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Top 10 Digital Product Engineering Testing and Debugging Barriers
UST Product Engineering
Digital products like software, mobile apps, and websites are pervasive in virtually all aspects of modern life, making it increasingly imperative for companies to turn to digital product engineering to improve efficiencies, product quality, user experience, and time to market.
Digital product engineering is an approach to rapidly creating quality digital products using innovative technologies, software, tools, frameworks, IT architectures, Agile development methodologies, and creative designs that solve real-world customer problems at speed and scale.
The practice covers all components of a product’s existence, including concept, research, analysis, design, development, test, delivery, maintenance, support, and retirement. This holistic approach ensures the optimization of a product throughout its lifecycle while helping businesses accelerate time to value significantly and elevate customer experiences.
Digital product engineering aims to deliver robust digital products that meet customer requirements and optimize user experiences. Consequently, quality is paramount to the engineering practice, with QA testing at the vanguard of today’s flourishing digital products.
The lack of testing or insufficient testing can be costly to a business, resulting in poor user experiences, buggy software, security issues, and customer churn. Software defects alone cost the U.S. economy $59.5 billion annually.
Still, testing the plethora of digital products that companies churn daily is daunting and time-consuming for any business. Error-prone manual testing is no longer an option in this fast-paced digital age.
For digital product engineers, continuous testing is the answer to ensuring the ongoing delivery of superior-quality products where testing and debugging occur continually across the lifecycle and mainly through automation.
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What is continuous testing?
Continuous testing is integral for businesses aspiring to release quality digital products within shorter timeframes.
Continuous testing is a method that tests digital products throughout the development cycle and after each code or configuration change. Engineers accomplish continuous testing by integrating test scripts into the Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) product development pipeline. This method automates the testing scripts and triggers to run when project work is activated.
The CI/CD pipeline is a set of processes that automates building, testing, and delivering code and allows developers to simultaneously make multiple codebase changes.
CI/CD aligns with Agile product development methodologies by delivering value to end users faster and creating customer feedback loops that enable engineers to improve products based on customer input rapidly.
Continuous testing in digital product engineering helps companies elevate customer satisfaction and be more agile and adaptable to changing customer demands, market shifts, and supply chain fluctuations.
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Top digital product testing challenges
As automation continues to envelop the product testing ecosystem, engineers still grapple with challenges that can lead to complex development and testing processes, product delays, and other roadblocks to streamlining and accelerating product testing.
Here are some common challenges engineers encounter when testing digital products:
- Rapid technological advancements. The fast-paced evolution of technology is a clear challenge in product testing. Today’s digital product testing scenarios are evolving quickly, powered by constant innovation from AI, machine learning, and other cutting-edge technologies.
These advancements significantly impact testing strategies, introducing new ways to improve the efficiency and accuracy of continuous testing, including more refined test kits, tools, frameworks, and platforms.
Companies with testers that stay current with emerging technologies and trends and leverage them in their testing strategies and products can avoid technological obsoletion, sustain, and prosper in the rapidly transforming tech space.
- Cross-platform compatibility issues. As products become more complex and integrated with other systems, managing these different interoperating schemes and assuring they perform together seamlessly is an increasing challenge.
Platform compatibility issues arise in product testing from differences in operating systems, screen sizes, and user interfaces. These issues can impact the performance, appearance, and user experience of products designed for multiple platforms.
Thorough planning and strategies, including cross-platform testing, are essential to ensure consistent platform performance.
- Security concerns. Due to the growing dependence on digital products for retaining sensitive and confidential data, security is a critical matter. Engineers must identify and eliminate product security exposures to protect user data and prevent unauthorized access.
To ensure robust security testing, companies should integrate security validation into their CI/CD pipeline and prioritize security as important as new product features and bug fixes.
Security validation is the active examination of security measures through various tests, such as penetration testing and vulnerability scanning, to determine how well a security system protects against actual or simulated attacks.
Security testing helps businesses diminish breaches by optimizing security operations and enhancing the effectiveness of cybersecurity initiatives.
Digital product engineering testing trends
AI in testing has already proven its value, and it’s evident that AI will power the future of digital testing. Below are some testing trends shaping the future of how we test digital products.
- More sophisticated AI testing tools and platforms. Artificial intelligence and machine learning in testing will grow dramatically, enabling more efficient and accurate testing and providing more choices in AI testing tools and platforms. A recent Lambada Test survey reinforces this movement, revealing that 78% of software testers have already adopted some form of AI to enhance productivity and optimize testing processes.
- Codeless automated testing. Codeless automated testing eliminates the need to write a single line of code using intuitive interfaces and AI-powered tools, regardless of the application’s type and size.
Codeless automated testing saves engineers significant time by automating the process of writing and running test scripts, allowing them to focus more on creating innovative products that please end users.
- Hyper automation testing. A top trend in the digital product testing space, hyper-automation, is a strategy that blends AI and machine learning with the latest automation and packaged software, including Robotic Process Automation (RPA), advanced analytics, Business Process Management (BPM), and low-code/no-code visual development environments to automate complex processes.
Hyper automation is an advanced version of automation that goes beyond automating simple, repetitive tasks and aims to optimize the entire IT lifecycle without human intervention. Hyper automation has introduced intelligent automation designed to scale automation initiatives.
Hyper automation testing helps organizations increase the speed and efficiency of testing processes to achieve higher quality outcomes, scalability, and reliability in their digital products.
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Conclusion
In this digital age, businesses must rapidly and continually deliver quality digital products (applications, mobile apps, websites) while enhancing end-user experiences.
The rapid delivery of quality products and elevating customer experiences are the primary goals of digital product engineering, a process of developing digital products that include the full mix of IT prowess with IT infrastructure and emerging technologies to support a product throughout its lifecycle, including the testing phase.
Product engineers increasingly rely on continuous testing, which automates testing scripts through the CI/CD product development pipeline, to keep up with the unrelenting pace of digital product releases.
Continuous testing allows engineers to identify and correct issues early in the development cycle when they are less costly to fix before reaching end users. Continuous testing facilitates frequent incremental updates and bug fixes, improving the product’s dependability and strengthening the company’s commitment to enhancing user experiences.
The continued emergence of AI in QA testing will make testing faster, more efficient, and more accurate through novel testing approaches like codeless automated testing, hyper-automation testing, and more sophisticated AI testing tools and platforms.
Companies that employ continuous testing in their digital products today have a solid competitive edge and a promising future in the fast-paced, high-stakes world of customer-centric digital products.
Learn how we can take your digital product testing scenarios to the next level with AI.
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