As the digital demands of the business continue to escalate, software delivery teams are under extraordinary pressure to deliver more work faster. Speed, however, counts for little if these teams are not delivering a high-quality product of value; rapid turnaround for a customer request is futile if the feature doesn’t work properly or meet their needs. As ever, the aim of the game remains the same – to continuously improve and innovate the digital experience of discerning end-users.
Fortunately, it’s within this pressure-cooker environment that your QA/test teams — so often the unsung heroes of software development — are becoming increasingly instrumental in managing the equilibrium between speed and quality. And it is through these de facto brand guardians that enterprises can accelerate their value delivery – as long as these specialists have access to the real-time information they need when need it.
Your talented and highly-trained QA/test teams are experts in assessing a product’s health. To do their job properly, they need real-time information into a product’s journey from ideation to operation to help them ascertain:
- If the *current* requirements have been fulfilled.
- Implementations are defect-free.
- Whether known defects are tolerable if they’re deployed into production.
These teams use excellent test management tools (such as Micro Focus ALM) to manage their work. However, these tools are unable to provide the one source of truth of a product’s entire journey from end-to-end because of the sheer number of specialists teams and tools involved in the software delivery value stream. All the data pertaining to the product’s development is fragmented between the tools, making holistic real-time visibility and traceability a constant uphill struggle.
The aim, then, is to improve the way data is shared between teams. There are three ways to achieve this:
- A Manual Process: such as logging into another team’s tool, emailing a colleague for the information or consulting a spreadsheet.
- Batch Data Transfer: exporting defects and requirements from one system and bulk importing them into another. Of course, artifacts loaded this way have only static information; they are not continually updated with the most current status.
- Automated Integration Across Toolchain: If these systems are integrated and the information in them is continuously synchronized, everyone has access to the most up-to-date information in real-time. Specialists can even collaborate with one another via this information, all while remaining in their tool of choice.
The third way is the only way to create a formalized, traceable workflow. By connecting your test management tool with other key stages you can empower your QA/test teams to protect and optimize your product quality and accelerate the value delivery of your product portfolio.
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