Software Testing During the Time of Covid

Innovation as Always

Innovation has always come out of the toughest of situations. The COVID-19 pandemic was no exception. When numerous businesses were forced to shut down with the slowdown of the market, innovators worked at lightning speed to bring new inventions and processes into the industry to keep business afloat as much as possible. From drone delivery of medicines and food to easily pocketable UV sanitizer stickers, we’ve seen technology innovations that have helped people and businesses continue just as they were before. Additionally, new technology like the Aarogya Setu contact tracing app and various social distancing apps for restaurants that helped businesses restart after the lockdowns began to gain prominence.

The IT Impetus to Innovation

Almost all of the innovations we saw during the pandemic were made possible by technology. Whether it was the actual product or service itself being a technology, or using technology to deliver a product or service to consumers, everything was achieved through technology. Outside of healthcare workers, day and night, it was IT professionals who worked feverishly to meet seemingly impossible deadlines, churning out solutions that helped individual businesses as well as overall economies move forward.

IT organizations met current business needs by reducing turn-around times, enabling remote deployments, and building products and services on the fly in order to support demand.

Responsibility of the Testing Practice

While IT plays a crucial role in supporting business domains to reach customers using technology and quickly replaces earlier business models, the underlying tone of businesses that are prolific during pandemics is also that of low cost. At times like what we saw during COVID-19, it’s usually the testing practice that falls under the scrutiny of cost-reduction programs. To ensure that companies do not lose focus on quality while continuing to deliver robust products and services, quality teams must ensure that they reinvent and adapt when required.

Automation adoption needs to ramp up significantly, because there is less and less time available for the industry to test. During pandemics, when it’s all about how time to market can be made shorter, most organizations will be forced to cut down on elaborate manual testing. It’s imperative that automation helps attain maximum test coverage and cycles of test execution.    

In Conclusion

At Prakat, we have always had a tradition of creating strong testing assets by continuously innovating with in-house accelerators and processes that can help kickstart testing earlier in the product/service lifecycle. We help our customers build strong automation frameworks that can be replicated across their assets and be used to reduce the ideation-to-market times for new products and services. This has helped us cope well with the changing trends in the industry, support critical deployments of clients, and respond quickly to the changing needs of our client base.

Organizations need to adopt wider automation testing to be able to support continuous innovation and be able to capitalize on the current requirements of the industry. This also helps build a stronger delivery practice, avoids bottlenecks for releases, and re-prioritizes work, based on each situation, to attain more productivity.

– Anuradha Biswas