New Frontiers in Quality Engineering: Continuous Testing and Shift-Right
OwlFinancial recently met with Nelson-Hall—a leading BPO analyst firm—to share our QE strategy within the larger context of a product-centric delivery model. The turn to products is no surprise for financial services and quality assurance providers alike—the limited scope, timeline, and funding of project-centric management demands a transformation that emphasizes advanced agile practices and continuous quality. Continuous testing and shift-right guide our QE strategy for product-based delivery model. They infuse speed into every step of the product cycle through hyper-automation.
Hyper-Automation as Key to Continuous Testing
Though test automation is becoming a hot topic within the finance industry, most firms lack robust test environments and structured test cases to properly utilize automation tools. OwlFinancial seeks to address this technical and intellectual gap through consistent investment in new automation features. We use BDD, employing the Gerkhin language to write test cases that are converted automatically into test scripts. Pre-defined business process diagrams—created via MBT (Mantiz)—guide finance firms’ journeys for exact and sufficient testing environments.
OwlFinancial is evolving its continuous testing platform—as well as its respective services across testing, AI-based analytics, and non-functional testing—through code-related services that expand test coverage, analysis, and coding quality. Increased data sources have also improved our defect prediction AI model, combined with explorative testing and full functional test automation (E2E testing). These features maximize error detection and speed as they take the shift-left approach to infuse automated testing at every step. The combination of these technologies is not only critical to an application’s success but is also the focus of product-centric management.
Entering the Shift-Right Era
Shift-Right takes the shift-left approach a step further, performing quality testing with real-life users. The complete quality maximization and accuracy that shift-right provides are unequivocal—yet the challenge to automate this process remains in need of growth. OwlFinancial has invested in shift-right to close this technological gap. Beyond A/B testing and APM tools to monitor applications and usability, we have employed AWS tools for cloud applications, the game-day concept to simulate test applications’ failures, canaries for early notification of end-user impacts, and rollbacks to redeploy previous application releases.
The Shift-Right era is still in its beginning stage. OwlFinancial currently relies on point-solution tools from AWS and is continuously calibrating AI use cases across defect triaging, test case optimization while gradually developing its Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) for quicker bug fixes. Forward-looking financial services will find it critical to develop awareness of this change and reap its quality benefits in the near future.
Turning the Chapter in QE
OwlFinancial shared these insights with Nelson Hall to expand the dialogue on evolving QE strategies within the backdrop of product-centric management. Indeed, the turn to products is motivating financial firms to rethink their QE strategies against existing legacy mindsets and manual limitations. Such challenges cannot be tackled without heeding to continuous testing and shift-right—the guiding principles for successful quality testing in this ever-changing digital landscape.
Ready to develop your continuous testing capabilities and shift-right? Get in touch with us now!
