Accelerating your software delivery cycle is impossible unless you also accelerate and enhance your approach to software testing. In another article we described the eight steps of the journey to transform your organization into a modern testing organization. This article will focus on defining your test strategy. You’ll learn about the importance of adopting agile practices.

Why should you invest in software testing? And if you’ve already invested heavily in your testing program, why should you invest in modernizing your current practices and tools? If these are questions you’ve heard or asked yourself, take a cue from your peers, Gartner, and the World Quality Report. When you modernize your testing, you make it easier for IT staff and business stakeholders to collaborate in ways that lead to faster software delivery and better business outcomes.

Year after year, DevOps industry reports and practitioners in the field point to testing as the biggest bottleneck in the software development lifecycle. Take GitLab’s 2021 Global DevSecOps Survey – for the third year in a row, the majority of respondents pointed to testing as the biggest cause of delays. That’s a lot of finger-pointing. If we had to guess, testers are tired of it.

In the era of digital transformation, misalignment between the business leaders steering the overall strategy and the technical experts who build, implement, and maintain solutions is one of the top blockers to a successful sea change. These groups need to be able to collaborate to define what each solution requires and the why behind it.