Digital technologies have gained momentum in the last few years reshaping the business models and helping companies to explore new opportunities to scale up efficiencies and improve customer satisfaction. This trend of evolving technologies has led to the progress of Digital workflow systems, to provide greater insight and efficiencies. To keep the digital workflow system up and running, organizations are innovating and streamlining the existing processes. Having business operations and software development closely interact and adopting practices such as DevOps, businesses have accelerated digital adoption cycles.

Every organization is creating a new digital transformation strategy to efficiently incorporate digital workflow and remove any hurdles associated with integration, processing, and maintenance. This process of building and implementing the digital workflow strategy should be backed by strong quality assurance teams and powerful test automation practices. Strong QA process will help bring faster stability to the systems, detect even the slightest of errors, and provide faster updates to the developer to fix any issues. Hence, the test automation forms an inevitable part of the modern, digital workflows.

Redefining the role of test automation in digital workflows

With the increasing emphasize on technology, organizations are moving towards digital, omnichannel workflow systems to offer seamless customer experience. Furthermore, organizations are adapting to the modern software development process like DevOps to improve the digital workflow system. This kind of development process works on highly complex and unified systems that are driven by specified APIs, GUIs, AI, ML, and other Cloud-driven applications. To ensure the speed, quality, accuracy, and consistency of these systems, test automation plays an essential role.

To sustain and succeed in today’s highly competitive world, organizations are optimizing their workflow Testing strategy to suit the modern application development practices and DevOps implementations. Such test executions are an important part for successful digital transformation.

Changes required for test automation in digital transformation scenario:

• Focus on business tests
• Emphasize on continuous testing
• Improving processes with test automation
• AI integration

Focus on business tests

Workflow operations are directly linked to business outcomes. Incorporation of digitization in the workflow systems are important for greater execution and enhanced customer experience; thus, allowing companies to build new workflow testing strategy to improve the performance of the entire process.

With digitization, the role of test teams has undergone a major transformation. Testers are not required to manually write the codes for all the process that is being developed. The QA process has been automated to handle complex business operations like real-time performance, interacting with other applications, flexible to the user preference, and a lot more. Businesses understand and develop test execution based on their requirements.

Emphasize on continuous testing

Digital workflows demand tools and concepts that deliver faster, accurate, and consistent results. CI/CD (continuous Integration/continuous delivery) practice is the most preferred among the developers for the speed, quality, and ease it offers. The success of the CI/CD process also lies in expanding the scope/coverage of the software testing efforts and the proverbial -shift-left testing. Continuous testing is bringing a testers mindset of questioning/ enquiry in early/all parts of the product development cycle. This enables the testers to identify any issues at an early stage in the development process and allows developers to fix the issues early which will further enable an easy and smooth development process with accurate end results.  This is achieved by questioning and revalidating assumptions (documented or undocumented) and establishing cause-effect relationships between varied parts of your development efforts. 

Improving processes with test automation

Digital workflows and test automation work hand-in-hand. The success of a digital workflow system lies in automating the testing process. Manual testing, while being highly effective, is tedious, time-consuming, and often prone to a number of errors.  A judicious mix of manual and automated testing should be applied to achieve maximum coverage and error-discovery.

As discussed earlier, digital workflows need continuous testing process to ensure the quality of the system. Continuous testing can be achieved only by test automation solutions. Test automation are implemented to conduct end-to-end workflow testing that includes test creation, processing, execution, test data generation, test data and environment management, running test suites, security testing, and generating reports.

Though test automation can provide reliability, accuracy, and consistency, it is essential to identify the right test tool. In the event of failing to do so, the anticipated time and effort savings can be lost in building and maintaining automation scripts. In critical digital workflows, testers create smaller regression suites and run the test; the results are analyzed, and problems are reported to the developer.

AI integration

AI and ML integration are offering new possibilities for test automations. AI has increased the speed of test automation by multiple folds, this is achieved by applying complex algorithms running in the backend of the AI-integrated system. AI-integration is still at a nascent stage, organizations are exploring different possibilities to use them for automation of different digital processes. AI testing are used to test application usability, features, integrations, and test data analysis. Furthermore, AI-driven test automation allows the machine tor self-learning and taking proactive actions with minimal or no human intervention.

Digital workflow testing for early issue identification in DevOps

DevOps practices are popularly used for application development in the modern world. Test automation helps them to identify and resolve issues at an early stage of software development lifecycle. Without a digital QA strategy, test automation can help to remove the barriers of the digital processes.

Digital-driven software development are the modern processes that are backed by powerful QA system. Implementing test automation practices right from the beginning of the DevOps cycle will adapt a true shift left attitude and perform the test activity with utmost precision. While test automation has distinct benefits, it requires careful planning supported by the right skillset to achieve the desired ROI.  Hence, it requires testers to reskill to fit in the modern digital scenario.

Yethi’s QA solutions to modern workflow systems

Yethi is a QA service provider for banks and financial institutions across the world. Yethi test automation tool, Tenjin, is a 6^th generation, robotic test automation platform that is capable of handling diverse workflow applications. With successful testing of inexhaustible workflow systems in the past for our esteemed clients, having us placed as one of the top QA testing solutions for financial software systems.

Tenjin is capable of providing effortless test automation with reduced time. It specializes in handling automation of continuous integration/ continuous development processes to keep in sync with the development process, thereby, ensuring to fix the issues as they are detected. It further helps in end-to-end testing of all workflow stages, strategizing, analyzing and designing test cases, executing and monitoring entire workflow stages and process. Tenjin’s multiple rounds of test execution to offer accurate test results even under high-risk scenarios make us the perfect QA partner. We carry out thorough analysis and testing to achieve specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely results/