Quality engineering is a crucial practice in digital assurance. It ensures that you build resilient digital products that deliver secure, intuitive, and reliable experiences to customers through a proactive and systematic approach. What’s more, quality engineering in digital assurance ensures that software apps, websites, and other digital systems meet the highest quality standards.
Simply put, quality engineering in digital assurance solutions helps you provide holistic customer-experience-focused digital products. This enables your company to make a leap from conventional testing to modern and more effective quality engineering. But what is quality engineering? And what are some core practices and principles involved in quality engineering in digital assurance? Let’s find out.
What is Quality Engineering?
Generally speaking, quality engineering is an engineering discipline. It focuses on the principles and practice of product and service quality control and assurance. In the software development scope, quality engineering involves developing, managing, and maintaining IT systems, ensuring they are of a high-quality standard.
Quality engineering in digital assurance involves applying rigorous quality checks at every product development stage. Quality engineers critically analyze, develop, manage, and maintain digital quality assurance protocols.
The main goal of quality engineering in digital assurance is to ensure product quality. Also, it validates the resilience and reliability of digital products throughout their development lifecycle.
Practices Involved in Quality Engineering in Digital Assurance
To ensure resilient and reliable digital products, quality engineering in digital assurance involves various practices and principles. These include:
1. Test-Driven Automation
Test-driven development is an agile software development practice. It involves writing tests before the actual code. This ensures that the entire development process is driven by requirements and that tests are an integral part of the development lifecycle.
This practice supports regular testing, early identification of errors, and refactoring to enhance code quality. Also, it acts as living documentation. It provides a reference point of how the code should behave. As a result, it facilitates collaboration between development and testing teams.
2. Test Automation
Building resilient and reliable digital products requires rigorous testing. Conducting these tests manually can be time-consuming. Also, it can lead to missed errors that may lead to costly security incidents.
Quality engineering in digital assurance embraces an entirely different approach. It embraces test automation, whereby various tools and frameworks automate the execution of test cases. Automating tests has numerous benefits, including the following:
- It improves efficiency.
- It minimizes the time required for testing.
- It supports regular regression testing.
- It improves test coverage, leading to thoroughly tested, reliable, and resilient digital products.
3. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD)
CI/CD, short for Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment, is a software development approach that emphasizes the regular merging of code modifications into a central repository. Its main objective is to automate the process of deploying applications and software to production environments. By continuously integrating code changes, developers can swiftly identify and resolve conflicts or errors, leading to faster development cycles and more reliable software releases. Additionally, CI/CD streamlines the deployment process by automating the steps required to bring new features or bug fixes to the end-users.
According to Red Hat, the CI/CD approach supports the frequent delivery of software to customers by introducing automation into various development stages. It introduces continuous automation and monitoring throughout the application’s lifecycle. By embracing the CI/CD approach, quality engineers ensure that digital products are delivered faster and are resilient to attacks. Also, continuous monitoring ensures early detection of vulnerabilities and defects.
4. DevOps Collaboration
DevOps collaboration is a crucial aspect of quality engineering in digital assurance. It involves promoting a culture of shared responsibility and collaboration between multiple teams, such as quality assurance, operations, development, and quality assurance.
Integrating development and operations processes ensures that quality is built into every phase of the software development lifecycle. Also, DevOps collaboration facilitates streamlined communication, accelerates response to emerging issues, and faster feedback loops.
Other benefits of DevOps collaboration include:
- Collaboration often sparks creativity.
- Transparency: Since everyone is aware of who is doing what, there is less friction.
- Improved productivity: A strong collaborative process boosts efficiency.
- Reliability: DevOps collaboration builds a stronger team that can comfortably rely on each other. This improves the outcome of digital assurance.
5. Robust Testing
To ensure the resilience and reliability of digital products, quality engineering in digital assurance involves intensive testing of these solutions. Every component must be tested to ensure it meets the customers’ needs and the industry’s best standards. Therefore, testing in quality engineering covers numerous aspects, including the following:
o Performance Testing
Digital products often perform differently under different circumstances. That’s why performance testing is crucial. It assesses the responsiveness, stability, and scalability of your digital products under different conditions.
Performance testing helps you identify performance issues and ensures that your digital product can handle the expected user load. This testing approach helps you build resilient and scalable digital products that can handle seasonal changes in usage and demand.
o Usability Testing
The increased competition means that customers have numerous choices to choose from. Therefore, they will go for digital products that are easy to use and deliver exceptional customer experience. And that’s why usability testing is a crucial part of quality engineering in digital assurance.
Usability testing involves collecting feedback from actual users to identify usability issues in digital products. This allows quality engineers and development teams to make necessary improvements to enhance user satisfaction.
o Security Testing
Digital products are often exploited by hackers and malicious intruders. In fact, the number of cyberattacks has grown significantly over time. These cyberattacks lead to security breaches that can lead to significant financial losses and reputational damage.
To ensure your digital products are secure, thorough security testing is crucial. Quality engineers thoroughly assess your digital products’ security posture. This enables them to identify weaknesses and vulnerabilities in their design, implementation, and integration.
Once the weaknesses are identified, they are addressed by integrating various security mechanisms. Therefore, it helps protect your digital products from unauthorized access, malicious attacks, and data breaches, among other cybersecurity risks.
Final Thoughts
Quality engineering in digital assurance helps detect and address issues in digital products in the early development stages. As a result, it helps minimize defects and improve the time-to-market, quality, and customer satisfaction. This leads to building resilient and reliable digital products that can withstand cyberattacks and changes in market demands.