Digital Engineering Archives - Page 3 of 6

Redefining the Way Quality Assurance Works

Alex Thompson Digital Engineering June 2, 2022

It’s essential for companies in the pharmaceutical and medical technology industry to find a way to approach quality assurance and management proactively. While advancements in technology have enabled a new way of delivering quality, healthcare companies must take advantage, implementing new approaches that extend beyond compliance and execution. There’s a whole new technology-driven way of quality assurance emerging.

Ways Technology Can Improve Quality Assurance: A Glance

To fully understand how technological advancements can redefine how quality insurance works, it’s essential to take a broader perspective before focusing on each benefit’s smaller, individualized aspects.

Technology improves quality assurance by:

Every industry currently faces digital modernization at some level. Excellent quality assurance should not come as a cost of doing business but rather as a way to emphasize the value of an enterprise. Advanced tech combined with modern design techniques and flexibility in the workplace are massive components of changing how determining quality works at a fraction of past expense.

The bottom line is always the bottom line. Innovative quality assurance can positively impact profit, accelerating product time to market and boosting manufacturing response and capacity.

While these benefits are measurable on paper, quality assurance (from a tech standpoint) can fuel your entire organization to take ownership of providing quality products and services, thereby boosting customer satisfaction and reducing the risk of compliance errors. When it comes to quality assurance, technology is seemingly limitless.

The Current State of Quality Assurance

Quality assurance tends to become something a business feels like they have to do to succeed. While this is technically true, that feeling skews perspective. In reality, we should view quality assurance as a way to enhance our businesses, and the process becomes a lot less tedious when it’s automated.

Executives in all industries, primarily pharma and medical technology, view quality assurance and compliance as a business byproduct. Since they’re in business, it has to be done.

Quality assurance happens behind the scenes, and customers typically aren’t aware of it unless the unexpected happens.

The main focus of quality assurance has never really been the consumer. Instead, businesses concentrate on fulfilling compliance requirements while reducing costs in any way possible.

This (somewhat misguided) direction is where many companies go wrong regarding how they execute their quality assurance measures. It should always be more about your client base and less about a primary goal of satisfying regulations with the constant building pressure to save money.

Instead of making operations more efficient, quality assurance practices, in many cases, put innovation into a box. Poor quality assurance practices take salespeople away from customers and significantly extend supply chains. In short, it tends to drive frustration instead of working as a way to improve operations overall.

The Application of Emerging Technologies

Many aspects of quality assurance remain rooted in legacy systems and old ways of implementation. However, newer digital technologies have presented opportunities that are only applied halfway. For example, companies will use digital technology to automate paperless workflows and data pulls, but the main concentration of quality assurance rests on cutting costs.

Yes, modernizing digitally absolutely cuts down costs and boosts revenue when done correctly. However, the mindset that modernization can only cut costs for the company completely misses the mark.

Pharmaceutical and medical technology organizations can increase patient safety by utilizing the speed, data, and connectivity that digital technology brings to the table. They can successfully improve the quality of their products across the table, as well as processing reliability and overall efficacy.

Embracing Quality Assurance and Creating Value

Adopting the technology to create intelligent quality assurance in every part of your organizational process can free up your resources and allow you and your teams to focus on the tasks that mean more. Automation improves your customer service factor when it comes to speed and efficiency, but it also gives you more one-on-one time with them.

Automation benefits don’t stop at customer service. By investing in quality assurance, you’re ensuring the time to determine if you’re putting out a quality product in the first place. It all comes full circle. In addition to improving your customer journey, automation creates value in other areas, including:

Embracing automated quality assurance processes within every fabric of your organization means spending less time dealing with services and products that are less than high-quality. It’s a genuinely business-changing venture.

The Pandemic and A Change in Quality Assurance

It’s no secret that the pandemic changed how most companies conduct business. Many went from no online presence to the need to establish one almost overnight. Quality assurance became essential as consumer reviews and the desire for instant accessibility and a relatively quick journey took over.

Focuses inevitably shifted to quality assurance to keep customers happy, but it became a way to make a business better in every aspect. COVID-19 undeniably forced many companies, who were facing massive pressure to begin with, to employ the fundamentals of proactivity when it comes to quality.

Pharmaceutical and medical technology companies adapted quickly, demonstrating unprecedented performance levels through agility and flexibility. Here’s what happened:

Companies redefined quality to work from a distance. Social distancing and newly implemented remote working settings meant revising workflows and having no other choice but to harness digitization processes that probably should have been initiated already;
The deployment of advanced analytics and digital tools helped immensely across all avenues, including product production, testing, and release;
Employees’ commitment was crucial in the collaborative efforts needed to successfully transform the work process from in-person to remote-based. Most companies noticed a dramatic reduction in any issues caused by human error, which contributes to quality assurance.

As a result, most companies have stuck to the changes implemented due to the positive return on time, technology, and financial investments.

Innovative Quality Management and Digital Technology

As recent as the past two years, smart quality assurance has demonstrated that it directly positively impacts quality improvement. It allows organizations to reduce overall costs related to quality assurance. When employed correctly, the benefits are undeniable, as are most aspects of digital tech advancements. Here’s what to expect:

Enhanced Results

Automation QA saves time, even when your legacy systems are massive and complex. Testing can repeatedly happen, delivering faster, better results with less effort.

Faster Feedback

With smart quality assurance, feedback can happen in real-time, which significantly enhances communication among designers, developers, and product merchants, primarily during the project validation phase.

Brand Enhancement

Automated quality assurance depends on the quality of the data tested. Testing was once carried out on live databases. It took copious amounts of time and has now transformed into automated solutions that allow companies to re-use data and save costs from a project maintenance point of view.

Automated quality testing adds value to all stakeholders, enhancing system capability and leading to a digital revolution. As a result, this improves the brand name and reputation and increases customer retention.

Cost-Effectiveness

Though the initial costs of investing in smart quality assurance are high, it saves a ton of company money and increases ROI in the long run. With automation comes a reduction in the time required to run quality tests and produces a higher quality of work.

Making Automated Quality Assurance Work for You

Taking the time and assigning the funds to evolve how your healthcare company conducts quality assurance throughout daily processes is essential for streamlining workflows and finding cost-effective success.

Automated quality testing plays a significant factor in reducing time spent on manual efforts. You’re paving the way for swift feedback and maximized profits by evolving digitally. Small and medium enterprises should consider putting changes into effect right away to maintain a competitive edge.

It’s time to stop working specifically for quality assurance and make your quality assurance process work for you.

