Disruption in Software Testing
1. DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION & IMPACT ON SOFTWARE TESTING
Digital technologies are transforming the business activities, processes, and underlying models taking into account of the customer’s needs. This transformation is seen across all the industries that enabled by the technology. Here we discuss the impacts of this change on Software testing services using McKinsey’s framework – economic essentials of the digital strategy. Before we begin, let’s understand, What Digital really means?
- Creating value in new frontiers of business:
- Creating value in the processes that execute a vision of customer experience: Proactive decision making, contextual interactivity, Real-time automation, journey focused innovation
- Building foundational capabilities that support the entire structure: changing mindsets, culture, systems, and data architecture
2. DEMAND & SUPPLY FRAMEWORK
The following framework can be used to understand the shift in the overall demand and supply and apply it to the Software testing industry. The framework has 6 components. The 3 components above the axis explain the modest degree of change and below, the extreme degree of change.
A. Modest degree of change
UN-DISTORTING DEMAND AND UN-CONSTRAINING SUPPLY HELP IN CREATING NEW MARKETS
- Un-distorting demand relates to changing desires or needs of a customer. Newspapers/blogs for example offer tailor-made content to different sections of the society and different demo graph of the country by un-lumping the content and tuning them based on the customer needs.
- Un-constraining supply is what AirBnB, YouTube, etc., is currently doing by enabling the new suppliers coming into the market who have additional space or content to share
- Observing this change in the demand and supply, UBER created a totally different market
B. Extreme degree of change
UNDERSTANDING THE CURRENT VALUE CHAINS OF THE BUSINESS, PROCESSES, AND METHODOLOGIES AND OFFERING NEW VALUE PROPOSITIONS USING THE SCALABLE PLATFORMS, AN EXTREME DEGREE OF CHANGE CAN BE FORCED IN THE INDUSTRY
- Reimagining the business systems means, understanding the complete value chains, incorporating the customer feedback, simplifying the distribution channels, and developing altogether a new structure to support this change.
- The new value propositions can be offered by enriching the service with the information and practical results
- Using the hyper scaling platforms such as IBM’s Watson, Google’s Tensor flow, etc., the way the current testing artifacts produced can be changed
These changes in behaviors and sentiments are felt and seen across the IT industry. Waterfall model is fading away fast giving the way to the agile methodologies. Agile methodologies discourage the necessity for a separate testing phase to be done by the independent testing organizations. This will affect the software testing industry in many of the following ways:
- The factory models built to achieve the economies of scale in offering the testing services will no longer be effective
- Testing centers of excellence with the testers concentrated in a testing organization with different chain of command cannot be sustained
- The demand for the testers who understands the DEV-OPS and are competent in programming and fundamentals of software engineering developers will grow steep
- The context-sensitive testers, who is well versed in the business, domain, and institutional knowledge will replace the traditional UAT testers
- The technologies or platforms such as crowd-sourced testing will become more prevalent and substitute the conventional User Acceptance Testing
- The open source technologies will disrupt the existing tools to manage the testing efforts and also bring down the costs