In the days of yore, businesses were set up at the town center, where people gathered, and offered their products and services. That was a logical way for businesses then to reach more customers and fill the coffers. Today however, one quick look around will easily tell us that people are immersed in the digital world through their smartphones and that is where the tech savvy populace of today is gathering. So isn’t it logical for businesses as well to create a digital presence and not miss out on engaging the consumers in the digital world?

It’s all about SMAC

Customers of the day, especially the millennials want business to be fun, simple and provide an engaging user experience. Be it banking, insurance or logistics, the consumer base prefers all services to happen from anywhere anytime and with a simple, no-nonsense approach. One way to go about providing a fun, simple and no-nonsense way to engage customers is to go digital. The commonly agreed ‘must haves’ for a digital transformation are “Social, Mobile, Analytics and Cloud”.

In other words, digital transformation is a closer alignment of IT and business to connect with customers in a seamless way across channels. It also involves helping the businesses take the right decisions at the right time with the help of real-time analytics.

The key drivers for businesses to opt for a digital strategy are:

  1. Staying ahead of the competition with superior customer engagement strategies
  2. Solution that is better responsive to changing business demands
  3. Faster time to market
  4. Provide a superior customer experience and thereby build a loyal customer base
  5. Advanced Analytics

While one can always debate about the cost and effort required in going for a complete digital transformation, one must also understand the cost of not going digital.

Some of the biggies such as Kodak and Blockbuster paid the price of staying stagnant and not investing enough in digital transformation strategies. On the other hand, companies such as DBS bank, Zappos, The Independent etc not just survived but beat the competition with carefully planned digital transformation strategies.

A digital transformation project has quite a few critical success factors. Ranging from complex integrations to business performance & reliability, digital transformation projects do provide a lot of scope for higher turnover of the business. On the other hand, it does involve a higher risk of failure if not implemented with a well-tested system.

Testing for Digital Transformation – Key Aspects

Digital transformation

Testing is a vital component of success for any digital transformation project. The main aim of providing a digital platform is to offer customers a superior user experience. The approach to test digital applications requires covering multiple dimensions of the product including functionalities, integrations, compatibility, accessibility, user experience, performance, reliability and the like. A simple delay of a few seconds in processing an online transaction can cause a social media backlash and can cause heavy damage to the reputation of the business. From a testing standpoint there are quite a few ways to ensure the user experience delivered is superior and comparable to, if not better than industry standards.

Performing all these tests effectively is a costly exercise and more often than not we see misplaced priorities and missed deadlines. Hence a balanced approach with reliance on automated testing is required to drive a successful testing engagement for a digital transformation project. While the repetitive tasks are automated, the manual effort can be spent elsewhere efficiently in finding user experience related issues that need the critical eyes of human beings.

Test Automation for Digital Transformation        

A well planned test automation strategy can add a lot of value to the digital testing efforts. A well-oiled test automation framework that is robust, capable of being effective in a continuous build & deploy environment, can cover omnichannel testing and has the ability to scale is a key enabler in digital testing projects.

Some of the areas where test automation can directly make a positive impact are:

Faster Time to market

Businesses are at a crunch to get their products rolled out in a short time span. Enabling a continuous integration set-up where there are automated tests to test the build in an automated fashion will go a long way in reducing the testing life cycle and speed up the time to market.

Cross Browser/ Cross Device Testing

A key aspect of digital transformation is for the businesses to be able to engage the customers across multiple channels, which inherently means the product has to be tested across all those different channels. Repeating the same tests across different channels is a waste of time and automation comes in really handy in saving time and effort in cross browser/device testing.

Increased Test Coverage

With shorter timelines for testing, test coverage always takes a beating. An automated regression suite will enable the testers to focus on validating the new features and other areas that need human screening, thereby enhancing the quality of the product multifold.

Complex Integrations

A digital transformation project usually involves a lot of integration with various components, internal or 3rd party. It is imperative to have the integrations tested to ensure there are no handshake issues in the live system that may jeopardize customers’ user experience.

An automated API test suite integrated with the UI test automation suite is an effective way to isolate issues and provide information to the development team that is quickly actionable.

Performance Tests

A one second delay in application load time has the potential to cause 7% loss in conversions. Every second counts in providing an engaging and satisfying user experience to the customers. Automated performance tests built into the continuous testing pipeline is an effective way to identify performance bottlenecks.

At Aspire, the in-house test automation framework AFTA 2.0 is specifically designed to make the most effective use of test automation covering all the above said parameters. With its tried and tested reusable functions, plug and play integrations, the ability to cover multi-channel and to scale up at will have worked well for many a customer. The AFTA 2.0 framework exploits Selenium Web Driver, Grid & Appium to their fullest on various parameters – Design patterns, parallel / distributed / cloud / cross browser / device execution, custom report, Continuous Integration, web security & performance testing. To learn more about how you can use AFTA 2.0 to make your digital transformation project a success, do write to us at [email protected]