World Quality Report (WQR) 2021-22

A new realism in QA

The 13th edition of the World Quality Report identifies a welcome increase of positivity in the world of Quality Assurance. Acceleration in Quality transformation is visible across the board, directly attributing to the shown by the IT and Quality resilience teams in the face of COVID crisis.

This has been a year of steady and encouraging progress with a new sense of reality, not just a new normal. IT teams were able to overcome challenges due to the COVID crisis with relative ease and transition to remote working in distributed virtual teams happened effectively.

What’s more, the importance of quality assurance has been reinforced: our survey sample of 1,750 CIOs and senior tech leaders emphasises the value of testing than ever before, and the onward march towards digitisation ensuring quality with seamless customer experience is of the utmost priority.

The WQR 2021 shows that expectations are, in general, more realistic, and key areas of IT strategy such as enhancing customer experience, enhancing security, responsiveness to business demands, and high quality of software solutions are being given broadly equal weight.

Testing and QA objectives are also evenly balanced: acting as custodians of quality, achieving quality at speed, enabling quality across the team, focusing on business outcomes, and improving customer experience are largely regarded in a similar light to one another.

Indeed, looking across the software development lifecycle, there a clear sense that testing is no longer seen as an obstacle to progress, but as a factor in its achievement. While embedded quality model adoption is gaining traction, there is still quality gap due to increased dependability on self-contained cross functional teams for testing. This is probably why there is, as ever, an acknowledged need to develop new skills, and to fill the remaining quality gap by extending existing skills across more of the software development and test team.

Here are our key recommendations to help accelerate your Quality Assurance & Engineering journey in WQR 2021-22:

• Focus on what matters. The emphasis should be on the customer experience and on business objectives, and on meeting needs in these areas with efficiency and speed. The focus is shifting from IT quality to production quality.
• Standardise the use of test automation in QA, and use it from end to end. An automation-first approach in software quality delivery should now be the norm across all QA activities.
• Stop talking about AI and ML, and start doing. Smart technologies are expected to transform quality engineering, so it’s imperative to begin the journey now.
• Emphasise the availability of test environments and test data. Investment in real-time environment and data availability solutions should continue to be a focus within the organisational strategy.
• Get management buy-in for intelligent industry initiatives. It’s a given that leadership backing facilitates change – so demonstrate feasibility, and quantify potential outcomes.