For every company and organization available on the current market, digitalization is both a destination and a journey – that is, if they want to keep up with the trends – and be relevant on the future market.
But are the digitalization plans just beautiful slides in a strategy presentation? How does it look like, in “real life” organization?
I mean, it sounds simple enough – go digital! Or, to be more specific, “use digital technologies and digitized data to impact how work gets done”, which eventually leads to “transforming how customers and companies engage and interact, and creating new (digital) revenue streams”
But here is the catch: whenever we aim to go digital, there are two extremes. There are some who focus only on the big picture – a “go big or go home” approach. And there are those who focus on the smallest rocks on this path – “the baby steps”. And we tend to get lost between the two of them.
The fundamental concepts from software testing are priceless in this process. Let’s take a closer look at some examples.
Every process is valuable within the company.
Short time between inception and ready to market.
We break the feature or functionality in testable bites, ensuring each bite has customer value.
This means, each piece of functionality adds a value and therefore has a return on investment (ROI). Every bite has a finite timeline and it is developed in increments, from minimum viable product (MVP) to an extended functionality – but every time, the bite has value.
Extending the concept to processes, each process has value within the company and a finite and usually short time from inception to ready to market. Adding increments when necessary will add value, but it won’t decrease the existing one.
we identify the repetitive patterns – reducing the costs and time to market
We reduce redundancy and use abstraction to find the repetitive patterns in each tested software.
Let’s take for example a registration form available on a couple of locations on an ecommerce application. While the purpose of each of them is slightly different, the consumer pattern is almost the same. We define just one set of scenarios for the registration form and use different navigation options outside those scenarios. This ensures easy maintenance, reduces redundancy and keeps tests consistent across the application.
Extending the concept to processes, we identify parts of processes repeating themselves, we isolate them and reuse them. This reduces the time to market, the number of automation specialists and keeps processes clean and reusable. With every new process, we should start by taking a look at the existing processes and find matching patterns.
These are just a few of the principles that apply to the general concept and to each organization in their journey to digitalization and digital transformation.
And, of course, the actual testing of these processes is priceless. While is important to apply the concepts in order to get the desired outcome, the reliability and the performance of the processes are essential.
Since digitalization is part of the digital transformation, the same principles apply to the “the profound and accelerating transformation of business activities, processes, competencies, and models to fully leverage the changes and opportunities brought by digital technologies and their impact across society in a strategic and prioritized way” or, shortly, the digital transformation.
