Quality Assurance in Digital Transformation Projects

Consider this: you’re working with an application and it crashes unexpectedly, doesn’t work as expected, or you encounter multiple versions of the same application. How frustrating would that be? Experiencing any of these issues after the product release can cost you both money and user trust. The longer a bug goes undetected, the more costly it is to fix. If you’ve undergone a major digital transformation project, these costs may not have been part of the original scope, which can lead to massive overages in both time and budget.

This explains the importance of role of a QA tester in the lifecycle of a digital transformation project at PITSS, especially when it comes to legacy applications involving Oracle. In some cases, QA and testing are equally as important as development. QA and testing contribute a great deal of value to a project. It ensures a defect-free application to the client, which is the ultimate goal of any product, software, or business system development. A QA tester tests the product as an end user, verifying that the flow of the application is working fine and as expected. This ensures that the product does what it should do (positive testing) and it does not do what is not expected (negative testing).

User Experience Matters

At the same time, the user experience includes not only the functionality of the new or transformed application, but also the display and the convenience in handling the application. This is achieved as the QA is testing the app from the view of end user. A product can be developed by a team of developers, working on multiple units. Hence it is crucial to perform integration and end-to-end testing. This is to confirm that product as a whole is working as expected and flawless. If a bug is encountered during the testing, it is the duty of the tester to explain the expected behavior to the developer, making it easier to fix. This may need further confirmation and clarification from the client or user. In this way, the QA can become a trusted liaison between the development team and the client. This role of QA liaison becomes very important during a digital transformation project. Based on the framework, some workflows may have to be changed. In this scenario, a QA makes sure that the end functionality is unaffected. They communicate this change to the client and clarifies any doubts. Once the confirmation is received from the client, the QA needs to communicate it back to the development team to apply the change.

A Practical Example

To give an example: One of our customers upgraded a product to ADFBC from Oracle forms. In Forms, multiple fields can be enabled at a time, which is not allowed in ADFBC. Hence, based on the product requirements, we had to make all other fields disabled in order not to allow the user to edit, as expected, and keep the focus in user input field only at all times. In this example, our QA tester had to explain the solution to the customer and make sure that the end functionality was not affected by this change. The customer approved the change—it’s been in effect for months now without any issue, thanks to the collaboration between the QA tester and the digital transformation client.