How Software Quality Assurance helps Make Technology Dependable

1. How software quality assurance helps make technology dependable

2. Introduction Martin Luther King once said, “Nothing in the world causes so much misery as uncertainty”. Half the amount of panic spread among the global population is not because of the pandemic, it is because of ‘not knowing what will happen next’. There are several questions such as when the world will resume its usual operations, how long will it take to control the virus, what will happen to the global economy, and more for which there are no definite answers. A heavy cloud of uncertainty is looming over practically each and every aspect of our lives. But, Mr. King also said, “You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.” When we are surrounded by uncertainty, even the tiniest glimmer of hope can be enough to help us tread through a crisis. And when there is only uncertainty all around and things that are out of control, we crave some degree of dependability on things that we can still control. Technology is one such thing.

3. Digital technology has empowered the world to function mostly as usual despite the fact that everything else is changed, including the business priorities and the overall perspectives. Amidst the global lockdowns, people could stay connected with one another because of technology. Businesses could operate because of technology. Work from home and virtual education became feasible because of technology. And even our healthcare workers are being supported by technology to deal with the maximum number of patients without compromising on the care quality. Forrester, in their recent report ‘Design for Dependability by Embracing a Future of Trusted Technology’, talk about the seven pillars of design which make a technology service dependable. As per the report, dependability is a measure of the profitability that a service will perform its intended function for a specified interval under stated conditions and an attribute of how well technology services endure a variety of real-world conditions’. Now, the question here is how one makes a technology dependable. The short answer to this question is software testing and quality assurance. Read on to learn the long form answer as we touch each one of the seven key elements of dependability.

4. How Software testing and quality assurance strengthen the seven pillars of dependabilityMark Zuckerberg talked about ‘moving fast and breaking things’, but later encouraged the mantra of ‘moving fast…with stable infrastructure’. Instability leads to uncertainty, which further results in lost credibility. A stable, working, dependable technology service will help businesses uphold customer trust as they cater to the increasing demand for speed in their offerings. Performing thorough software testing eliminates the possibilities of ‘unknown’ from an application and makes it highly dependable. Let’s look at the seven key elements of dependability and understand the role of software quality assurance for each one of them. Availability – to form the base line of dependability: Contrary to the popular belief, availability and dependability are not the same thing. Availability definitely is the prime KPI for measuring dependability. As the Forrester report points out – Dependable services and infrastructure have a high degree of availability, but an available service may or may not be equally dependable. Dependability makes a software or technology resilient to time and conditional constraints. By testing a software application for availability, it is run for a certain amount of time to identify failure events and understand the required repair time. The obtained data is then compared to the original software requirements. The information obtained from running the software availability tests can help close the gaps between the original requirements and the actual uptime, thus, guaranteeing maximum availability in real-life conditions. Read Full Blog at: https://www.cigniti.com/blog/software-quality-assurance-reliable-application/