So-called mission critical assurance is the strategy of focusing QA time and effort solely on business critical applications. Alternatively, incremental gains is the endeavour to achieve full code coverage across all systems.
QA Vector® Research has – in the course of ongoing discussions with our community – identified that some 20% of financial firms are transitioning from the pursuit of incremental gains to a mission critical assurance model.
“Our strategy is to prioritise business impact over inconvenience,” states the CTO for a Global Interdealer Broker. “We only test the applications that would cause a crash. For anything else, a production failure is recoverable.”
Quality leaders often highlight the limitations of incremental gains for reducing defect leakage in complex financial systems. This struggle is best illustrated by the impact of the software quality failure at TSB Bank.
Mission critical assurance is emerging as a viable alternative, replacing attempts to achieve full code coverage with a thorough investigation of the dependencies and interconnects that matter.
“Starting with shift left, we now work with product owners to prioritise which applications to investigate,” says the Head of Quality Management at a Global Asset Manager. “Quality-driven development demands that we identify material risks in critical systems early and mitigate against those.”
Firms can transition to a mission critical assurance model by deploying the following three actions:
- reinvent the quality process journey by pursuing foundational automation.
- identify priority systems and user journeys using software intelligence and code analysis.
- evolve measurement practices to account for software criticality and overall performance.
Prioritising QA time and effort by application criticality may well enable quality leaders to improve risk management for the software that matters most.
To learn more about how to pursue mission critical assurance, download a copy of the QA Vector® Research report Delivering quality for financial infrastructure firms by demonstrating value to drive engagement, produced in partnership with Exactpro Systems.