The Right Way to Transition from a Legacy Platform to a Modern Application

Alex Thompson Digital Engineering, Modernization May 24, 2022

Digital transformation is so much more than a buzzword, even though the tech industry often uses it as such. From blog posts to services promising to digitalize your applications, digital transformation is everywhere.

Even though digital transformation is all the rage, it would be ill-advised to allow the hype surrounding it to overshadow the importance of actual implementation. Transforming existing products and processes to attract and retain more customers is one of the main selling points of digital transformation, as well as driving growth and staying competitive in your industry.

As we make our way through 2022, we can safely say that thousands of organizations, more than half, have excited their usage of digital technologies. This acceptance of digitalization transforms legacy platforms into applications that optimize the customer experience, fuel employee productivity, and solidify business resiliency.

Your digital modernization should include updating legacy systems and processes to infuse greater intelligence (both human and AI) across your business while increasing workflow efficiencies. It begins with the update of your legacy systems.

What Defines a Legacy System?

If you’re here, you probably know what constitutes a legacy system, but just in case, we’ll cover it briefly. In short, a legacy system is any older software, method, language, or technology that your organization relies on to stay up and running.

You can continue to use legacy systems and allow them to be an integral part of your institution. Still, they come with challenges if the out-of-date technology impedes your business’s fit, agility, or value. When legacy systems become an issue for IT in the form of complexity, risk, or cost, many business owners turn to the transition to a modern application.

You can spot a legacy system from a mile away when they begin to introduce the following challenges:

Technology is changing rapidly, along with market dynamics and the need for organizational change, which often ends with updating or eliminating old legacy systems. If you’re struggling with your legacy systems built on ancient architectures contributing to a lack of connectivity and low efficiency, it’s time to consider application modernization.

What Does Application Modernization Mean?

If you’re unclear on what application modernization entails, it’s the process of taking a legacy system and updating it to a modern platform infrastructure or architecture. Application modernization can go in many directions depending on the state of your legacy systems and the problems your organization faces. It also relies heavily on the business goals that currently drive your desire for digital transformation.

Application isn’t the act of simply replacing legacy systems. There are varying approaches to migrating, updating, and optimizing your legacy systems to turn them into modern, workable, relevant architecture. When you understand what drives your modernization, you can choose the right approach for each legacy update you conduct.

Why You Should Modernize Legacy Systems

Updating a legacy platform to a modern application stems from the fact that agility has always been an IT priority, and systems designed upward of five years ago probably can’t even attempt to embrace today’s technology changes. The business landscape, primarily in technology, is hugely competitive and shows zero signs of slowing down.

We understand that many legacy systems are critical for daily business operations, and this is why digital modernization is such a massive undertaking. However, IT managers and business executives have to study the cost of continuing to maintain a legacy system and compare it to the expenses of migrating to an updated application.

Decisions regarding legacy application updates have to reach beyond the cost. The importance of updating legacy systems and embracing cloud transformation is strategic, and the recent shifts in mindset show that businesses recognize the value of modern technology.

The main driver of digital transformation is meeting customer expectations, but the decision is more intricate than just that aspect. Employees are putting in more work to operate on outdated legacy applications, and it’s not uncommon for people to leave their jobs as a result. Organizations that prioritize digital transformation can increase revenue while decreasing internal costs. It starts with committing to the change.

Technologies to Modernize Your Applications

They say if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself. This statement isn’t always true, and if you plan to tackle application modernization without professional help, you might be in for a big surprise and, worse, poor results. Regardless, when we talk about modernizing applications, it typically means that your company should take advantage of one or more of these technologies.

The Cloud

Replatforming legacy applications on the cloud is a typical component of the attempt to modernize or automate a workflow. The cloud offers a variety of options, including public, hybrid, and private, while boosting scalability, lower cost, and overall agility.

Containers

Containers are a packaging method for deploying and operating software units within the cloud, leading to data portability and scalability. Organizations will sometimes utilize Kubernetes as well, a container system that automates the processes within a container system.

Microservices

Most legacy platforms exist on a single-tier, self-contained, monolithic platform. A major playing factor in the modernization game is reaching company agility goals to work with the ever-evolving customer and employee needs. Many organizations employ microservices to emphasize linked services by API, allowing them to choose the best solutions to meet those changing expectations that they can scale as needed.

Orchestration and Automation

Workplace automation is becoming essential, primarily when it comes to redundant tasks. When executed correctly, automation can set up such processes to run on their own, while at the same time, orchestration automates multiple tasks and turns them into a workflow.

A Strategy to Modernize Your Legacy Systems

If you’re going to transition your legacy systems and embrace modern applications, you have to do it right.

Evaluate Current Legacy Systems

If you can determine that your legacy application does not meet the current needs of your business in a competitive landscape, you should modernize it. The more drivers to update that are present (not contributing to success, introducing risks, raising the cost of ownership), the greater the benefit of modernizing such applications.

Define Your Problems

When legacy systems no longer meet the IT needs, you have to define and refine them. Pinpoint the specific cause of the friction for users, both customers, and employees.

However, you should also be able to determine what aspects of your legacy software actually do work. You can decide which modernization approach you should implement when you know what works and what doesn’t, moving forward to evaluate and choose your application modernization options.

The Right Transformation for You

What works for one company may not work for another, and this rule applies to everything from marketing to digital upgrades. The right way to modernize your legacy systems is to choose which method flows with your company from varying perspectives. There’s no doubt that this type of transformation is a complex process, and it helps to have an experienced partner who can help you make your modernization venture a success.

Serverless Architecture and Its Traits

Alex Thompson Digital Engineering May 16, 2022

When it comes to serverless architecture, it’s crucial to understand every trait of this popular cloud execution model. Many content pieces focus on the positives of serverless services, which is just fine because its benefits are outstanding.

However, it’s essential that we note, when dealing with any new or new-ish (serverless architecture hit the market in 2014), that it not only comes with positives and negatives but traits. But what do we mean by “traits” regarding cloud computing execution models?

The traits of serverless architecture are features, attributes, or characteristics if you will. They’re not really pros or cons but simply part of the software model we have to deal with to take advantage of the perks.

What is Serverless Architecture?

For those unfamiliar, serverless architecture is the relatively straightforward method of developing and deploying applications and services without maintaining a server. Of course, your application still runs on servers, but you don’t have to operate them. Instead, your serverless services provider will handle that aspect.

With serverless architecture, you will not need to provision or scale your servers to support your storage systems, databases, and applications. Instead of spending substantial time on server management, your DevOps team can focus their time and effort on product development. In addition, server security and network configuration fall under the responsibility of your serverless vendor.

