Digital transformation isn’t just an industry buzzword in IT and quality assurance testing, it’s quickly becoming a way of life. Data shows that companies across Europe are shifting their focus to digital transformation, and most companies are expected to have a plan in place and activated by the end of this year. With this change in the industry, some companies might start to wonder how to approach this new way of thinking.

Spectrum recently wrote about the major paradigm shift in the QA department at Yahoo. Once Yahoo decided it was time to transform the way they test and release code, they underwent major structural and process changes. The goal was to “shift from batch releases of code to a system of continuous delivery.” With this, they would eliminate traditional testing teams, and put the quality assurance responsibility on the software engineer. But how can a company with so many users and such complex structures continue to function confidently without a QA department? The answer largely lies in test automation. This paradigm shift “forced engineers to develop tools to automate the kinds of checks previously handled by teams of humans.”  Yahoo may have removed their traditional QA teams, but many of the QA team members were shifted into test automation roles.

The shift to continuous testing. We’re seeing this more and more in today’s market.  It is simply impossible to deliver the highest quality software with manual testing – and companies are looking for automation options. Core business processes must be tested continuously – across the entire release cycle. The shift to automation allows companies to test more applications and business processes than in the past, with fewer resources and with higher quality.

Getting to high business process coverage. This point wasn’t covered in the piece, but a key enabler in successful test automation is the ability to capture, visualize, and analyze critical business processes. Why is this such a big deal? Because if you don’t understand your real business processes, you can’t capture them, and you can’t test them. Worksoft automates the discovery of business processes by simply capturing underlying processes while users perform activities as usual. Because it’s fast and easy, this makes it possible to get to really high levels of coverage – so you can protect 90% or more of your core business processes with high velocity testing.

With better insight into processes, and the tools to document and optimize, you know just what needs to be tested.  From there, building end-to-end business process tests can be completed in minutes, and can be used to build a reusable portfolio of test automation.  To learn more, click here.