“No matter how embedded your brand is in customers’ lives today, if you stop meeting their expectations, it’s easy for them to switch to a competitor tomorrow. ”
– Forrester’s Best Practice Report titled ‘Optimize Your Digital Experience To Compete For Customers’
Innovation cycles for digital businesses have become shorter. Period. There’s no hiding from this truth. New-age digital-first customers have a variety of options at their fingertips. With a simple tap of a button, they can download a competitor’s app.
In this fast-paced world, businesses have no option but to keep matching customer expectations at record speeds. In this quest for speed, test execution can often become a roadblock as it impedes release velocity. This scenario brings us back to the age-old question of ‘speed vs quality’.
Enterprises have realized that they need to come up with a strategy that enables development teams with the right technology to ensure faster developer feedback. Successful enterprises have made it possible to have speed and quality.
How can faster developer feedback time help enterprises?
- Reduced Time to Market– Faster feedback means more efficient bug resolution and accelerated time to market.
- Minimizing Cost– Faster developer feedback results in catching bugs earlier, directly translating to cost savings. The longer it takes to fix an issue, the more expensive it becomes.
- Quality Improvement– When developers receive feedback quickly, they can address the issue faster before it becomes more pronounced, thus enhancing the quality and incorporating quality from day one.
How are enterprises accelerating faster feedback times?
Technology- As a first step, enterprises should look at automating a major chunk of their tests to ensure faster feedback to developers. Manual testing is time-consuming and error-prone. Manual exploratory testing can be used as ‘check’ tests or to test edge cases that require human judgment. Also, testing on a cloud-based test execution platform will help save costs and resources (time, manpower, and money).
Enterprises that are well into their test automation journey and are already seeing the benefits should look to use smart AI-powered test orchestration platforms to push their test execution to the next level.
Think of test orchestration as an intelligence layer to your testing. The traditional way to run tests, i.e. running them on a sequentially triggered basis results in test execution inefficiency. For most optimized parallel test runs, you have intelligently orchestrated the tests for ideal test distribution, lesser developer friction, faster feedback, and collection of test execution data. Test orchestration ultimately results in quicker time to market.
Enterprises should also ensure that they test on platforms that come with ready-made integrations so that developers and testers need not move from one tool to another to do testing-related tasks.
Finally, test execution insights are critical for faster developer feedback. By analyzing data, enterprises can get deeper insights into what kind of tests/sections of their digital assets need scrutiny thereby ensuring that they focus on it diligently, ultimately reducing time to market.
Right Process– Agile methodologies can enable enterprises to provide faster feedback and streamline development cycles. Since Agile prioritizes collaboration and communication, it allows developers and testers to work more efficiently and creates an effective feedback loop. This also allows companies to respond the market needs/changes quickly.
People- At the end of the day, people make all the difference. Enterprises must ensure that they enable proper communication between teams and should do their best in removing silos. Developers and testers should work as one team. Bringing this cultural shift is paramount to ensure faster feedback.
Conclusion
If there is one thing that should be the KPI of the whole development team, it is developer feedback time and how to constantly reduce it.
Catering to digital-first customers is challenging and thus enterprises should put a lot of emphasis on reducing the developer feedback time as it impacts release velocity. Added to this, is the ever-changing market dynamics, enterprises need to be swift in addressing them through fast development and release cycles. Doing this successfully requires full-blown efforts on the technology, process, and people fronts.