The Attributes of Serverless Architecture

Companies can significantly reduce overhead and channel more energy into creating scalable, dependable solutions with serverless architecture. Serverless architecture has many characteristics (traits) that some find to their advantage while others do not. The light that you shine on serverless architecture, whether it be negative or positive, has much to do with your specific company needs.

If you believe that serverless architecture might be right for your business, but you’re unsure, we’ll discuss its traits now.

Serverless Architecture is Hostless

Developers and business owners love that serverless architecture doesn’t rely on hosting or servers, and therefore, there is little to no server maintenance. Traditional server-based systems require a great deal of troubleshooting and infrastructure monitoring, and you don’t have to patch your server.

The lack of a server means that standard server hosting data will not be available to you. These data sets include Peak Response Times, Requests Per Second, Average Response Rates, and error rates. Instead, the cloud provider will report such metrics.

Since the typical data isn’t part of your serverless management methodology, you’ll have to learn to use metrics that don’t coincide directly with the server. You’ll also need to study new ways of executing and optimizing the acceptable performance of your serverless architecture.

While shifting to a serverless service sounds simple, it can be overwhelming, keeping many businesses from making the switch. It’s up to you to decide if you’re ready for the challenge. Is the absence of hosting responsibilities worth learning and implementing an entirely new architecture?

Serverless Architecture is Stateless

FaaS, or Functions as a Service, is one of the options given by serverless architecture. FaaS allows a platform for users to create, deploy, and administer applications without the burden of managing a server.

However, FaaS is short-lived, and the system uses code containers only one time before deleting, which means that you cannot save application data on a FaaS serverless service; it’s stateless. For some businesses, FaaS works well, and for others, it’s not an option. Again, this is a fantastic example of how serverless architecture manages to be both helpful and hindering simultaneously.

Serverless Architecture has Elasticity

In terms of scalability, the elasticity that serverless architectures have is an advantage. Because the model is stateless and, obviously, serverless, it can scale resources automatically. This automation means that your developers are free from manual scaling, as well as finding and eliminating typical resource allocation challenges.

The flexibility of a serverless model can help your business save money on operating expenses because you’ll only see charges for the aspects you utilize in certain situations. It’s likely necessary to integrate your serverless architecture with legacy systems that have lost some relevance and can’t handle the higher levels of serverless elasticity and flexibility. In turn, this could cause downstream system issues and failures, but that’s not a guarantee.

Regardless, it’s crucial to brainstorm with your team concerning coping with system failure circumstances if you decide that serverless architecture will work for you. Modernizing digitally and building microservices requires the constant need to lean into the evolution and inevitable change. Implementing serverless architecture is not an exception to that standard rule.

Serverless Architecture is Inherently Distributed

The term “distributed” in DevOps often refers to splitting an application, project, or business into sub-service categories and assigning them to varying servers or computers. Serverless architecture is stateless, and therefore all pieces of data must exist on a BaaS, or Backend as a Service, platform. Because of this, serverless architecture distributes automatically and inherently.

We previously discussed elasticity, which is a massive advantage to distributed systems. A distributed architecture equates (in most cases) to a single region of high availability that will minimize service interruptions by eliminating scheduled downtime and exhibiting stellar failure control.

Teams can utilize serverless architecture in other availability zones that are up and running, even if one of them experiences failure in the region of your cloud computing vendor. It should be clear by now that choosing any architecture model involves a distinct level of compromise, as constant availability reduces system consistency.

In cloud computing, serverless architectures have consistent models that remain specific to that architecture. At some point during the migration to a serverless model, you’ll face the decision of which BaaS platform you want to implement, and you should consider the behavior of the consistency model of each one.

Serverless Architecture is Event-Driven

Designed to execute tasks and receive data, serverless architectures react to incoming information in the way of creating a subsequent event. Each serverless architecture function runs only when prompted by a particular event. So, each process of your program or application will run when triggered.

The use of a BaaS platform is why serverless architecture is so event-driven. Essentially, you have zero control of the code of your third-party services. While this can be scary for some development teams, others appreciate that no control means your provider can enable extensibility and quickly expand upon their existing features.

Without question, the event-driven design reduces dependence between components and, as a result, reduces the coupling of processes. However, most businesses agree that the bigger picture is an essential operational aspect, and employing event-driven architecture could contribute to losing sight of that bigger picture. It’s not a requirement when implementing a serverless model, but it happens, and it makes troubleshooting your system more complex.

There are two sides to every characteristic, and it’s crucial to consider both. Know what will work for you and what won’t, weigh the pros and the cons, and then go from there.

Working with Serverless Architecture

As serverless architecture gains more attention because it requires little to no maintenance and a low barrier to entry, businesses must educate themselves on how to work with a serverless system before jumping in with both feet. From better observability across your applications to speed, there are many reasons that businesses choose to take the serverless architecture route.

Internal architecture administration is typically a considerable investment for a business, and the appeal of the serverless model lies in the relief of those expenses. Developers can leave server maintenance behind and focus more on the user experience, which would seem to raise your revenue inevitably.

Serverless architecture is ever-evolving. It’s not all perfect and can provide application inefficiencies and third-party dependence, which are two aspects that may not work for many companies and development teams.

Deciding if Serverless Architecture is Right for You

There’s no denying that serverless architecture is exceptionally appealing. Having your applications and programs exist on a third-party computing system that you don’t have to maintain frees up a substantial amount of time and money.

While there is an initial investment, the costs are often low. However, it can take some time to get your serverless model up and running, and “cold starts” are common due to the system needing access to internal resources to get up and going. It’s all about deciding what your company can deal with from a developmental and operational point of view. Do you currently have the time to deal with the potential bugs that assist serverless architecture?

Any digital modernization switch will have its drawbacks, and we have to stop talking about benefits and limitations and more directly about attributes. In short, serverless architecture is just another means for deploying applications, but it’s crucial to have the troubleshooting and management knowledge that it requires.

Educated decisions are essential when choosing an architecture for your company. Compared to other cloud models, serverless services are still in their early days. As experiences and patterns evolve, so will the ability to build a better, more efficient serverless architecture.

How to Know if the Multi-Cloud is Right for You and How it Can Help Your Business Succeed?

Alex Thompson Digital Engineering, Modernization May 10, 2022

As the world advances toward new forms of technology, it can be challenging for business owners to decide what structures, formats, and applications will work for them. Internal technology teams must operate efficiently while adapting to ever-changing conditions in the workforce and consumer environments.

Companies of every size should have an agile digital transformation strategy to improve adoption rates and come out of challenging periods (such as a global pandemic) above the competition. Agile, scalable, and secure infrastructures come from a future-ready cloud or multi-cloud platform.

