Digital transformation is happening. In many cases QA isn’t involved, but they should be. No one can undergo a digital transformation in any corporation without improving their quality by 10x, literally. This means improving visibility by 10x, and being able to raise that visibility all the way to the CIO or CTO. And you need technology to do that.
Why digital transformation matters
Companies have conducted business in many ways: on paper, in writing, verbally, as well as using different kinds of systems. True digital transformation happens from the ground up. Re-look at everything that you do, and capture it digitally: Whether it’s IOT, speech to text, email – it doesn’t matter. You have to capture it in ways that can then be utilized to enable data, and do so with the cloud, AI or other kinds of data enablement, that sort products and technologies.
A critical part of digital transformation is also improving the quality of your existing digital assets. This means improving not just your internal assets, but everything you do digitally, including your external applications. The quality jump that you have to make is much higher than you think.
In 2020, the cost of poor software quality in the US was approximately 2.08 trillion. Not in brand equity loss, just actual hard cost, loss, productivity, redoing things, etc. And if you think about it, that is all about visibility. Nobody wanted to make poor quality software. They didn’t know they made it, and the CIO didn’t either. Users find bugs in areas that you don’t test. If you had tested it, you would’ve found it first. So quality is all about visibility, and digital transformation is about visibility to the top of everything that works in your business.
In general, QA has not provided much visibility. QA tests only the very limited things that it can possibly fit in the time available. This provides visibility to less than 10% of what’s actively happening in the applications, internal or external. Visibility to all of it is necessary.
Leverage AI to create visibility
As part of digital transformation, CIOs want greater visibility, but are told they can’t have it. It’s too hard, it’s too costly, it takes too long. They don’t have the technology. That’s why you have to leverage AI; similar to the kind of AI that Appvance brought to market. That technology gives you that visibility. Now the CIO has visibility to all the problems before they get to the users, and they can decide whether they care. Are they going to fix it? Can they afford to fix it?
What Appvance AIQ does is provide visibility that enables those decisions. No one in the industry ever talked about that before, however Appvance has been talking about it in the guise of digital transformation. Digital transformation is about visibility to your data, visibility to your digital assets, visibility to the cost of your cloud, visibility to the quality of your applications.
How to save a QA team
When bugs are found in software, the CIO holds the engineers responsible for them and QA responsible for not catching them. QA is often viewed as the bad guy, however they weren’t given the budget, technology or the time to find them. The CIO doesn’t understand why their QA team of 125 people didn’t find the bugs. QA was given three days. And in three days with antiquated tools, that’s what they got.
For the last hundred years, in any industry, whenever you didn’t have the time, wherewithal, or money to do something, you had to improve the productivity of the people you had. A good example of this is farming. At one point in the United States, 70 or 80% of people were employed in agriculture. Today it’s about 1%. To feed more people with less people on the job, technology came into play.
Today technology, enabled by AI, automatically picks fruits and vegetables, adds water or fertilizer just to the plants that need them, and kills a weed while not picking the bean plant because it can recognize the difference. That’s the digital transformation of farming.
Doing more with less
Farming is just one example of doing more with the team, budget, and time available, using technology. For software, QA needs to find 10 times more bugs than they’re finding. They need technology that makes them at least 10 times more productive because they cannot hire 10 times more people. Digital transformation is about doing more digitally with the data you have and can have access to. And most of that is leveraging machine learning (ML) and AI. Saving your QA team means using AIQ, Appvance technology, to find the bugs that you would never otherwise find. And how does that save the QA team? The QA team isn’t blamed anymore because they found bugs before the users did. It’s all about visibility.
You need technology to increase visibility by 10x. And Appvance’s, multiple ways of generating scripts that include AI blueprinting, AI regression testing, and AI English written test cases (to be released in Q4), can find bugs for you in three different ways, and make teams hundreds of times more productive.
