# Infosys Whitepaper 
Title: Establish the right purpose for testing to win big in today’s digital world 
Author: Infosys Limited 
Format: PDF 1.6 

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 WHITE PAPER ESTABLISH THE RIGHT PURPOSE FOR  TESTING TO WIN BIG IN TODAY’S  DIGITAL WORLD Abstract The need for quality and agility across all enterprise offerings  – a top priority in this digital world – underscores the need for  robust software testing. Over the past few years, software testing  has undergone significant transformation. However, to ensure  transformation delivers relevant outcomes, organizations must first  understand and redefine the purpose of quality assurance across  all their offerings. This paper outlines the importance of defining  the right purpose of testing across four critical dimensions. It also  explains how such an approach will help organizations increase  the overall value and quality in the product and software delivery  lifecycle.<|endoftext|>- Bodhisattwa Mukherjee Test Analyst, Infosys Validation Solutions 

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 External Document © 2019 Infosys Limited Introduction  The rise of new technologies is creating a  world driven by the need for real-time and  relevant solutions that make customer lives  easier. In fact, most of the innovation we  see today is about making breakthroughs  to support this demand. As customer  expectations increase, organizations are  under pressure to deliver more at superior  quality within ever-shrinking timelines.  Thus, to sustain their edge, enterprises  are looking at optimizing their software  testing lifecycle to become lean and agile  in order to support quality assurance and  shorter time-to-market. But first, they must  evaluate what their purpose of testing is.  Without such understanding, initiatives to  amplify value and deliver positive customer  experience will remain limited in efficacy.<|endoftext|>External Document © 2019 Infosys Limited 

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 External Document © 2019 Infosys Limited What is the purpose of  testing?  Testing has a significant role to play in  the software industry. It is no longer  confined to ensuring that specific software  components work. Today, testing is about  enabling understanding and clarity in  the end-to-end lifecycle – from origin  of business requirements to customer  acceptance.  However, as software becomes complex,  there is a steep rise in the number of  checks to be conducted, making software  assurance impossible through only  human intervention. Thus, it is imperative  for companies to augment the entire  testing process with selective accelerators  like automation. Establishing a balance  between human testing and automated  testing is the key success factor here.  Moreover, the strengths of each can  only be fully leveraged when there is  clarity on the overall purpose of testing.  In order to achieve this, we recommend  defining the right purpose across four  critical dimensions, namely test maturity,  strategy, accelerators, and agility. A balance  between these four factors will enable  robust and outcome-driven testing for  business success.  These four dimensions are further described  below: 1. Test maturity   It is extremely important for  organizations to understand their  current testing maturity if they want  to adopt digitization and meaningful  innovation. They should identify the  purpose of testing and introduce clarity  into its objectives through effective  assessments. This involves defining  a clear vision and future state that  reflects how the organization views  the overall role of testing as well as its  role in the digitization journey. Thus,  end-to-end traceability from business  goals to IT goals to testing goals form  the winning criteria for successful  testing assessments. Moreover,  organizations should also focus on  change management during digital  transformation to ensure enterprise-wide  success.    The strategy outlined below can  help define the purpose of testing  by first understanding the overall  objective. This assessment strategy can  help organization identify potential  and current gaps as well as the  corresponding next steps to solve them.  The differentiator of this strategy is that  it provides end-to-end traceability across  all phases, thereby aligning with the  overall purpose of testing.<|endoftext|>End to End traceability of findings to gaps to recommendations to initiatives  Assessment Initiation – Planning and  Strategy Collect response to  questionnaire, interview  different business  functions and review  testing process Analysis of current state  Testing process to identify  Key findings and Business  Impacts Design Testing Vision,  Strategy and Target  state  Gap Analysis Propose  Recommendations Define Initiatives,  Roadmap and  Next Steps 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Findings Gaps Initiatives Next Step RoadMap Vision Fig 1: An assessment strategy to effectively identify current testing maturity 

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 External Document © 2019 Infosys Limited External Document © 2019 Infosys Limited 2. Strategy   Increasing customer expectations,  aggressive product release timelines,  competitive product margins, and  steep compliance measures present a  new type of challenge for nearly every  department in an organization, namely,  quality assurance. Addressing this calls  for extreme agility, value-based delivery  and increased efficiency in operations. In  this new era of quality assurance, testers  can no longer manually assure all the  functional and non-functional points of  a software product or solution. In fact,  3. Accelerators   Testing accelerators like automation and  soft tools are now being viewed very  differently as compared to the past few  years. Previously, automation meant  using software capabilities to perform  repetitive tasks with a tester’s partial  attendance to monitor the process.  Now, automation has transformed to  become more structured and guided  with a definitive purpose. It has moved  beyond performing repetitive tasks and  focuses on using software intelligence  for complex tasks, which may even  require decision-making capabilities.  Moreover, the need for extensive human  this is a key factor driving transformation  within testing strategies. Nowadays,  testers are moving away from traditional  phased ‘test-all’ approaches all to more  agile and ‘purposeful’ testing. While  many organizations have not explicitly  embarked on such agile journeys, it is  important to infuse a certain degree of  agility in testing by first understanding  the purpose and overall objective of  testing. Hence testers should have a  good understanding of technology  along with sound domain knowledge  in the current business landscape. This  intervention for close monitoring has  reduced to a large extent and is required  only in specific situations beyond the  software capability.   Simply automating every process can  be time-consuming, costly and may  not even yield the expected outcomes.  Instead, it is important to understand the  purpose of automation and the value it  brings. Once there is clarity on this, the  next step is to generate a heat map of  all the automatable processes, identify  high impact zones and categorize and  prioritize the most important ones for  automation. The heat map must clearly  reflect time-consuming tasks, actual or  balance of techno-domain knowledge  will enable agility in an organization’s  quality assurance journey.   We recommend that organizations  further optimize their testing strategy  by incorporating twelve selective focus  points as mentioned in Fig 2. Once  there is clarity and understanding of  the relevancy of testing in the overall  business context, these twelve points  can be implemented through various  means like test accelerators, bots, new  operational models, etc.<|endoftext|>potential choke points, friction zones,  and processes having high complexity.  When automation is leveraged  efficiently in this way with a definitive  purpose, organizations can derive  positive impact on speed, cost, time,  and agility.<|endoftext|> Fig 3 depicts the simplified architecture  of an application landscape reflecting  the value generated through  automation across different layers. The  key success factor here is identifying  the correct purpose for automation  across different layers, thereby crafting  an effective automation strategy that  strikes a right balance in each layer.<|endoftext|>Fig 2: Twelve selective points to improve the testing strategy for robust quality assurance 

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 External Document © 2019 Infosys Limited Apart from the above benefits, automation also helps organizations leverage robotic process automation (RPA) for higher ROI in areas like  vendor invoice management, claim management (administration and processing), customer enrollment management, billing management,  tax calculation system, etc.<|endoftext|>Fig 3: Architecture of an automated application landscape  External Document © 2019 Infosys Limited 

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 External Document © 2019 Infosys Limited 4.  Agility    In a fast-paced customer-centric  world, organizations want to be more  agile, particularly in their product  development lifecycles in order to  increase efficiency. However, traditional  practices of maintaining independent  teams across the product lifecycle with  high manual intervention in each step  cannot support agility. The shift towards  agile product development necessitates  having a collaborative environment for  development, operations and quality  assurance for lean end-to-end processes.  Armed with this purpose, organizations  that have