If you remain entirely unsure whether a cloud program is right for your company, there are ways for your IT team to assess your business’s current and future needs to determine if the multi-cloud will work for you. Data modernization is essential to the future, but it’s up to you to decide your approach.

How to Assess the Applicability of the MultiCloud for Your Company

Though all businesses should embrace digital advancement, even in its most basic form, there are a few for which the multi-cloud approach may not make sense. The proper assessment is necessary, and through a strategic operational scrutinization, you can begin to establish if the multi-cloud will enhance your business practices. It’s all about knowing when the time is right to put a multi-cloud infrastructure into action.

Remember, adopting a multi-cloud strategy comes with some initial increase in costs and time spent. If your company does not have a legitimate reason to assume multi-cloud operations, you might take on too much complexity without tangible benefits regarding your ROI.

Compliance

Complying with industry regulations concerning security, for example, is a significant driver for many businesses to jump on the multi-cloud operational bandwagon. Legal concerns that could represent a potential risk to the company (whatever those may be) that can be rectified through cloud migration encourage most business owners to leap to the multi-cloud.

Flexibility

The flexibility of an organization is essential to operational efficiency. The multi-cloud allows business owners and IT teams to increase speed, create new user-friendly tools, and amp up their customer-based services and technologies.

The overnight transition from office-based work to working from home was a wake-up call to the world regarding the need for business flexibility. If flexibility within your company is a goal, then the multi-cloud is your answer.

Cut Out Downtime

Reducing the downtime for a suite of already containerized services can help your business achieve a consistent operational workflow. In the long run, this will optimize your return on investment. Though the initial switch to the multi-cloud is undoubtedly time-consuming and, for some companies, incredibly overwhelming, it’s worth the inevitable ROI increase.

Establishing the Resources

Any shift to a cloud platform requires substantial technical resources to execute the move correctly. If you think your team is ready for a multi-cloud approach, you have to fully grasp the capabilities and objectives of your organization and any potential tradeoffs, both short and long-term.

The Multi-Cloud and Success

Your business’s success in implementing a multi-cloud strategy depends on the strength of the resources that back you, though many aspects of the multi-cloud drive overall business success. Reasons to utilize the multi-cloud can go from simple to complex quickly, so let’s take a look at how the multi-cloud can help your business succeed.

Workload Optimization

A multi cloud strategy allows companies to pick and choose vendors that can best help them optimize their workload and operational services. Working from a multi-cloud perspective makes it easy to assess different vendor strengths and weaknesses and apply them to your needs.

Cloud environments have a way of operating similarly and differently all at once. While one platform may have a great test environment, another might be better for production. The good news is that a multi-cloud platform allows you to work with more than one vendor, thereby creating a workflow that fuels your output on every level.

Reliability

One of the most appealing aspects of the multi-cloud for business owners is its reliability. Multiple-cloud infrastructure often supports potential disaster and business continuity plans, should it be met in the face of an old legacy system data breach, extreme weather, a power outage, or a global pandemic.

It only makes sense to use (at least) two different cloud systems to form your disaster backup. However, you’ll want to pay attention to geography here, primarily from an extreme weather perspective. Choose cloud providers that host data far enough apart that if one provider loses power to severe weather, you still have data online in another location.

When you utilize the multi-cloud, you have your data up and running when you need it, no matter what is happening in the outside world. That alone can set your business far apart from your competition when it comes to consumer trust.

Security and Compliance

We mentioned compliance and security above as one of the main reasons businesses venture into a multi-cloud platform to start. The utilization of more than one multi-cloud provider could help many organizations succeed in stellar security measures and comply with the level of security required within their specific industry.

Many enterprises keep data stored in a private or public cloud within the national borders to comply with security regulations relevant to the business. Whatever security or data center best meets your compliance needs is the one you should choose within your multi-cloud approach.

Migrating to the Multi-Cloud

It’s not to say that a migration to the multi-cloud comes without its challenges. There are undoubtedly many of them, present on different levels, for every business attempting the switch. The proper preparation and allocation of resources can help.

Moving to a multi-cloud infrastructure when you’re not ready consumes unnecessary cash and time. The process has to begin with you understanding what the cloud and multi-cloud entail and determining if what the platform offers (as a whole, not broken down into vendors) is relevant to your business needs. Though multi-cloud technology may not suit you now, the odds are high that it will work in the future.

How Do You Choose Your Microservices Strategy? Too Many or Too Few?

Alex Thompson Digital Engineering, Modernization April 28, 2022

The technology industry is constantly evolving, and microservices are the perfect example of how we’ve made applications easier to manage. Of course, one of the biggest problems with microservices is that most people don’t know how to apply them using the best practices, or even worse, at all.

In the simplest terms, microservices act as applications within themselves. When you restructure your applications as a collection of microservices, you’ll achieve maintainability, easy and fast deployment, and scalability. These attributes make it much easier to manage and maintain your company applications.

What are Microservices?

Before you truly begin to think about how you’ll apply microservices to your current applications, you should know a bit about them. Best described as an evolved architectural pattern, microservices involve designing and developing an application as a collection of autonomous, loosely coupled services that can communicate with each other.

Also known as microservice architecture, microservices are a piece of modern software development that enables fast and accurate delivery of large, complex applications. Microservices allow your company to broaden and improve its technology stack. They’re becoming a much-desired component of digital modernization.

Building a Successful Microservices Strategy

Building a microservices strategy can be stressful, to say the least. It can be challenging to know how many (or how few) microservices to employ right out of the gate. As usual, evolving digitally takes a lot of careful planning, and microservices are not an exception to that rule.

There are practices you can put into place that will help you build your microservice architecture that will help new microservice adopters transition from monolith architecture. Before you begin your next project, consider these microservice tips, as many of them will work well for those new to these technology concepts.

These tips will work well for those unfamiliar with microservices to help create a more descriptive and easier transition.

Microservices Planning and Organization

Before you move forward with attempting to create a microservices architecture, you’ll want to ensure that it’s the right move for your business. Don’t commit to changes just because larger organizations are doing it. Instead, break up your requirements and notice where microservices will add real value.

Also, you’ll have to ask yourself if you can successfully divide your applications into microservices. After all, you’ll want your applications to maintain their core functionality and features, and microservices should enhance these features.

The Transition

The transition from a monolithic architecture to microservices is incredibly long and involved. While most of these changes will fall on the shoulders of your development team, you’ll have to consider your stakeholders.

Think about the amount of time and expertise needed to implement these infrastructure changes and the amount of work your engineering team will have to take on. To convert to a microservices architecture successfully, everyone has to be on board.

