World Quality Report (WQR) 20-21

The 12th edition of the World Quality Report outlines the  contribution of QA being implicit in the success of the digital transformation.

The coronavirus pandemic has been a major challenge, but it has also acted as an accelerant, encouraging organizations and teams to do more things – and to do them better.

A survey sample of 1750 CIOs and senior tech leaders has voted ‘Business Assurance’ as the most important quality assurance and testing objective.

The WQR 2020 highlights the fact that expectations of QA have been steadily increasing. There’s an upward trend in almost every objective for which we have previous data. These include the need to support business growth and the importance of ensuring end-user satisfaction. Both of these indicate that QA is no longer seen as a backroom discipline, divorced from the rest of the organization.QA has been steadily evolving – from an independent function to  an integrated function, and now to an inclusive function. Also, the role of the QA practitioner is transforming from finding and reporting defects, to becoming the orchestrator of quality; and they are expected to  ensure that the other engineering team members inculcate quality in their way of working. User experience and production testing is also gaining ground implying that QA is not only shifting left but also moving right.

Here are our key recommendations to help accelerate your Quality Assurance & Engineering journey in WQR 2020-21:

1. Don’t silo responsibility for QA. Share it. Quality practices should be integrated into every part of the lifecycle – and should be a part of everyone’s mindset
2. Adopt smart ways of working. Focus on value added activities by leveraging the insights gained through implementation of analytics, AI and ML in QA.
3. Greater savings can be achieved by using test infrastructure smartly. Maturity and the adoption of cloud-based technologies provide an excellent opportunity for organizations to optimize their test environment and test tool licensing costs.
4. Be better prepared for business continuity. Run disaster planning and testing more often. Test the application architecture and ensure it will be able to adapt in line with any changes to business models.

For more information on the regional developments from this global study, please download e-copies of the regional pull-outs.