The Evolution of QA in the Enterprise
Posted by ITBusinessEdge on May 23, 2018:
There is growing talk these days that as DevOps becomes the norm for enterprise service and application support, the need for a formal Quality Assurance (QA) program will fade.
This is not entirely untrue, but it is important to remember that quality never goes out of style. So even as QA's role changes in the DevOps pipeline, its relevance to the new agile business model will not diminish. In fact, it will be enhanced.
For one thing, says WWT's Mark Balbes, DevOps is not the only emerging trend affecting QA, nor is it the only legacy IT function facing change. The cloud is making the creation of test environments easier and more dynamic, while microservices are upending the entire notion of software architecture, including the QA component. Meanwhile, the IoT is unleashing an entirely new wave of digital data and services on the world, all of which must be tested and reviewed on a continual basis. So while QA is under the gun to evolve with the times, it is no different from any other aspect of the application lifecycle.
Without doubt, QA will have to reinvent itself in the era of automation and machines, says Nikola Šopar, director of quality assurance services at Comtrade Digital Services. If you look at the state of QA even 10 years ago, both the volume of complexity of data has changed dramatically, with entirely new disciplines arising to account for mobile, cloud and now device-driven data flows. There is no reason to think this will abate over the next decade, so the onus on practitioners of QA will remain to devise new and intricate ways to effectively secure and test the technologies needed to survive in this ocean of information.