Building Teams

There’s no question that the conversion to microservices requires teamwork. One of the first steps in the process (other than getting your team members excited about the transition) is to begin building independent microservices teams. Assign different groups to handle different microservices independently.

Designing Your Microservice

You want to avoid building microservices that are too large or too small or have too many or too few. Microservice architecture is all about finding the perfect balance, which can be challenging for many companies.

If your microservices are too large, you’ll be unlikely to see any benefits from utilizing the architecture, which is disappointing once you’ve put in months of work. If your microservice architecture is too small, you’ll unintentionally drive up operational costs.

Microservices Perform One Function Well

Microservices are meant to perform one function very well (also known as high cohesion), so they’ve got to be developed not to depend on other services to perform that function. You want to achieve a Domain-Driven Design regarding your microservices, ensuring your service covers a single-bounded context.

Security

In the light of any new technological development, you must consider security. Adopting a Development Security Operations (DevSecOps) model helps ensure that your microservice framework is secure. Microservices exist on a distributed structure, which means they are more likely than other services to attack vectors.

Security for microservices requires an entirely different technique than when we’re dealing with a monolithic architecture. DevSecOps will work wonderfully here.

API Communication

Microservices should communicate through an API gateway that handles account and user authentication, requests, and responses. When you have that API gateway set in place, you can redirect traffic away from the gateway and to the most recent version of your application whenever an update takes place.

Microservice Development

If you’ve made it to the development stages of your microservices strategy, you’ve likely realized the number of microservices you should put into place to benefit your company. Remember, development for microservices is a considerable undertaking, and it’s best when done with balance.

Separate Control Strategies

Keep your control strategies for your microservice development separate. This way, you can implement changes that will not affect other services while keeping control logs tidy.

Backward Compatibility & Development Environment

Backward compatibility will assist your company in building production-ready applications quickly. It enhances the service components of the application without breaking callers.

The development environment of your microservices should be consistent across virtual machines, establishing the framework and allowing developers to get started quickly.

Storing Data and Managing Microservices

Each microservice needs a different storage database. You don’t have to use the same data storage for each of your microservices, as long as the two are well-matched. You’ll have to customize storage infrastructure to match your microservice, keeping in mind that storage is one of the key ways to build a solid microservice architecture.

The bottom line here is that you must manage each service independently. At the same time, they must work with other services seamlessly.

Launching and Hosting Your Microservices

Deploying your microservices is crucial to success and helps to save time while you’re coordinating regular upgrades. You don’t want one service to use up an unfair amount of resources because it negatively affects your other microservices.

Dedicated infrastructures are essential to hosting each microservice individually, isolating them from affecting each other directly. Your microservices strategy could crash and burn if you do not intend to keep them separate. Isolation will help avoid a complete and total shutdown in the event of the outage of one service.

Container Storage

Container storage is a fantastic way to keep your microservices organized and operating unassisted. When you containerize your microservices, you can launch services independently without messing with systems and services that exist on different containers.

Containers tend to match the goals of microservice technology because they offer platform independence. This blends perfectly with the purpose of microservices and how we can best maintain them.

Separate Builds and Automate Deployment

There’s no doubt that automation is the future. Automating your microservices through a DevOps workflow is the best way to handle and improve efficiency. Individual builds for your microservices are also essential for facilitating CI and CD.

Maintaining Microservice Operations

A centralized monitoring and logging system will save discrete logs for every microservice you establish. The correct maintenance and operations for microservices include a centralized logging system, aiding in handling errors much faster than possible on monolithic architecture.

Making the Transition

Deciding if your company is ready for microservices is challenging. The transition can be tricky, often requiring the entire team to lend a hand as changes occur. There’s no question that microservices help manage applications more efficiently, but it’s not right for every business.

In many cases, the delay in transitioning to microservices isn’t due to the architecture being a poor fit for a business, and more that the transition is so complex it keeps companies from trying. How you’ll go about implementing your microservices is very different from how other businesses will choose to do it.

However, the practices mentioned here are universal, fundamental ways to keep yourself on track and your company headed in the right direction regarding developing your microservices.

The Goal of Microservices

The goal of microservices is to improve the development of positive application attributes, including maintainability, testability, and deployability. In short, microservices allow any organization to develop better software at a faster rate.

You’ll be looking to achieve a framework of services that are loosely coupled, distributed, and independent of other application services. Microservices essentially remove the need for applications to be dependent on one another.

A DevOps model is a massive component of helping your microservices endeavor run smoothly. You’ll want to establish the perfect balance of microservices for your company while enabling automation and efficiency.

If your company needs the perfect architecture for continuous delivery, microservices could be perfect for you. The ability to edit services within their containers, taking away their ability to affect other services during maintenance, is revolutionary.

Remember, the microservices have to make sense for an application to work correctly. You may have some instances where microservices will work for you and others where they will not. Any organization that can find a way to implement microservices (with a good balance, not too few, and not too many) should begin planning out the shift today.

DevOps: A Discipline, A Way of Life, A Culture Change

Alex Thompson Digital Engineering April 22, 2022

It’s become apparent, primarily in recent times, that company culture is imperative to the way that company performs. The culture in our company gives plenty of information regarding the values, morals, and norms within a company or organization.

Neglecting to manage company culture, whether in-person or virtual, can lead to purposeful or accidental wrong practices. Culture encompasses the way those within a company will approach one another and whether or not they’ll succeed as a team.

Development Operations (DevOps) are part of the company culture. DevOps is a way of life in many organizations, often taught by management or external sources as a workplace discipline. The demand for constantly improving digital experiences is at an all-time high.

Most brands adopt DevOps to streamline the development, deployment, management, and maintenance of software at scale. There are certain principles of DevOps that need to fall into place before you can consider it a way of life within your organization.

DevOps: A Way of Workplace Life

DevOps is so much more than just a buzzword or a thing. Instead, it’s a literal set of principles that lay the foundation for an agile DevOps work culture. The primary objectives of the DevOps process include:

Speeding up the deployment time for a product or service
Apply improvements in an ever-changing environment
Streamline a development process

The fastest way to achieve an agile transformation to a DevOps environment in your organization is to combine your operations and development teams, encouraging them to communicate and collaborate more. This partnership should allow for the design, implementation, and management of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) frameworks.

Suppose you’re wondering how to cultivate such an engineering culture and an agile mindset among teams. In that case, there are certain principles you can apply to ensure a smooth transition into such a culture change.

A Collaborative Environment

For brands to achieve a unilateral team that focuses on delivering common objectives, they must encourage operations and development to communicate. By breaking down silos and bringing these teams together, your company can align its people, tools, and processes toward a customer-focused culture.

