Balancing risk with the need for speed

The pace of change in the world is rapidly accelerating. Technology companies must prioritize speed to market to stay ahead of this curve, but speed can sometimes come at the expense of risk. The recent CrowdStrike incident is a sobering reminder that even the largest and most capable organizations are not immune to errors that can lead to significant downstream impacts. “Move fast and break things” might be a catchy business motto but in reality, rapid innovation without sufficient risk assessment and quality intelligence is a dangerous proposition. So how fast can you safely go?

Moving fast in a changing world

Today is the slowest that businesses will ever move, because as technology rapidly evolves the pace at which we operate is only going to increase. Likewise, the industry will continue to develop new apps and solutions in response to market needs, and as these are integrated across the numerous and varied enterprise IT landscapes, systems complexity will exponentially increase.

Under pressure to do more with less in this ever-changing environment, it’s difficult for any organization to keep up with the changes while remaining error-free. Mistakes will happen, but our collective goal as an industry should always be to reduce and minimize the impacts. Every organization should take this moment to re-examine their quality assurance strategies, particularly their change validation processes, and adopt more sophisticated testing methodologies where necessary.

Safeguard your investment in innovation with a comprehensive quality assurance strategy

So how do you develop a quality assurance strategy that limits your exposure to risk and downtime? Some questions to consider might be:

• Do I fully understand my user’s needs? This understanding is paramount to identifying where to put your testing efforts. User profiles help you simulate real-world scenarios, ensuring that all potential use cases are covered. This leads to more thorough testing that reduces the risk of overlooking critical issues. By aligning testing efforts with actual user behavior and requirements, you can prioritize testing on high-impact areas.
• Have I taken different environments into account? Consider how your customers will be using your product and test across multiple environments. Within the Tricentis portfolio, tools like Tricentis Tosca and Tricentis qTest allow you to simulate and test across various environments seamlessly. This comprehensive approach ensures that your application performs reliably under various operating systems, application technologies, or device types. By accounting for diverse environments, you can uncover environment-specific issues early, preventing potential failures and ensuring a consistent, high-quality user experience regardless of how and where your customers access your product.
• Will my websites and applications stand up under higher loads? Under increasing levels of traffic and demand, critical systems can slow to a crawl or even fully crash. Ticketmaster experienced exactly this with Taylor Swift ticket sales recently. Performance testing is an integral part of any overall testing strategy, and solutions like Tricentis Neoload can help you minimize unforeseen impacts from increases in load across websites, applications, APIs, etc.
• Is my infrastructure or supply chain exposing me to risk? Ensure that you identify all third-party components and vendors in your critical business applications, along with their policies and processes for handling buggy code that may originate on their side. Tosca can be used to automate end-to-end testing, ensuring that integrations with third-party systems are robust and reliable. By scrutinizing your infrastructure and where applications integrate, you can mitigate risk from external sources, ensuring that your entire ecosystem operates smoothly and securely.
• Am I using no-code or low-code solutions, or AI-generated code? These practices allow development teams to deliver updates and new capabilities faster than ever before. The increased pace puts pressure on QA teams, creating an innovation bottleneck where QA is the last team standing in the way of increased revenue or increased user adoption. To avoid innovation gridlock, companies should look for AI-enabled automation in their regression test portfolios. The new Tricentis Copilot solutions were designed specifically to help in these scenarios.
• Do I know where to test? It can be difficult to understand where to test, particularly when resource limitations don’t allow for extensive testing. Organizations should consider solutions that look inside the code and alert QA teams of untested areas. Quality intelligence technologies like Tricentis LiveCompare and Tricentis’ newly acquired SeaLights solution provide exactly that type of visibility into change assessment, ultimately reducing risk as change comes faster than ever.
• Does my quality engineering strategy employ automated regression testing? Most SaaS applications release updates on a regular basis, sometimes quite frequently. Organizations who are undergoing digital transformation and moving to the cloud with tools like SAP S/4HANA, Oracle, or Salesforce are also subject to these updates. When our applications have external dependencies and updates are outside of our control, automated and fast regression testing becomes a business imperative.

Conclusion

In today’s dynamic business environment, we will undoubtedly see more instances of code releases leading to outages and financial impact. It is increasingly difficult for any organization to maintain the speed required to keep up with the pace of technological advancement while thoroughly testing more frequent and complex deployments. The pressure to do this means that organizations must accurately assess risk to determine where to focus their testing efforts. It’s also important for businesses to periodically review their testing and deployment strategies to ensure that they align with current customer needs and risk profile. With a comprehensive quality engineering framework and the right testing solutions, it is possible to both move fast and limit risk.