"Digi-Data"

Decoding TDM approach for Digital Assurance

- Sathiya Narayanan

Recent studies and trends indicates “Digital Assurance” will top software testing trends in coming years. As per latest reports, 30 - 35% of the QA and Testing Budget for new development is spent on customer channel solutions. Digital transformation will continue to drive IT strategy which has direct impacts on QA and testing functions. This provides great opportunity for digital testing to move from ‘Quality Assurance’ to ‘Digital Assurance’ that will measure, quantify and better understand the user experience by executing end to end comprehensive testing across the digital value chain (digital marketing, asset management, online analytics) and digital eco systems (Social, Mobility, Analytics & Big data, Cloud).

With the emerging technologies and customer facing applications getting complex, it is indeed imperative to assure the business across multiple digital platforms, devices and services. As digital assurance involves testing across digital eco system and digital value chain, we need to have a holistic and hybrid approach to manage provisioning of data to different needs like functional, performance, automation, security areas.

Testing apps properly means testing against real data, which means a copy of the production database has to be masked and set up on IT systems the test teams can use. Provisioning the hardware and software for a testing team can take weeks; then resetting each test can take hours, which means there's a limited amount of time to get the bugs out.