DEVOPSdigest

"The cloud offers great opportunities for business growth and innovation, but also more possible failure points. As organizations embrace the cloud, they can avoid those failure points by making the transformation of quality engineering as high a priority as the broader digital transformation of their business," according to the Quality Engineering in a Cloud-Centric World report from Wipro.

Organizations must incorporate engineering and testing across the lifecycle to promote IT resilience, improve product quality and reliability, accelerate speed to market, and ultimately improve the customer experience.

Pivot towards "shift right" and "resilience" processes

Organizations are increasingly looking to optimize testing capabilities to drive business forward and deliver continuous reliability and monitoring for predictive and preventive maintenance. In reaching those goals, enterprises are embedding "shift right" and "resilience" beyond the "shift left" and "automation" practices of the last decade.

Lag in Agile adoption

As organizations transform to be more digital, they are embracing new ways of working and the associated technologies to quickly deliver highly integrated products and services. DevOps and Agile programs that adopt a quality engineering strategy can support such a transformation and help improve business outcomes. However, according to the findings of the report, Agile adoption is lagging, with 50 percent of programs still running on Waterfall or Hybrid SDLC.

Increased training and cross-skilling for engineers

Organizations should train quality engineers on expanding testing expertise beyond domain skills, especially in non-functional testing, which is becoming integral to the shift-left methods used in high-speed software-testing programs. In addition, regular cross-skilling improves the efficiency of a quality engineering programs by allowing team members to focus on more value-added tasks.

"Organizations need to re-shape their quality engineering processes to succeed in a cloud-centric world. These programs must support collaboration with an enablement model that bridges the gap between innovation and executing projects. Our report intends to help organizations benchmark their own testing landscape and identify steps to be taken to assure their cloud journeys," said Ramesh Pai, General Manager and Global Head, Quality Engineering and Testing, Wipro Limited.

Methodology: The report is based on a survey of 81 clients across 7 countries and 6 continents, representing more than 200 QE programs. Survey respondents run or play a key role in their organization's QE program, including test managers, test program managers, and test leads, and oversee programs with a testing workforce of at least 50. Client organizations in the survey are based in Australia, Asia, Europe, New Zealand, South Africa, US, and UK. To round out survey responses and learn more about QE program trends and needs, Wipro also analyzed data from more than 600 recent requests for proposals (RFPs).