Breaking the Bottleneck

The world is increasingly reliant on technology. It impacts daily life in almost every way; communication, entertainment, housing and lifestyle, finance, healthcare, education and travel to name a few. The demands on businesses responsible for delivering solutions to enable and enhance these aspects of daily life are also increasing. And this means the demands on these businesses to continuously develop and improve the quality of software also continues to grow.

The wide adoption of Agile and DevOps as highly productive methods of delivering innovative applications and services has enabled many organisations to be more responsive, at a lower cost. And it is becoming more acceptable nowadays for significant time and budget to be invested in resources to transform development operations in terms of tooling, training and coaching.

But still, many organisations are operating in the past.

Despite all the advancements in software development, software testing remains dominated by yesterday’s tools, which no longer meet the needs of today’s accelerated development process.

The legacy tools and methods of software testing often result in a bottleneck, and in fact, many organisations tell us that software testing and quality assurance cause the largest bottleneck to implementing DevOps. The result is a process that is a frustratingly slow to market and costs that are increasing.

Transforming testing for the modern era.

The reality is that testing is a cross-functional activity that involves the whole team and should be done continuously from the beginning of the project. Key to this is understanding the role of a tester and what type of testing should be performed for the project at hand. Distinguishing testing tasks for all phases of delivery is also a critical component.

Automation is a tenet of DevOps. Tests are generally written up front before development starts, with agreement between the developer and a user representative. Automated testing enables higher quality results by identifying problems earlier and reducing manual effort. It has great ability to lower costs, increase speed, improve quality and accelerate digital transformation.

Business processes can also be automated.

But it’s not just software development that can greatly benefit from automation. Many executives we talk to are challenged with scaling up staffing levels, improving employee productivity and reducing manual tasks and errors, providing consistent and strong user experiences and integrating existing applications and software without creating custom APIs or using costly integration software. And all while maintaining an acceptable level of operational cost.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the automation of manual business processes, best targeted at high-volume, repetitive or mundane tasks. It enables the automation of a large percentage of business processes without requiring expensive IT integration. It sits on top of an organisation’s IT infrastructure enabling the implementation of technology quickly and efficiently because many workflows simply require data to be transferred from one system to another.

RPA has proven to be an effective tool in situations where organisations have high volumes of rule-based transactions and processes that are prone to error due to the complexity or disparity of systems, or simply due to human error when conducting repetitive tasks. Organisations with processes that require 24/7 support or with budget limitations that constrain significant system upgrades or replacements can also benefit greatly from RPA.

Change is inevitable.

Whatever your business, whatever your processes there is one thing that is inevitable – change. The world is moving too fast not to jump on board the train. But the good news is that there’s help available regardless of the maturity of your business processes. So, don’t be shy, embrace change and enjoy the great outcomes technology can enable.