Increased Speed And Continuous Improvements: How Software Quality Assurance Redefines Retail Applications

Retail industries have witnessed a dramatic shift in recent years. The confluence of technologies such as mobile, cloud, and e-commerce platforms has accelerated the pace at which today’s retail businesses are evolving. The rapid development of digital infrastructure has led to customer-centric “Flash-sale”, “Subscription”, “and On-demand retail delivery”.

In order to manage these disruptions, retailers are in constant need to reinvent their operating practices. In retail, it is important to orchestrate a business model that can bring the customers a lifetime value, not just a one-time transaction. Therefore, retail enterprises need to build software products with the capabilities to be agile and responsive to consumer needs.

Hence, any new software platform that is being introduced should prove its effective IT capabilities with a mix of analytical and innovative performance virtuoso. Resilient quality assurance (QA) is important to transform legacy environments in the digital era and to ensure each of the development processes is executed correctly.

A robust Software Quality Assurance would help retailers to build top-notch software products that could come with the ability to collect, process, and share large quantities of data. Sophisticated quality improvements across products, processes, and systems would maximize productivity and offer retailers the opportunities to enhance customer engagement and improve the overall shopping experience.

Automation As An Integral Part Of QA

Testing practice is increasingly moving toward AI-powered automation. Its higher efficiency and faster outcome have made AI an inevitable force to optimize QA strategy. In World Quality Report 2020-2021, 74% of the respondents have said that “we need to automate more of QA and testing.” Moreover, in that same report, a whopping 90% of respondents reported that AI formed the biggest growth area in their test activities.

The figures in that report are revelatory.

  • QA contributes to business growth and business outcomes (74% respondents)
  • A robust Quality Assurance serves as a custodian of quality. It detects software defects before go-live (72% of respondents)
  • 63% of respondents believe that QA speeds up software releases with good quality ¹

A streamlined Quality Assurance focuses on ensuring a high level of functionality and delivering applications more quickly, more frequently, and with greater reliability. We aim to produce our clients’ specifications with zero defects and maintain the integrity of the product or service.

retail testing

Quality Assurance practices involve a smart quality system that enables a virtuous cycle of continuous improvement. With strong validation and verification, the tangible benefits of accelerated time to market, increased capacity and responsiveness, improved customer satisfaction, and profits are remarkable. As retailers embark on journeys to modernize their software infrastructure, overly tight specifications require additional processing, analysis, and testing strategies.

Fully Modernized progress in the complex world of QA

Legacy IT platforms are functionally inadequate to provide Loyalty, Pricing & POS Solutions in retail industries. Solid quality management and monitoring product consistency are vital to enable digitally-driven omnichannel approaches. Ensuring quality during rapid development cycles is a challenge that needs to be addressed. But the problems are further magnified since retail businesses are also looking for recommendation engines, dynamic vendor collaboration, and real-time forecasting models to be incorporated into their software landscape.

Quality Assurance brings in a magnitude of opportunities in the retail marketplace to identify risks and proactively mitigate them. The process identifies vulnerabilities by utilizing advanced analytics on a holistic set of data. The domain-centric delivery solutions and process competency make it easier to conform to requirements and meet business demands. Testers can now optimize testing and build and execute tests faster than ever.

QA strings together innovative tools and established practices to provide testing metrics such as defect-removal efficiency, defect ratios, and cost of defects. Automated deviation detection further cements Quality Assurance as a much-needed solution to be integrated into product development workflows.

Moving Efficiency Into Mainstream Retail QA

Why Software Quality Assurance is indispensable for retail businesses? The new digital shopper is highly interconnected. To meet this, retailers produce software that demands complex system integrations. To diagnose and resolve quality issues, the always-on agile QA is essential. The problem is further magnified when the new failure patterns become difficult to identify and analyze due to increased integration. Now QA is at the forefront of solutions to help retailers keep pace with advanced technological breakthroughs. An optimal QA is necessary to emphasize rich functionality and handle tailored configurations in the core retail ecosystem.

Aspire Systems’ Software Quality Assurance is a systematic approach that bridges product specifications to customer performance. We create a culture of continuous improvement and our QA is geared to enhancing the standard and consistency of retail software products.

Our full suite of quality assurance services includes extensive process assessments, test program management, gap analysis, and AI-driven QA testing. From requirement analysis, test planning, to test execution and reporting, we embed quality into the testing landscape for sustained and predictable quality of products.

Endnotes

¹ https://www.microfocus.com/media/report/world-quality-report-2020-21-twelfth-edition.pdf

Follow us on Aspire Systems Testing to get detailed insights and updates about Testing!

Latest posts by Kevin Paul (see all)