World Quality Report 2022-2023: Quality remains pivotal in the race to release more and release faster

New tech demands a new approach

One of the emerging topics to come out of this year’s survey is the impact of new technology, such as blockchain and virtual reality (VR). Both are assuming a firmer place in day-to-day activity, and this has a knock-on effect for quality engineering professionals. This new technology needs to be tested in a different way than before, with a different approach and types of testing and quality validation. It will be interesting to watch the evolution of this in the coming years.

A clear and understandable trend is the sustainability of IT. Organizations recognize that simply adopting a sustainable IT approach isn’t enough – they also need to be able to validate the sustainability aspects of that IT. While quality can help with making environments more efficient and in optimizing resource utilization, the next step is about making sustainability levels of IT transparent. We are not there yet. In fact, only 54% of organizations say they test for resource efficiency and 54% say the same for energy efficiency.

Agile quality orchestration

I’ve written previously about the evolving role of agile development and it’s clear this evolution is ongoing. As the rapid pace of change continues unabated, agile and DevOps improve lead-time-to-deliver and enable frequent deployments. But being faster in software deployment is not helpful if the outcomes do not have the right level of quality. This demands continuous agile quality orchestration, whereby all team members are enabled and supported to deliver and test for the right or even higher levels of quality faster. Get this right and the transformation to agile/DevOps that we’ve seen over the past few years certainly gets results. Our latest survey found that 64% of respondents felt agile and DevOps adoption had improved on-time delivery, with 61% saying it had improved the customer experience.

Automation in the quality and testing landscape is nothing new, yet only about half of DevOps teams feel they get benefit from automation. Further, more than 40% of the WQR survey respondents believe that manual provisoning of test data remains one of the top barriers to integrating the provision of testing data into the continuous integration and delivery pipelines. I believe there is a lack of strategy and target setting when it comes to automation, which goes some way to explaining the perception that automation isn’t delivering benefits like speed and resilience. If teams are to continue meeting the fast-changing needs of the business and customers, automation and smarter environment provisioning must yield better outcomes. As our report points out, this needs the right people, with the right tools (often more than one tool) and good requirements.

Validating and provisioning data

Finally, this year’s WQR dive into the role of data in quality engineering notes the increased focus on provisioning test data safely and securely. The quality of data and the ability to control that quality will become ever more important. Why? Because all organizations increasingly rely on data for effective decision making, including in the realms of quality and testing. For example, the quality outcomes of an artificial intelligence environment will depend on the quality of the data itself. The ability to validate that data is seen as an important step, with 44% of survey respondents agreeing that this will be an area of extreme importance going forward.

From new approaches to quality engineering for emerging tech to sustainability and intelligent test automation, this year’s World Quality Report points to how a stronger demand for quality can be met by embracing new technological advancements. Through these evolutions, organizations are able to deliver value from software upgrades faster, while being more adaptable to change as quality teams look deeper, test smarter, and see more, which is the essence of quality engineering.