We like sharing and caring at Brightest. So, in that spirit, let us share some inspiration for your software quality wish list and new year’s resolutions.

Please be careful not to wish for less, otherwise Santa might not bring all you want!

What should you wish for as a digital company?

Nowadays a fast ‘time to market’ in combination with high expectations on quality, agility and flexibility is expected from digital companies. This means you need solid but pragmatic software quality strategies.

To ensure all this, your software quality wish list and new year’s resolutions for 2023 should look like this:

1. Shift-left  development & quality approach
2. T-shaped resources to enable DevQAOps
3. Low/no code test strategy
4. Low/no code automation tools
5. Security  and  performance  testing

Let Santa explain why…

Secondly, Santa advises you to add (at least) T-shaped test resources to your development team to enable DevQAOps. These testers with multiple technical skills can cater for all your QA needs in the team and will be able to make the bridge towards development in terms of understanding and added value. They have competences such as (test) analysis, continuous test automation (API + UI) for DevOps, and performance and/or security testing basics.

Extra tip from Santa

The Bright Academy ensures that our employees are well trained and grow their skills continuously; thanks to bootcamps, swITch learning tracks, and many other courses. All of this is also open for non-Brighters. So if you want your employees to improve their skills, take a look at the website.

Furthermore, our domain managers provide individual support on projects (technical or strategic). Brightest stands for #AimHigh, in other words we will always go the extra mile. Also, we want to be first in adopting new technologies and approaches. This way we can help our customers be winners too!

The third Bright advice is to apply a proper testing (automation) strategy when using low-code/no-code development platforms. These platforms are visual software development environments that allow enterprise developers and citizen developers to drag and drop application components, connect them together and create mobile or web apps.

There are many reasons to use and love low-code development platforms and more and more companies are starting to use them. Although these platforms generally include features that allow for experimenting, prototyping, testing and deployment; don’t make the mistake of assuming that low code means low QA. On the contrary, low code makes QA oversight and engagement with the software delivery process even more important. So, we hope you hear Santa’s advice loud and clear: apply a good (automation) testing strategy when using these platforms

Santa’s fourth advice is to investigate the use of low/no code test automation platforms. Low/or no code test automation is an approach to software testing that requires minimal to no coding. The biggest benefit of these kind of tools is that ‘anyone can test’, so this means there is an opportunity for more intuitive user engagement.

Not an either or story

However, coded Test Automation is not going anywhere. Basically, organisations shouldn’t be thinking of codeless tools and traditional automation as an either/or scenario. Codeless test automation tools are great for less-involved scenarios, like smoke tests or certain parts of a regression test suite. Using codeless automation tools in this way, allows test engineers and test automators to focus on higher-priority and more complex test automation.

So, you should balance traditional and codeless test automation. And ideally, manual testing is also used alongside both traditional and codeless test automation solutions (mainly for new features). This to maximize the speed, scale and quality at which software can be delivered to end users.

And finally, Santa’s fifth advice is to never forget about the importance of performance and security testing. In the past, these were both somewhat of an afterthought in software development, taken into consideration during the testing phase. But new methodologies like Agile build ongoing testing into every phase of the software development life cycle, and that includes testing for secure and well performing software development. If you invest in these areas, you will improve software performance and security of course, but also

• Reduce business risks
• Reduce costs for software flaw detection and fixes
• Save money on fines and penalties (compliance with laws and regulations governing security)
• Increase customer trust and loyalty
• Have better internal organisational security