Change is amongst us, we must embrace the new Digital era and rather than see change as a challenge, reverse those views and see it as an opportunity to grow and expand. It’s a fact that Digital Transformation (DX) is at the top of every companies to do list. Whether that be a partial or full DX change, companies today are facing a dilemma; don’t change the way we work and the infrastructure we use or be left behind in a fast-changing world. Today we face a couple of big challenges, staying ahead and on top of new technologies but at the same time provide outstanding customer experience. To be clear, DX is the process of using new or modified business processes to meet the changing business and market requirements by the use of new and advanced technology.

That’s not technically true… I’d love to spend time with family, eat chocolates and open a small selection of functional, relevant and meaningful gifts along with a stack of Christmas Pudding and brandy butter and maybe user acceptance test a glass or two of Baileys! 

The Manifesto for Agile Software Development is based on twelve principles:

1. Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software
2. Welcome changing requirements, even in late development
3. Deliver working software frequently (weeks rather than months)
4. Close, daily cooperation between business people and developers
5. Projects are built around motivated individuals, who should be trusted
6. Face-to-face conversation is the best form of communication (co-location)
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress
8. Sustainable development, able to maintain a constant pace
9. Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
10. Simplicity—the art of maximising the amount of work not done—is essential
11. Best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organising teams
12. Regularly, the team reflects on how to become more effective, and adjusts accordingly

It’s interesting that despite the first principle being; ‘Customer satisfaction by early and continuous delivery of valuable software.’ UAT, as we have traditionally known it, doesn’t fit well into an Agile delivery model. Many Agile teams dispense with UAT and rely more heavily on the Show and Tell session to get customer sign off. In Scrum, this is done in the Sprint Review Meeting and involves a demonstration of the user stories that have been delivered (according to the Definition of Done) in the sprint. One of the objectives is to elicit stakeholder feedback.

This is good practice, fosters collaboration and creates a high level of discipline while also meeting the objectives of the first principle. Product demonstrations should be interactive so that stakeholders have the chance to provide feedback however, I often wonder “Is this enough?”. Participants in the ‘Show and Tell’ and the Sprint Review Meeting should include, amongst others, the Product Owner, Stakeholder and Sponsors and Customers. However, in practise, I tend to find two problems;

Regression testing is performed to verify that a code change executed in the software does not impact the existing functionality of the product. By regression testing you are making sure that the product works fine with new functionality, any bug fixes or changes with existing features. Previously executed test cases are re-executed in order to verify the impact of change has not adversely affected existing functionality.

Like other engineering principles, software engineers should be responsible for delivering high quality, bug free products that work under all conditions. I wholeheartedly agree that developers (and the whole team) should be accountable for product quality and there needs to be a mind, and culture, shift so that the responsibility of quality control is not abdicated to the testing team.

As testers we are inclined to try to test everything, however factors such as timescales, available resources, technical complexities and costs can prevent this from happening.

The glib answer to the question “where does testing fit into your Digital Transformation project?” is “to get a high-quality product and the expected business outcomes, testing needs to feature highly in your digital transformation – as it does with any IT project.“

User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is one of the final phases in the project life cycle and provides end users of the system with the opportunity to test the system prior to its live state. It is the final check that the Business Processes will function in the manner they were intended and built.

You’ll be fully aware that Digital Transformation is at the top of every IT Directors list of things to do. Companies today are facing a couple of big challenges, staying ahead and on top of new technologies and at the same time providing outstanding customer experience. To be clear, Digital Transformation is the process of using new or modified business processes and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements by use of new and advanced technology.

In the previous part of this 2-part series, we identified how taking a Lean approach to testing can highlight various wastes that testers face in a project team, and external wastes that end users deal with. This concluding part will identify some solutions that can help with reducing the three types of waste, Muri, Mura and Muda and how continuous improvement can lead on to creating value for the customer.