NOVEMBER 2018CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM9orchestration processes are effective: i.e. they deliver quality code to production with the speed expected by the business and customers.Evolving your Quality Processes: How to StartValue stream mapping. You must work with your organization leaders (e.g. Business Analysis, Development, QA and Operations) to ensure they thoroughly understand what it actually takes to take an idea, code it, test it and deploy it in production. As your leaders do that, they will likely find long waiting time in each of these disciplines. Most notably, in the software testing one.Next step is to ensure the inputs needed for testing to take place (i.e. requirements. Note: a user story is a form of requirement) are known and understood by developers and testers. They don't need to be documented in the written form. In fact, it's more beneficial if they're not. The written language is inherently ambiguous, and we all know ambiguity leads to defects. The figure below is a good illustration of how ambiguous requirements pose a threat to quality.It is very common for team members to draw flowcharts or activity diagrams on a whiteboard or piece of paper to explain a functionality or feature. As long as all team members start the iteration with the same understanding and they leverage technology to take that diagram and automatically generate the optimal set of test cases to achieve maximum coverage then developers will be able to create their code to pass those tests (think ATDD--acceptance test driven development) and testers will focus on using more modern technology to bring automation earlier in the cycle, inside the iteration or sprint. As opposed to just thinking automation in terms of regression tests.If you think about what this picture above means, developers will write code correctly the first time, which leads to less rework due to defects. Testers will focus on doing in-sprint automation, which will reduce the testing cycle time. Overall quality of the code that gets deployed in production will be higher as well as the quality of the application itself will be higher as the business and customers will realize the value quicker with a quality deployment.Continuous Testing Enabling Digital Transformation SuccessMany of the executives I work with are starting to see their teams achieve the desired acceleration and quality across legacy and new applications. By shifting testing activities to the left of the SDLC and focusing on modernizing test automation techniques and tools, teams are being able to continuously test the application code at every code check-in at the unit, system, system integration, and performance test levels.Continuous Testing is becoming a secret weapon to executives looking to truly accelerate time to value. Any digital transformation strategy that focuses solely on accelerating code development and deployment by leveraging modern techniques such as TDD and pipeline orchestration will quickly realize business value is not being perceived by customers. Software testing is key to ensuring that not only quality code is built, but also that a quality application is deployed to the hands of your customers. Big difference! Alex Martins
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