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Assuring Your Digital Core - A Complex Yet Essential Task for Your Organization

The digital core supports the end-to-end business processes that are at the heart of the organization. Typically, the digital core is implemented based on a platform solution but with extensive integration with a complex set of applications and external interfaces. The digital core is business critical and therefore is a key focus area for an organizations’ Quality Engineering & Testing teams.

Complex, but critical

Testing the digital core is complex. The World Quality Report 2023-24 provides an overview of the key challenges that organizations report while ensuring quality of digital core solutions:

  • Complexity due to multiple tools in the mix
  • Complexity in testing business processes end-to-end
  • Environmental challenges
  • Test data comparable to production

However, the potential business impact of even small failure in the end-to-end chain can be significant. The implementation of the digital core necessitates therefore a sound test strategy and strong testing capabilities.

Not a one-time effort

This does however not stop after the initial go live. The IT-ecosystem is in constant motion and any change has the risk of breaking the end-to-end process and can trigger business impact. In the World Quality Report, 31% of organizations report that they struggle to keep up with development velocity. This is further increased by the need to keep up with platform (often driven by platform vendors) and infrastructure upgrades.

Given the huge volumes of variations in data, usage patterns and business process flow that need to be covered, it is no wonder that many organizations are looking to test automation.

Automated business process testing?

Automated testing offers interesting benefits such as extended test coverage and speed of execution. When applied correctly, test automation can contribute to business agility and business assurance. But experience shows that automation of end-to-end flows is difficult. Without a well-thought test automation strategy and solution, the costs are likely to outweigh the benefits.

At Sogeti, with our focus on business assurance, we ensure that there is clarity about what the organization wants to achieve through test automation, establishing an as-is picture and understanding the future automation vision. The test automation solution is designed based on assessments of the application landscape, analysis of business processes (and associated business risks) and regression test objectives.

An intelligent test automation solution

We have witnessed that, when designed and implemented correctly, test automation provides organizations We are clear that test automation tools must be part of the ERP landscape of tomorrow. And, as this year’s World Quality Report reveals, although automation has become core to QA transformation, there is still some way to go before it reaches maturity, with organizations reporting that only 21-40% of their digital core testing is automated. This is clearly due to the same top challenges around testing digital core solutions: when it is hard to test, it is even harder to automate.

An intelligent, well-design test automation solution can deliver the expected benefits. At Sogeti, we do this by applying established test automation best practices and integration of the test automation solution with test data management, test environment and tooling for test case management & reporting.

Digital core assured

We have witnessed that, when designed and implemented correctly, test automation provides organizations with the right level of assurance about the continuity of their core business processes. This in turns allows them to evolve and innovate with more confidence and to act on emerging business opportunities, knowing that their digital core is assured.

Interested in partnering with us for Quality Engineering & Testing solutions? Check out why we are known as the market leaders in Belgium here:
https://www.sogeti.be/services/quality-engineering-and-testing/

Contact us for information.
https://www.sogeti.be/contact-us/contact-us/

Bart Vanparys

Practice Manager Quality Engineering & Testing Belgium