prevents costly defects from becoming embedded throughout in each product, and it reduces the time spent fixing defects, as well as the time spent doing rework and paying back technical debt.
Accelerated delivery
Increasing time to market by releasing at greater velocity is highly valuable, as organisations are operating in environments where speed of delivery is essential, as digital technologies are accelerated with new demands on businesses. Business leaders often request more flexibility in responding to rapidly changing market needs. By optimising the software lifecycle process with QE, you not only save money but also deliver faster by avoiding time spent fixing defects and doing rework. Speed can also be increased by applying the right tools and technologies at the right time, such as choosing what, when and how to automate with intelligent automation, applying intellectual property (IP) including assets, frameworks and tools, as well as by utilising analytics and AI-augmented technologies to accelerate delivery.
Improved quality
High quality is even more important today as software and systems are so critical in the modern digital economy. Ensuring and assuring the quality of software is becoming more challenging for customers, as IT systems are getting more complex with rapidly expanding integrations. Software should work the way it was designed, and businesses must be able to trust that their software products meet all relevant criteria to be successful, be it customer satisfaction, security and compliance, resilience, accessibility or competitive differentiation.
Reduced business risk
QE can reduce business risk to near 0% when you go live and bring 100% confidence in your ability to deliver. QE experts can help figure out where quality matters most and where it brings the most value, based on risks identified and expected business value of mitigating each risk. Risk-driven quality involves looking at the business value of the product versus the complexity and potential for product risks, and then determining the investment and effort required for QE activities that will mitigate those risks. QE helps to look at how the system could fail from the perspective of various stakeholders, so that we can work backwards from that and identify a balanced approach to embedding quality throughout the life cycle. This significantly reduces risk while accelerating delivery and reducing costs.
However, to achieve the above successfully, collaboration is key, and the partnering of quality engineers with various teams and stakeholders, such as software developers, business leaders, architects, third-party software vendors, release-support and operations staff, is essential to facilitate continuous feedback. The goal is to optimise every aspect of the lifecycle, gearing it towards delivering better business outcomes sooner.
Planit focuses on delivering these outcomes for clients, by bringing people with the right skills, leveraging the right tools and assets, at the right time, with the right level of intelligent automation. Our consultants and engineers are experts in how to deliver high quality software and at their fingertips they have a complete portfolio of frameworks, governance frameworks, tools, intelligent automation, industry assets, and our own IP. We are also constantly innovating to further streamline and expand how we improve value for our customers, and we leverage our data and analytics solutions for better insight and decision making, as well as game-changing AI solutions that can revolutionise the delivery of quality.
Planit recognises that every customer we work with has different requirements, from complex software architectures to unique end-user needs. By focusing on not only what our customer needs, but also on what our customers’ customer needs, it enables us to act as quality coaches and trusted advisors, to support our customers in reaching their business goals sooner.
To conclude, quality engineering is a strategic approach to software and systems delivery that can bring significant benefits to organisations and customers. By applying QE principles and practices throughout the software lifecycle, organisations can achieve greater customer satisfaction, lower cost, faster delivery, higher quality, and reduced business risk. If you want to learn more about how Planit can help you with your QE needs, then visit our QE page.