Artificial intelligence is one of the driving forces of the transformation in quality engineering, with 77% of global businesses making investments to make AI a critical part of their QE infrastructure, a report published by Capgemini SE, Sogeti and OpenText Corp. shows.
The World Quality Report highlights the rising importance of QE to enhance sustainability in business operations and value delivery to customers and end users. According to the report, 67% of organisations have incorporated QE at the core of their business operations, to ensure that technological advancements adhere to quality standards.
The report highlights that with high customer expectations, interoperability demands, regulations, evolving guidelines and cybersecurity risks, testing now requires an approach that is more rigorous and agile than ever before. The trend of hyper-personalisation is also adding to the complexity, as it demands exhaustive testing.
Quality assurance is evolving from a pure testing scope to broader QE, which focuses on delivering value over volume to enable customer experiences, brand protection and business outcomes. This shift requires a re-focus onto the end-to-end customer journey and collaboration with business teams, the report suggests.
AI Use Rising In QE
Trends in the use of AI to deliver quality outcomes are moving fast. Organisations cite, for the first time, higher productivity as the primary outcome driven by AI (65%).
Respondents said that using AI to improve the reliability of tests (33%) and reduce the number of defects (29%) was no longer their primary focus. This indicates a shift in the testing philosophy, with an increased tolerance for defects as long as they can be fixed quickly and efficiently. Continuous testing, inherent in Agile and DevOps4 practices across organisations, has accelerated this trend.
“It’s interesting to see the role AI can play, particularly in generating test cases and automating quality procedures, but also on the importance of quality practices to enhance value delivery to customers and end users,” said Mark Buenen, global leader, quality engineering and testing, Capgemini.
However, concerns related to security, privacy and biased outcomes need to be addressed, with 31% of respondents remaining skeptical about the value of AI in QA, emphasising the importance of an incremental approach.
“To ensure AI’s reliability within quality engineering long-term, organisations should take a gradual, incremental approach,” Buenen noted.
QE’s Active Role Within Sustainable IT
The report also confirmed sustainable IT as a rising interest area for quality teams. The vast majority (97%) of respondents thought that QE is an active element in driving the sustainability agenda in their organisation, and 55% highlighted benefits on the environmental aspect of sustainable IT.
For 63% of the respondents, the priority over the next 12 months remains understanding how to monitor and report on green metrics within their QE testing processes.
The Rise Of Agile Quality Management
To keep up with the fast-paced digital environment, 70% of organisations cited that they are valuing a central testing centre of excellence over traditional project-level QA practices. This demonstrates they are moving to Agile quality management, which emphasises continuous improvement, adaptability and customer-centricity.
Respondents prioritised development skills for quality engineers, such as SQL/Python/C#/Java (42%) and continuous integration/continuous delivery (39%), over traditional testing skills like automation (28%) and performance tooling (24%).
Despite the rise in quality automation, the report acknowledged persistent challenges, with an average of 27% of organisations grappling with legacy systems and the fast-changing application landscape.