The need to become digital-ready and stay competitive is putting pressure on CEOs to choose speed over quality. This forces testers to carry out risk-based testing, leaving gaps in coverage and exposing software to risk.
But why does moving faster make risk awareness more important?
The possible repercussions of software failure are immense – they include huge levels of expense, impact on brand reputation, potential job losses, and much more.
With those consequences in mind, we’ve laid out six reasons why risk awareness is all the more important in an environment where releases are becoming so frequent.
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Moving faster
Cutting corners in QA
A culture of patch testing
Different industries, different speeds
Test automation
The requirements brought about by the pandemic led to companies supplying new applications quickly.
Many organizations are adopting processes like agile and DevOps where software features are developed and released in frequent iterations.
Speed has become a huge priority as teams attempt to get releases to market, but Leapwork’s 2022 Risk Radar Report showed that speed is too often being prioritized over safety.
More releases mean more risk of releasing bugs in software. It means a greater need for risk awareness.
Read more: How to do End-to-end Testing in Agile Teams.
But what’s the problem with faster releases? It means it’s far more likely that QA testers will start cutting corners.
There’s a paradox involved when teams try to keep up with the competition by cutting corners – patch testing faulty software will lead to bottlenecks, and that’s eventually going to delay releases and reduce speed eventually.
Even though evidence shows that testers are confident in the awareness of senior management when it comes to software risk, corners are being cut in a fast-moving environment.
Even when risk awareness is high, companies are restricted in what they can actually do about it.
Moving faster results in a patch testing culture where companies think it’s acceptable to release first and fix later.
This is especially a problem at the C-level where the C-suite feels the pressure to release software at speed.
Software being released with the tactic of patch testing it later, and estimations among testers that up to 40% of software goes to market without sufficient testing show just how great the need for risk awareness is in QA.
Moving faster means that risk awareness is more and more important. However, this isn’t the same in all industries.
Take health and life sciences as an example: if lives are at stake, it might be more obvious why risk awareness and the increased safety it leads to is more important than speed of release. Poorly tested software could truly endanger lives in this case.
However, if your industry’s all about keeping your users engaged by releasing new features, risk awareness might have to take a back seat.
In order to move faster and release quicker, you’re going to need to adopt automation.
However, the will to invest in a sufficient test automation strategy depends on companies having a high level of risk awareness.
Automating the testing process can significantly reduce the amount of software bugs and outages a company experiences, and it will open up time for your team to plan a secure testing strategy.
With all this in mind, automation, as it’s currently used in QA, presents a paradox – that’s because it has become synonymous with coding, and setting up and maintaining automation leads to new bottlenecks.
Using code-based automation solutions to meet digital transformation goals can also lead to corner-cutting and unnecessary risk taking.
A no-code visual solution like Leapwork’s on the other hand can help automation be used to its full potential. It is more scalable and allows testers to focus on developing a testing strategy capable of dealing with fast and regular releases.
Want to know more about how speed affects the need for risk awareness across industries and why test automation is such a key ingredient in solving this issue? Then download Leapwork’s 2022 Risk Radar Report.
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