Quality Engineering
Part of the change-maker series
Impact of Quality Engineering on Resiliency
Building quality into all facets of engineering assures less risk, improved market competitiveness, and better business agility. Reduced incident and defect rates result in superior user experiences and quicker product rollouts with shorter testing cycles and lower expenditure, driven at its core through automation.
Quality Engineering, as a part of DevOps, uncovers new efficiencies that synergise and support superlative engineering practices. In this article, we’ll explore the key tenets of Quality Engineering and how it impacts resiliency from both technology and business perspectives.
What is Quality Engineering?
Quality Engineering ensures the development of high-quality products/applications through applying rigorous testing at each stage of product development as issues can be identified and addressed as they are found. Through establishing the two key focus areas: process improvement and technology improvement, it ensures teams understand their data and can leverage it to identify and resolve issues quickly.
Quality Engineering in Software Development
Quality Engineering is a key enabler to Continuous Delivery. Utilising the two key focus areas to build quality into the Software Development Life-cycle enables teams to collaborate more seamlessly across functions such as development and security. As a result, teams are able to shift identification and resolution of problems to earlier stages in the cycle. This lowers the risk associated with the implementation of a change, improving visibility, while enabling efficiencies to be gained across teams in terms of time and costs.
Quality Engineering has a number of core objectives:
- Ensure teams ‘own’ the solution from inception to operations with the use of cross functional capability within the team.
- Enable an “as code” practice within the teams, for quality this means coupling and treating application and test code the same way – leveraging patterns, principles, practices and technologies based on application layers and technologies.
- Leverage DevOps tools and patterns to ensure seamless execution, early feedback/visibility and ongoing monitoring of the application
- Ensure data utilised in tests is self-serve and injectable at any part of the process.
- Leverage proactive exploratory testing in critical areas to identify issues and implement changes to improve overall design cheaply and efficiently.
At Tyme, we can address change and operationally related risks in development and delivery by empowering your business to build and develop risk assessment models across platforms and application stacks.
By using a shift-left strategy via continuous testing models, we can leverage automation and quality watermarks before a line of code is committed to production.
Key Tenets of Quality Engineering
There are many ways of measuring the quality of IT delivery, such as customer NPS, the average time to resolution, or system downtime. While the choice of metric could be subjective, the overall focus remains on functionality, consistency, usability, security and reducing the risk of a change.
To achieve these benchmarks, Quality Engineering incorporates techniques and tools taken from several domains such as software engineering, architecture, product management and information security.
Here’s how Quality Engineering enables a Software Development Life-cycle:
At Tyme, we believe quality has to be embedded into the product from the outset – during design and planning – with the mechanisms in place to drive a continuous feedback loop to expect and tackle the unknown.
Quality Engineering has to constantly evolve in progressively more complex tech environments to become a persistent, instantaneous, and data-driven function, which is improved by AI-based autonomous frameworks and can use intelligent incident reporting and self-healing processes.
That’s where we can help. We optimise tooling solutions and build a cross-organisation integration map to facilitate the reuse of common assets across the business.
Impact of Quality Engineering on Resiliency
Under the Quality Engineering model, quality maintenance doesn’t end when the product is launched. Quality Engineering continues with each sprint cycle and uses data obtained in every phase of the development process to enhance quality in the subsequent round.
Quality Engineering concentrates not only on product quality but also focuses on the analysis of the processes involved in product development. The objective is to reduce cost and save time by diminishing the potential expenses and delays due to defects.
The fundamental concept is that later in the delivery cycle defects are recognised, the more costly and time-consuming they are to resolve. Through Quality Engineering it is possible to significantly improve resiliency and reduce defect rates while in production.
We can help you lower the risk of changes and deliver known outcomes via correct assessment. We’ll empower you to decrease the frequency of defects in production, and ultimately increase your organisation’s responsiveness to market demands through considerably decreased delivery time-frames, while improving customer experience.
Organisational Impact of Quality Engineering
Why would your organisation want to adopt Quality Engineering? Here are a few possible reasons:
- Better Agility – Businesses have to implement Agile and DevOps methodologies to simplify their workflows, increase efficiencies, decrease costs, deliver quality products and services, and improve ROI. Quality Engineering can help in executing industry best practices and enabling the adoption of Agile and continuous delivery processes.
- Improved Monitoring – With the level of consumer expectations steadily increasing, the success of any product depends on key parameters such as performance, accessibility, functionality, and security. A robust Quality Engineering strategy can ensure effective quality control and management by leveraging technology, measurable tools, and well-established industry standards.
- Faster Time to Market – Quality Engineering involves planning and executing strategies to avoid defects from sneaking into the SDLC. It focuses on the long-term perspective of avoiding defects instead of getting into fire-fighting mode every time defects are found. This way, organisations can accelerate the software development and delivery process and significantly decrease the cost of ownership.
- Better Brand Safety – Quality Engineering can help address change and operationally related risks in development and delivery by enabling the organisation to build and develop risk assessment models across platforms and application stacks.
Embrace The Principles of Quality Engineering With Tyme
Effectively implemented QE solutions and methods can have a substantial influence on the organisation’s customer experience, and in-turn its bottom line.
At Tyme, we can help you deliver high quality platforms and exceptional customer experiences. Our consultants help organisations to realise the vision of Quality Engineering, being defined less by its focus on the applications themselves, and increasingly by its alignment with business goals.
We offer comprehensive quality engineering capabilities encompassing the entire range from Functional Regression, to Security, to Accessibility, to Usability and beyond, across all platform types.
If you wish to develop a ‘testing as a service’ capability including suitable consumption, funding, and governance models, you may want to read our free guide.
