Ensuring Digital Quality: The Role of Digital Assurance in Continuous Delivery

More businesses have shifted to digital solutions to streamline their operations. According to a study by Gartner, 56% of Chief Executive Officers (CEOs) said that digital improvements have led to revenue growth. Also, the study showed that 89% of all organizations have already implemented or are planning to implement a digital-first business strategy.

However, the increased transition to digital solutions means that development teams are often under pressure to build technological solutions that deliver top-quality user experience (UX). And since UX is a key consideration in any software development aspect, digital assurance has become more important than ever before. But what is digital assurance? And what is its role in continuous delivery? Let’s find out.

What is Digital Assurance?

As the name suggests, digital assurance services helps companies optimize the success of their digital transformation solutions and meet the expected outcomes of their project. It ensures that digital solutions sync with customers’ digital touchpoints and behaviors.

Digital assurance objectively examines all project management aspects, giving organizational leaders increased capabilities and confidence to mitigate potential risks. Simply put, it encompasses various practices and activities that verify and validate the quality of your digital products throughout the continuous delivery (CD) pipeline.

Components of Digital Assurance

To ensure the quality of digital products throughout the CD pipeline, digital assurance consists of several key components. They include:

• Data assurance. This component involves testing the security, accuracy, and completeness of data stored in digital systems and the cloud.
• Localization testing. This component tests digital transformation solutions for linguistic and cultural requirements in different locations.
• Accessibility or usability testing. It ensures that digital products are accessible and easy to use and support users with disabilities.
• Business Value Chain Testing. This component examines the business process flow in digital systems and the cloud. It ensures they support the company’s overall business strategy and meet end-users’ needs.

 The Role of Digital Assurance in Continuous Delivery

As initially stated, digital assurance focuses on ensuring the digital quality of software solutions. Here are some key aspects of the role of digital assurance in continuous delivery:

1.    Test Automation

With more digital products being developed daily, development teams may struggle to deliver thoroughly tested applications. But did you know that testing can be automated to accelerate the process and achieve more accurate results?

Well, digital assurance involves automating the testing process. Automated tests can be integrated into the continuous integration and continuous delivery (CD/CD) pipeline. This ensures thorough, efficient, and frequent testing of software releases. Therefore, you can rest assured every digital product or update is thoroughly tested, minimizing the risk of security breaches.

Automated tests can cover different aspects, including:

• Integration tests,
• Unit tests,
• Security tests,
• Performance tests, and
• Regression tests.

Through test automation, digital assurance ensures that all security vulnerabilities are covered. Also, it ensures digital products meet the highest benchmarks of excellence and quality.

2.    Promoting Continuous Testing

Continuous delivery is an approach where software is built and delivered in short cycles, ensuring it is always in a releasable state. So, in this approach, testing isn’t a standalone stage – instead, it is an ongoing process integrated into the delivery pipeline.

Digital assurance teams collaborate with development teams to build and execute tests at every stage of the CD pipeline. Continuous testing covers multiple various activities, including the following:

• Validating code changes,
• Assessing the overall system behavior, and
• Verifying integration points.

Continuously testing and verifying the performance of your digital products improves the success of your digital transformation initiatives. It helps companies identify loopholes and opportunities for improvement, optimization, and innovation.

3.    Monitoring and Alerting

The CD approach requires continuous monitoring of digital systems and applications in production environments. This helps ensure they function optimally at all times, delivering consistent customer experience across different digital channels.

Digital assurance teams establish monitoring systems and tools to track various metrics, like user experience, availability, and performance. Also, they set up alert mechanisms to proactively detect issues and initiate remediation actions promptly.

Through end-to-end monitoring and alerting, digital assurance helps companies unlock the true value of the digital economy. It enables companies to identify improvement opportunities, achieving greater success in digital transformation.

4.    Compliance and Security

Digital assurance encompasses activities associated with compliance validation and security testing. With more data breaches occurring daily, compliance and security have become crucial in continuous delivery. As a result, there is an increasing emphasis on cybersecurity.

Digital assurance teams can critically assess the security and compliance posture of digital products. This may involve performing vulnerability assessments and penetration testing to ensure that applications follow the relevant industry’s compliance requirements.

By observing compliance and security requirements, digital assurance can drive better customer experience, as they can use services without being afraid of losing their data to unauthorized persons. Also, it promotes brand reputation, building brand loyalty.

5.    Continuous Improvement and Feedback

Digital assurance involves teams actively collecting and analyzing feedback from different stakeholders. These may include end users, business partners, and other relevant associates. Involving these stakeholders helps discover areas of improvement, driving greater customer experiences.

Digital assurance teams work on improving test coverage, closing loopholes in digital systems, and optimizing the CD pipeline. As a result, the feedback loop improves the overall quality of digital products and drives overall process maturity.

6.    Preempting Business Emergencies

Cybercrime has significantly grown over time. In the United States, 53.35 million citizens were impacted by cybercrime in the first six months of 2022. Cybercriminals use different techniques, such as trojans, viruses, and ransomware, to compromise digital products. This leads to system failure, communication breakdown, data loss, and blackouts.

Digital assurance helps discover and fix vulnerabilities and glitches in digital systems before they are exploited by malicious intruders. Also, it reduces the chances of costly errors. This saves on costs that may be incurred during system recovery or fines related to non-compliance.

Final Thoughts

Digital assurance is an integral part of continuous delivery. It helps ensure that applications and software meet the desired quality standards throughout the delivery pipeline. Through test automation, continuous testing, monitoring and alerting, and preempting business emergencies, digital assurance helps deliver secure, reliable, and top-quality software in a fast-paced continuous delivery environment.