Fostering collaboration prepares employees for the cultural shift that must take place as DevOps gains a foothold within your organization. These changes have to start from the top, lining up executive sponsorship before anything. There’s nothing wrong with a well-executed initiative that comes from the top, as long as it’s completely transparent and well-understood by company teams.

Management should focus on putting the right people on their teams, those that will lead a culture change with confidence.

Responsibility On All Ends

Operations and development have entirely different roles in the traditional software development models. However, DevOps asks these teams to work together on every project and company application from beginning to end. Responsibility from start to finish is one of the core principles of DevOps.

Gone are the days when development wrote the code and operations set that code into action. There are far too many opportunities for error in the separation model, leading to many inefficiencies that you can fix by employing a DevOps mindset. DevOps helps avoid differences in production, performance problems, and unpredictable environments. Overall, it’s a collaborative push.

Encourage Improvement

The DevOps culture comes to those who encourage continuous improvement. Responsibility from end-to-end means constantly adapting to circumstances that change, including customer needs, the emergence of new technology, and changes in legislation.

The DevOps way of life places a focus on optimizing performance through constant improvement and the cost and speed of delivery. A valid application of DevOps means uniting teams to support your CI/CD pipelines, enabling the efficiency of the deployment of applications. Automated application release allows for minimal downtime.

Automation is Key

When it comes to a thriving DevOps environment, automation is the key. Striving for continuous improvement is a significant part of building a DevOps discipline that lasts, and high cycle rates and the ability to respond quickly to customer feedback are essential. Your brand has to begin automating repetitive processes to successfully pull this off if you haven’t already.

Automation is the best way to release new software to your consumer base rapidly. Automation within DevOps looks like this:

Automation of infrastructure provisioning
Software deployment and testing
The building of new systems
Verifying functionality and security

It’s only natural that DevOps teams will begin to automate their own processes as well, from building and running software to safely making changes to their running services. By automating services within DevOps teams, your organization can get the software to the masses in a more reliable fashion than ever

Customer-Based Focus

The DevOps mindset is very focused on the needs of the customer. Regardless of size, it requires every brand to act like a start-up, continuously innovating and pivoting when established strategies are no longer working. DevOps means investing in software features that will deliver a fantastic customer experience across the board.

The demands of consumers are constantly changing, and if you’ve done the work to establish a DevOps culture, your team is listening, continually reviewing automated data, and working with it instead of against it. However, DevOps also means that your team focuses on the correct automated data.

Don’t obsess with your metrics, primarily if you’re new to the DevOps way of life. Instead, focus on the metrics that matter to your company and the people that utilize your services. It can be easy to get lost in the noise of analytics, but a DevOps mindset can work through that noise to the information that matters.

Learning from Failure

With any intentional culture change, no matter how positive, comes failure. DevOps requires that organizations embrace a whole new way of working, including cloud computing. Accepting potential and inevitable failures on every company level fosters a learning climate where employees feel safe making mistakes.

Failures are nothing but opportunities to learn, and this is an attitude that you should foster early in the switch to a DevOps state of being. The willingness to learn from mistakes can create a massive shift within company culture as well.

Uniting Teams and Expertise

DevOps is very much about unison and sharing expertise. It’s an incredibly collaborative business culture that encourages learning, automating repetitive processes, and streamlining a company through conveyed experience. DevOps teams have to be very involved at every stage of software development.

From planning and building to deployment and feedback, DevOps is there, acting as a cross-functional team with a very well-rounded and balanced set of skills. There is a place for DevOps within every company, seamlessly streamlining operations in various companies and multiple components of the technology world.

It’s not easy to find a well-rounded IT professional, though they exist. Instead of trying to find the perfect members for your DevOps team, create them. Encourage shared expertise at every turn, and stress how important it is to live a DevOps lifestyle when present in the workplace. Above all, lead by example.

DevOps doesn’t have to apply only to newer companies that are more susceptible to change. It works everywhere, and it does not mean the erosion of functional responsibilities. Instead, team members with different expertise areas will share responsibility for running code in the production process.

DevOps is the new definition of teamwork.

Automating the Automation: The Silver Bullet for QA automation ROI

Alex Thompson Digital Engineering April 22, 2022

Quality assurance is crucial in every business within every industry on the planet. It’s impossible to survive as a company, especially in the oversaturated markets we’re experiencing today. Many companies rely on technology to effectively handle repetitive tasks, including quality assurance.

Heated debates could go on for hours regarding quality assurance and whether it’s suitable to automate the way we test it, and some points serve both sides of the argument well. Because QA plays a crucial role in our businesses and product delivery, it needs to work well within agile development methodologies and highly compressed test execution styles.

There’s no doubt that QA engineers face many challenges, most revolving around the automated changes with QA coding. So often, code that worked in previous test periods, or sprints, is affected by features and bug fixes from following sprints. All of this increases the risk of automated QA not working correctly.

Because of this, tech teams need to consider automating QA testing. Without it, it’s hard to provide real-time feedback and system analysis, but is it too much to automate within automation?

Knowing When to Automate

Before deciding if automation is a silver bullet in the chest of quality assurance, we must understand when we should embrace automation and when we shouldn’t. If your application is ready for automation, then, by all means, automate your heart out.

However, there are instances where applications are not ready for automation. There are specific criteria an application should meet before rushing into QA automation tests.

Determining Application Readiness

It can be tricky to determine whether your application is ready for automation. These days, everything feels a bit rushed, primarily when we’re working with deadlines or working toward a product launch.

Be incredibly careful if you’re working with a graphic user interface. Take care never to begin automation at the beginning of a project, or you might have to rewrite those automation scripts, maybe even more than once.

Automation requires functional features that are ready for testing. You’re better off beginning your automation process when you’re sure that the elements of your application are not going to change.

Suppose you plan on changing them, or they evolve naturally as part of the development process. In that case, early automation is fruitless, taking too much precious time and cutting into your return on investment.

The automation planning process cannot overlook script design. We have the knowledge that QA automation can fail with automated test scripts when we create a new version of the product or service. It’s vital to devise scripts to require very little maintenance in the future.

A complete dismantling and rebuilding of new scripts will cause setbacks in time and money, which is one reason why many consider it unwise to automate automated QA. To avoid potential roadblocks, ensure that your app is fully prepared for automation and don’t move forward without a plan.

Team Skill Sets

QA automation engineering requires a particular skill set. There are plenty of technological tools available to assist in effectively executing automation, but skills within the field are a crucial component. It goes without saying that challenges will arise, and your team has to be prepared to handle them without batting an eye.

