The modern customer is not easy to please. However, in a highly competitive market, offering a superior customer experience is of utmost importance. Superior customer experience, in turn, depends on the quality of the product/service delivered.
What makes a quality product?
A quality product comes together when its aspects of design, functionality, performance, reliability, and security are delivered to meet customer expectations. This becomes all the more challenging because of the demand to deliver quality, with minimum wait time. In fact, a study by Forrester has revealed that 66% of customers feel that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with a good customer experience.
The following are some of the best practices you can follow to achieve this:
- Early and frequent testing
Catch bugs and defects early before they snowball into big, complicated issues. To do this, it is important to involve and work closely with testers from the first stages of design and development.
To ensure continuous testing, it is also important to chart out and implement the right test automation schedule. This will ensure maximum quality, minimum errors with minimum effort! Detecting problems early not only works out cheaper but also ensures that lesser time is taking in fixing them. Ultimately, this reduces the time taken to launch the quality product.
- Quality controls
Establish quality controls at the beginning of the project and put a systematic methodology in place. This helps developers and testers to work together and ensure that the expected standards are met at all times.
Effective communication between teams and a good relationship between developers and testers is paramount for the company to carry out this practice successfully. If carried out well, this will effectively catch and eliminate coding errors before they become difficult to trace.
- Quality Assurance
Make sure that quality assurance goes hand-in-hand with testing, as an important and ongoing process during all stages of development.
This governance process must involve the entire project team as checkpoints within the development process to ensure that the software is making progress with the expected quality and at the expected pace.
- Room for Innovation
Don’t let your focus on timely delivery of a bug-free product make you lose sight of the need for innovation. To stand out from the competition, a truly quality product not only delivers the features and functionalities that meet client expectations – it exceeds them.
This is where the automation of processes plays a key role. By automating as much of the repetitive testing processes as possible, you can free up your team’s time and put it to use for innovation.
- Effective Communication
Make sure that your teams are communicating frequently and effectively. That is the most important ingredient in the making of a great product.
To encourage fluid communication, you can break the barriers between teams, leverage the tools of collaboration, and make sure that all team members are fully aware of KPIs. In this way, everyone will be able to add value to the project.
How can you deliver a quality product?
A quality product can be delivered only if you put together a great team and establish an effective methodology. At CloudNow, we bring together multi-faceted teams with a DevOps approach and deliver quickly and effectively using an Agile methodology. This is our winning combination because:
- It becomes easier to develop, test, and ensure quality at all times
- It ensures open, consistent communication between all those who are working on the product
- It addresses team capacity issues by eliminating silos
- It becomes possible to continuously improve the existing product through innovation
- It moves the project lifecycle faster and shortens the time-to-market
Why is this so important?
Finding the balance between quality delivery and timely delivery is important to superior customer experience and, with it, brand image and brand loyalty. With an Agile-DevOps approach, it is possible to do just that!
CloudNow’s Agile-DevOps approach has enabled a large global bank to set up an effective Testing-QA process that enhanced their customer experience. We undertook:
- Periodic sprint reviews for seamless coordination between testing and quality assurance
- Functional and regression testing for uncompromised quality
- Automated test runs to ensure timely delivery
To know more about how this approach became a game-changer for this global bank, read the full case study here. To change the quality and speed at which you deliver, get in touch with us now!