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Digital Assurance Solving Technical Debt in Software Development
There has been a tremendous shift in consumer behaviour in recent times. As a result, products or solutions that were considered the most efficient are now rendered redundant and fail to appease the customers. Thus, businesses are pushed to innovate new methods and techniques in their development cycle, and digital technologies are seen as a major boost by companies in this process. In an exclusive conversation with the Silicon India team, Arjun Ramaraju,CEO, Conneqt Digital Solutions shares his views on the recent trends in the product development space and how digital assurance is enabling businesses across industries to mitigate technical debt in their software development process.
Explain the role of Digital Assurance in solving technical debt in software development?
Insufficient testing, which builds up over time in software development, is one of the main causes of technical debt. Fixing a technical debt becomes more challenging as the project passes through its various phases, which also led to a change in quotation. The cost of fixing defects in the early stages of the software lifecycle is far cheaper than in the later stages. In today’s context, many iterative projects are happening, and one must make sure to catch all the defects in the initial stages. Organizations frequently neglect developing their software correctly due to the enormous pressure of delivering the technology to the market without delay. This is where technical debt can be addressed through a structured digital assurance programme using tools, procedures, and working methods.
Some examples of technical debt could be poor code quality, insufficient testing, lack of documentation, lack of clear understanding of business requirements, lack of collaboration and many others. Digital assurance can play a significant role in addressing technical debts. It is better to detect the error in its initial phase itself because if the defect prevails and passes onto the next phase, it becomes costlier and time consuming to solve. Static testing techniques will limit poor code quality, which is the most apparent technical debt. Quality Assurance processes will ensure that all technical documentations are in place by improving the upstream development processes. Continuous testing and continuous integration will align the DevOps to the DevOps culture. All of these will help reduce technical debt.
How can a software firm reduce technical debt while releasing new features quickly?
Automation can significantly contribute to reducing technical debt and simultaneously improving time-to-market. Equal importance must be given to functional and non-functional requirements, as a lack of focus on adhering to non-functional requirements increases technical debt. Integrating DevOps into development will ensure continuous testing and integration. Also, micro-services-based architecture and low-code/no-code platforms and testing will help reconcile technical debt and achieve a faster time-to-market. Additionally, an overall focus on analytics in digital assurance will help predict future failures by analyzing data from past instances. So, when all this is done through a better set of platforms, we can easily address technical debt and reduce time-to-market.
How is Digital Assurance acting as an enabler of seamless tech transformation?
Digital assurance plays a very critical role in seamless tech transformation by acting as a gatekeeper for enabling high quality, being responsive and offering a multichannel user experience. This is possible by protecting the brand, mitigating technology errors, and accelerating digital transformation. When a company is looking to transform itself, and once it becomes a digital organization, there are a number of digital programs that get instituted. In many cases, people look at how they can work with the ecosystem much better. So if you are planning to make a lot of changes to your environment, bring in a lot of platforms and integrate with the external ecosystem, as several changes are bound to happen.
If you want to make sure that all of these tech changes go smoothly, you need digital assurance. This is especially true when you look at the number of channels, employee experience, user experience, and customer experience. Having a proper approach to digital assurance can be a great enabler, as the process becomes completely seamless. In my view, a seamless tech transformation is more cost-effective and less painful.
How is cloud testing accelerating digital transformation efforts of companies in recent times?
The need for accelerating test automation has led to the evolution of cloud test automation. Since cloud technology offers extraordinary infrastructure, tools, and high-performance servers, it is an extremely a smart move to adopt cloud platform for testing. Also, you will be able to successfully address many challenges that may arise during the process. This leads to much shorter, more frequent and higher quality release cycles. For example, if your business priorities change, you will have to introduce newer testing for newer products. You can leverage cloud platforms much better as opposed to the normal way, where the lack of these testing platforms leads to different timelines of project releases.
Today, the biggest challenge is that anything on digital has to be linked to a business outcome. In most cases, once you are out in the market, you realize that you have to make a lot of changes, which means you will have to go through complete robust assurance again. Thus, it is necessary to have a continuous test execution and orchestration platform to support scalable testing across various channels. The key benefits of moving to cloud test platforms are to effortlessly assure compatibility testing and test coverage on multiple platforms, along with parallel execution support to increase the speed of execution at an optimized cost. That is how cloud testing can accelerate digital transformation.
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