Time is money in any field, but particularly in technology and engineering. The fast we move through testing and automation, the faster we get our services to the public. However, we cannot expect to automate every single process flawlessly. Human intervention is necessary, and this is often the case for automated testing for QA.

Most of the tools we use to automate processes (like quality assurance) mandate coding experience. These tools typically provide the resources necessary to teach those without experience using them how to use them properly.

Sometimes, this built-in guidance is enough, but you might want to consider bringing in an outside expert. Not only will your team come away with a ton of learned knowledge and hands-on experience, but fewer future mistakes will lead to an improved ROI.

There’s no question that test automation is a long-term investment. From frameworks to automated scripts, a lot of time and money goes into developing and maintaining your team and their work. Outsourced expertise makes for a better team overall, reducing the need for constant rebuilding and script rewriting.

Testing Test QA Automation Tools

So, you’ve decided to automate what’s already automated by automating tests for automated programs. It sounds complex because it is complex. Before you jump in with both feet, have you stopped to consider whether or not you’re using the right tools?

If you want to succeed in test automation, you’ll need skilled testers and the correct tools for those testers to utilize. Test automation tools are readily available, but some are not as good as others, like most things in life. Also, some are free, while others are pretty pricey.

Automation tools are an aspect of technology in which you’ll have to decide for yourself what will work for your business. You’ve got to choose a reliable automation tool, but you’ve also got to stay true to your budget. Things can become tricky here because it’s essential to continue to consider your return on investment.

Using an automation tool that isn’t of high-enough quality for the job you need it to do can cause severe damage in the long run. At the same time, overspending at this stage might be unrecoverable. Before you select your automation tool or tools, consider the following:

When it comes to QA Automation testing, the bottom line is knowing your bottom line! Understand your risks and if you’re willing to take those risks. One of the best pieces of advice we can offer is to start with a tool you can afford and apply it to a pilot project.

Once you know what the tool is capable of and if it’s a good fit for your upcoming workload, you can commit. There isn’t a single application on Earth that’s perfect. We always wish it had this feature or that we could get rid of that feature.

Tools for automation are similar in that way. The app you choose won’t be complete perfection, but it has to prove that it can provide purpose and a great ROI.

What Should You Automate?

Let’s talk about what you should automate and which aspects of your applications you should leave alone. You now know when to automate and what to consider when choosing automation test tools, but what exactly should you automate regarding your QA (and everything else in your business model)?

The Golden Rule: If It’s Repetitive, Automate It

Testing software and QA includes a whole lot of repetitive tasks. Doing these tasks manually leaves too much room for human error, and you can easily avoid that by implementing an automation tool.

Humans tend to do the same task differently every time they do it; sometimes, in a desperate attempt at breaking up the monotony, machines repeatedly do one job the same way. Automated tools are superb at producing the same results when assigned a specific task, supplying your team with consistent answers and feedback.

Automate Difficult Tasks

The amount of time you’ll save by automating complex quality assurance tasks is immeasurable. Technically not, because there’s likely an automated tool to measure it.

If your team is consistently bogged down by tasks that take an extremely long time to complete, such as syncing thousands of email and contact accounts to a new application, it’s time to automate.

Automating application testing can be a time saver for a quality assurance engineer and a money-saver for you. Your team’s effort into testing app features that you can (and should) test automatically is directly lowering your ROI.

Automation and the Future of QA

Everyone in the technology industry knows that automation is our future. We’ve struck a pretty good deal with AI and machine learning, and there’s no reason we can’t utilize it for tasks and tests that can thrive under automated processes.

Automation will never replace human testers. It’s impossible, as humans can analyze and notice nuances in ways that computers do not. However, it’s good to have computers on your side when it comes to QA automation and the possibilities it has to increase your ROI.

Without question, automated tools are here to assist testers, not replace them entirely. Manual tests are still just as necessary as those that are automated, and the combination of the way we use these testing methods will look very different for every business. Automation increases efficiency as long as you use it in the right place at the right time.

FAQ

What is QA automation?

Using tools to automate software testing tasks for speed and accuracy.

When should QA be automated?

After core features are stable and unlikely to change.

What tasks should be automated?

Repetitive and complex tests like regression and performance checks.

Does QA automation need coding skills?

Yes, most tools require basic programming or scripting knowledge.

Can automation replace manual testing?

No, both automation and manual testing are needed for full coverage.

Sailing in the Speed boat of Scrum

Alex Thompson Digital Engineering April 4, 2022

Software development projects demand high productivity and adaptability to meet the ever-changing requirements—this is where methodologies like Agile come into play. Inside the Agile methodology, there are frameworks like Scrum that help to structure teams and their functions. The Scrum Framework is crucial within Agile Software Development as it significantly increases productivity by delivering the product in an incremental and iterative method.

Here are five best Scrum practices we follow in our projects at TVS Next:

Let’s look into each Scrum practice in detail:

1. Conduct Scrum ceremonies consistently

The Scrum Master needs to make the team understand the importance of Scrum ceremonies within a Sprint. The main Scrum ceremonies are Sprint Grooming & Planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review & Sprint Retrospective.

Regular meetings help the team stay updated on the work status and help to give and receive valuable feedback. A successful Scrum Master makes the team see the value in these ceremonies.

2. Plan and prioritize

Plan a new Sprint only when the backlog has enough items for the next two sprints. Ensure not to let scope creep happen.

A minimum of two Sprints backlogs must be planned and prioritized by the product owner, where the scope of the project and the Sprint goal must be clearly defined. Unless the goals for each Sprint are clearly laid out, it could become challenging to prioritize the tasks in the backlog.

3. Build a cohesive team

A Scrum team has five to nine people and three prominent roles: Scrum master, product owner, and the development team. Everyone in the team is equally important and must be treated as such.

The team’s learning is a continuous process that happens through experience developing the product and working as a team. The Scrum master’s job is to apply the Scrum framework successfully, lead the team’s meetings, empower the team to become cross-functional and self-reliant.

4. Deliver viable product

A Scrum master must encourage the team always to meet the requirements and deliver a viable product to the customer. For every Sprint, the team can show a demo to the principal stakeholders and receive feedback. They can then adjust and improve before delivering the final product for that Sprint.

5. Conduct Sprint retrospective

Even an excellent Scrum team can always improve. A Sprint retrospective is an integral part of Scrum to develop, deliver and manage complex projects. This meeting is held at the end of every Sprint. The agenda of this meeting is to discuss what the team did right and wrong and identify what they can change. The team can then decide on a plan of action to incorporate the findings in the next Sprint.

As a takeaway, I firmly believe that we can successfully implement the Scrum framework in any project if we follow the above best practices.

