Digital innovation in an economic downturn – Quality Engineering for quality outcomes

While the IMF has revised its prediction of a looming worldwide recession and is now reporting that consumer inflation will slow, and the global economy will grow by 2.9% this year, the outlook for the UK is bleak and is forecast to be the only major economy to shrink this year.

In the face of mounting pressure to reduce costs, some risk-averse CFOs may be looking to cut future investment and cut back on in-flight projects, but I think this short-sighted approach will result in businesses being in a much weaker position compared to their competitors when the economic downturn is reversed, and the UK eventually returns to positive growth.

Undoubtedly, everyone is feeling the pinch, and wallets and purses are a little lighter this year, but consumers will still spend, so it’s imperative that in sectors with tough competition, businesses that want to thrive retain their existing customer base, whilst beating their competition to try and gain any market share to be had.

The most successful companies survive in tough times by continuing to invest in their future while looking to save costs by streamlining existing operations.

This can be achieved by delivering the best digital experience to both staff and customers by innovation – looking for those savings, developing those new products and experiences and continuing to grow, but only if it is delivered efficiently.

A great many transformation and innovation projects fail to deliver either on time, within budget, or sometimes at all - because of decisions made in the early stages of a project or programme of work that have wide-ranging yet unforeseen implications that need extensive and expensive (in both time and money) rework – wasted effort that doesn’t deliver any value.

Worse still, the missed opportunity can have a wider-ranging effect than just the cost of the work, competitors can gain an edge if you’re late to market or in the worst case a failed project can result in reputational loss and damage to your brand.

Rather than take a conservative approach and cut back, businesses will need to continue to drive forward – To be bold, but not reckless!

Success can’t be guaranteed, but the chances of a successful project being delivered can be greatly enhanced by considering the quality aspects of any piece of work at the earliest opportunity – during its inception, and then throughout the lifecycle into service – if businesses can capture as many of the unknown unknowns as early as possible this will help to reduce the risk of failure in subsequent phases of the project out into service.

The Quality Engineering mindset is a set of behaviours leveraging consultancy, functional and non-functional techniques driven by principles that give appropriate levels of governance, transparency, and feedback, whilst leveraging industry best practice tooling and approaches to monitor and shape any deliverable throughout the project lifecycle.

This starts with robust and comprehensive processes and practices to deliver great products and services – a clear and well-documented Quality Engineering strategy that defines how you manage the entire lifecycle from inception through to operation.

It is also vitally important to consider the non-functional aspects as early as possible – design the solution to be performant and secure from the start, considering all the regulatory and compliance controls you must meet - you don’t want to discover a requirement or consideration hasn’t been met after months of engineering time.

Leverage the benefit of test automation early – start with simple tests that perform basic smoke tests and then iterate and extend their capability, but only when the tests are stable - the value of test automation is lost if the tests are unreliable.

Once the tests are trusted, run them frequently and surface the results - the entire team gets faster feedback on the state of any new builds and deployments, and further testing can then be performed, leveraging exploratory test techniques to find defects that were not considered in the requirements or only become apparent when the whole system is assembled.

Finally, businesses need to consider how the software will be operated and updated and implement appropriate monitoring and alerting in their live system to maintain the required level of service and availability.

Quality is never an accident. It is always the result of intelligent effort.

Delivering quality outcomes at pace is only possible if you start at the start of the process.