Why enterprises need to transition from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering?
Organizations are remodeling their legacy quality testing approaches with engineering methodologies. To meet dynamic market demands, customer expectations, and IT compliance, they need a holistic quality engineering program that empowers the product, process, and people involved. Moreover, organizations need a proactive quality analysis process to drive their business transformation journey with agility and efficiency.
A study on the "future of quality engineering" done by Deloitte says, "As organizations continue their path through digital transformation, quality needs to evolve from a supporting to an enabling function by shifting the paradigm away from "cost of quality" to "value of quality."
Today, industry-based quality engineering strategies and advanced execution models are helping organizations achieve their project goals. This blog explores the importance of transitioning from quality assurance to a quality engineering mindset and some of the key benefits realized by adopting quality engineering.
What is Quality Engineering?
Quality engineering is a rigorous end-to-end quality check approach, addressing issues in each phase of development to ensure the quality of the product and process. The approach ensures quality right from the onset of the project and gives real-time test feedback at each phase so that issues can be resolved at the point of injection. A quality engineering approach enables continuous quality validation throughout a project as the feedback from each phase is incorporated into the upcoming phases. This ensures efficient localization of the issues in the individual elements resulting in the elimination of defects in the final product. Quality engineering connects all the touchpoints such as ideation, documentation, architecture, implementation, and user experience that impact the project's quality as a whole.
Differences between Quality Assurance and Quality Engineering
Quality assurance and quality engineering differ in many aspects. While quality assurance mainly comes into play at the final stage of product development and assures the quality of the product, quality engineering provides continuous product and process quality right from the start and all the way to the end of the project.
For instance, with quality assurance, the defect is detected in the end product, requiring the team to go back to the drawing board to reassess and rework the whole process. This will affect the company's time, budget, resources and operations adversely. But in the case of quality engineering, teams continuously test the product in parallel with development, ensuring that issues are resolved at the source, and the chances of defects creeping to production are reduced.
Also, with quality assurance, the responsibility to ensure quality is with the QA team, but quality engineering delegates the accountability of quality across the project phases to everyone involved. Quality engineering expands the project team's capability from being a siloed part of the cycle to a continuously integrated component in the project.
Key Benefits of Quality Engineering in SAP S/4 projects
Now that we know the differences between quality assurance and quality engineering, let’s take a closer look at some of the key benefits quality engineering provides
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Enables Early User Engagement
Quality engineering enables organizations to implement applications faster and let users engage earlier. With early engagement, users can interact continuously with the application and draw feedback quickly. This helps the organization to find defects earlier and solve them collaboratively before entering the final testing phases.
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Offers Cost Reduction
Quality engineering helps to find issues as early as possible and eliminate wasted time, cost and rework. By aligning the project team, customers and end-users with business goals, quality engineering can cut operational and management costs dramatically.
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Accelerates Speed-to-Market
Embracing quality engineering practices helps businesses fast-track projects and enables them to release products to the market sooner - and flawlessly. Specifically in SAP projects, identifying and fixing issues in real-time eliminates unnecessary bottleneck and speeds up the implementation and test cycles to realize the benefits of the application faster.
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Drives Quality Consciousness
A quality engineering approach instills quality consciousness across the organization and distributes the responsibility to every project participant. It evokes the importance of ensuring quality across each project phase and resolving issues at their origin.
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User Adoption
The Applexus Quality Engineering approach is essentially anchored on the user experience and users are involved in every stage of the project cycle, from discovery to deployment. So by the time the poduct development is complete, the users have already had multiple interactions with the product and are quite excited to get their hands on the product.
In conclusion, by deploying quality engineering in project development lifecycles, businesses can gain operational as well as strategic advantages. Changing the mindset and the right consulting help is key to success in your transition from quality assurance to quality engineering and the realization of business value much faster.
At Applexus, we have a robust and well established quality engineering practice that enables our customers to derive real business and operational benefits in their SAP projects. Our testing methodology RunningValidation is built on a combination of quality engineering, continuous validation and SAP Activate principles, to ensure quality delivery of software development projects.
Connect with our industry experts to learn more about Applexus’ quality engineering services or for any other questions.