Following some golden rules such as being open to providing and receiving feedback, criticizing the work and not a person, and making decisions as a team further strengthen the implementation of Scrum in Projects.

Cloud Cost Optimization for Maximum Efficiency

Alex Thompson Digital Engineering April 4, 2022

Recently, many enterprises have moved their data from traditional datacenters to the cloud. There has also been a growing consensus among leaders about staying prepared for unforeseen circumstances, mainly by cutting unnecessary spending. These events have led to the question – are we efficiently using every resource, especially the cloud?

Getting the most out of their cloud solutions requires organizations to invest significant time and resources to understand how their cloud environment works and then determine how to optimize their cloud costs. Cloud cost optimization is not a one-off exercise that you can implement and be over with. It is all about pausing, analyzing and making conscious decisions throughout your cloud journey.

Through my experience working on various cloud platforms over the years, I’d like to highlight some cost optimization best practices.

Evaluate Resources

A developer might create a temporary server to perform an activity and forget to turn it off afterward. Sometimes they might delete the instance but forget to remove storage attached to the terminated instance. If the resources are not shut down completely, you will continue to pay for them.

The first step to optimizing cloud costs is regularly identifying and removing unused resources.

Choose Suitable Instances

Every cloud provider offers different computing instances that cater to varying workload requirements.

Most providers give heavily discounted instances based on the instance term, region, and type. You can get 25% – 75% discounts on these instances, so it’s essential to know your past usage and have a long-term cloud strategy before you invest in such instances.

Organizations tend to purchase too small or too big of an instance and compromise on quality or performance. Therefore, it is crucial to take your time and identify the right-sized instance that does not require any compromise and will perfectly meet your cloud computing needs.

Make Use of Spot Instances

You can bid and get spot instances for temporary jobs at a meager cost. Spot instances are different from regular instances, but you can save more by using them for your short-term needs.

Spot instances are most suitable for batch jobs and jobs that will be quickly terminated.

Design Scalable Workloads

When you configure a flat workload, unless you plan for maximum utilization at all times, you end up spending needlessly. Ensure that your cloud solution allows for automatic scaling. If you set the appropriate autoscaling rules, you can then scale up when needed and down when not needed. This way, you only end up paying according to your workload.

Turn Off Idle Resources

Many enterprises have deployed multiple environments on the cloud, such as production, pre-production, development, test, etc. While you can auto-scale the production instances according to the demand, the best strategy for other trivial instances is to turn them off when not required.

Identify when the development, test, and other unimportant instances are not in use, and then turn them off during such times. Off periods could be timings such as weekends, evenings, or whenever the developers are not working on them. Leveraging automation to turn instances on and off based on need is the best way to consolidate idle resources.

Consider Multi-Cloud

Many enterprises running on the cloud follow a multi-cloud strategy and avoid vendor lock-in. There are both upsides and downsides to such an approach. When it comes to availability and up-time, multi-cloud might seem like an intelligent choice, but you also risk losing the volume discounts and high-tier status when going with a single cloud vendor.

Additionally, a multi-cloud strategy comes with a lot of administrative challenges. You have to pay the network cost for every transaction between regions or distributed databases. You also have to train the users to use each platform effectively.

Ultimately, your organization’s priorities should determine your cloud vendor strategy.

Analytics and Notifications

It’s essential to understand your organization’s usage history to forecast your future needs before purchasing. Having a good analytics setup in place will give you the necessary visibility.

Another way analytics can come in handy is by setting up notifications for specific thresholds. You can keep an eye on usage and billing and avoid overshooting your cloud spending through timely notifications. Multiple inbuilt and third-party analytical tools are available for every cloud environment.

Conclusion

Other cost optimization strategies for the cloud include tagging and containerization. A good tagging policy helps streamline your cloud resources and restricts unnecessary spending. You could also take advantage of containers such as Kubernetes and Dockers to keep cloud costs down.

There are many more ways to save costs on the cloud, and I have shared some based on my experience. Depending on your workload setup, application design, and cloud vendor – you can use some or all of the above recommendations to design the perfect cloud cost optimization strategy for your team.

A Mashup of Creativity and Testing

Alex Thompson Digital Engineering April 4, 2022

My coworkers from other domains and skillsets often ask me where I use my creativity in testing. People believe that testing is a tedious and monotonous process that lacks creativity & innovation.

But having been a software test engineer for several years now, I firmly believe that creativity is a crucial skillset required to become a successful QA person!

Let me explain.

One of the critical tasks of a tester is to evaluate and test an application from the end user’s point of view. While testing for user experience, testers must learn to think out-of-the-box. Once you develop the thinking required for user experience testing, this thinking is naturally reflected in other testing activities.

Creativity is using our imagination or original ideas to create something. And that’s what we’re doing when we try to use our imagination to extend our approaches, experiment, and explore our ways while doing software testing.

Are we already using Creativity in Software Testing?

Yes, we are!

We use creativity in many ways in software testing. Here are some testing techniques in which we employ our creativity & diligent thinking skills to create a valuable product:

Ad hoc testing is software testing performed without planning and formal documentation. It focuses on logical and illogical scenarios used with divergent thinking. When performing ad-hoc testing, we tend to find bugs/defects that we wouldn’t have found while following the formal process. This testing technique gives ample freedom to testers to test the product more realistically.

Exploratory testing is an essential skill for a QA tester because this type of testing focuses on having an instinctive approach to finding bugs. When performing exploratory testing, a tester is their own master. They do not choose the default path for testing the application. Instead, they try the maximum possible ways a user can perform any action incorrectly. In this way, the tester exceeds the testing boundaries and discovers hidden and unexplored bugs. When a tester moves out of their comfort zone, that is when the magic happens.

Be curious, Be creative!

Creativity in real-life

Can you recall when you appeared for an interview for a testing role, and your interviewer asked you about your creative skills? Well, no, right? There is minimal focus on creative talents in the job market, which might explain the dearth of innovative startups around us.

Society needs a collective mindset shift in understanding that creativity & innovation are interconnected. Several methodologies and experiments are available to assess creativity, one being the “Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TCCT),” created by Ellis Paul. This test is a creatively-oriented alternative to the IQ test, and it tests for divergent thinking and problem-solving skills.

Conclusion

Creativity is a core skill that includes critical thinking, problem-solving, and adaptability. QA Testers should develop creativity as a key skill to keep up with the ever-changing industry.

It is high time that the testing domain made a paradigm shift in testing methodologies, and it is up to us, the testers, to turn testing around from a repetitive job to an innovative job.

“Creativity flows when curiosity is stoked”- Neil Blumenthal