Ensuring platform assurance through On-demand Quality Assurance

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, organisations rely heavily on a complex ecosystem of applications, APIs, and critical systems. The continuous delivery of value demands agility, yet maintaining stability and performance in the face of constant change, be it patches, upgrades, or security endpoint modifications, presents a significant challenge. 

The challenge of maintaining platform assurance in a dynamic environment

Modern IT environments are characterised by continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, cloud-native architectures, and a relentless pace of updates. 

While these advancements drive innovation, they also introduce inherent risks to platform assurance:

• Patches and updates: Regular security patches and software updates are essential for addressing vulnerabilities, fixing bugs, and enhancing functionality. However, each patch or update carries the risk of introducing unforeseen regressions, breaking existing functionalities, or impacting performance. Without rigorous testing, these changes can lead to system instability, outages, and compromised user experience.
• Upgrades and migrations: Major system upgrades, database migrations, or infrastructure overhauls can significantly alter the underlying platform. The complexity of these changes often makes it difficult to predict all potential impacts on dependent applications and APIs, requiring extensive validation to ensure seamless transition and continued operation.
• Security endpoint changes: Modifications to security configurations, firewall rules, or the deployment of new security agents can have far-reaching effects. While crucial for maintaining a strong security posture, these changes can inadvertently block legitimate traffic, introduce latency, or disrupt communication between critical systems, leading to application failures.
• Interoperability and dependencies: Applications and APIs rarely operate in isolation. They are interconnected and often rely on external services, third-party integrations, and shared infrastructure. Changes in one component can ripple through the entire ecosystem, making it challenging to pinpoint the root cause of issues without a holistic testing strategy.
• Static vs. dynamic testing: Traditional, static testing approaches often struggle to keep pace with the velocity of change. Pre-defined test suites, while valuable for baseline validation, may not adequately cover the unique permutations and edge cases introduced by dynamic platform modifications. This can lead to a false sense of security, with critical issues only surfacing in production.

The consequences of inadequate platform assurance are severe, ranging from reputational damage and financial losses due to system downtime to security breaches and non-compliance with regulatory requirements. Organisations need a proactive and adaptive approach to quality assurance that can keep pace with the speed of modern IT.

On-demand Quality Assurance (O-QA): The solution for dynamic environments

On-demand Quality Assurance (O-QA) is a flexible and responsive approach to testing that provides immediate, targeted validation in response to system changes. Unlike traditional QA models that often involve lengthy planning cycles and fixed testing windows, O-QA is designed to integrate seamlessly into the CI/CD pipeline, offering continuous feedback and rapid verification.

Key principles of O-QA include:

• Just-in-time testing: Executing tests precisely when and where they are needed, rather than relying on pre-scheduled cycles. This means triggering automated tests immediately after a patch is applied, an API is updated, or a security configuration is changed.
• Risk-based prioritisation: Focusing testing efforts on the most critical functionalities and components impacted by a change, optimising resource allocation and accelerating feedback.
• Continuous feedback loop: Integrating testing directly into the development and operations workflow, providing immediate insights into the health and stability of the platform.
• Scalability and elasticity: Leveraging cloud-based infrastructure and automated tools to scale testing capabilities up or down as demand fluctuates.

Assurity Consulting: Expertise in platform assurance

Assurity Consulting brings extensive expertise in helping organisations navigate the complexities of platform assurance. Their human-centred approach, combined with deep technical capabilities, enables them to co-design and implement tailored QA solutions that deliver tangible outcomes.

Assurity’s solutions for O-QA are built upon two core pillars:

AutomationFlex: Adapting to System Changes with Enduring Automation

The key to effective O-QA lies in intelligent automation. Assurity’s AutomationFlex is not just about automating existing test cases; it’s about building an adaptable and resilient automation framework that can withstand and respond to the inevitable changes in the underlying platform.

AutomationFlex helps organisations:

• Build robust regression suites: Develop comprehensive automated regression tests for applications and APIs that can be executed on demand to quickly verify core functionalities after patches, upgrades, or security modifications. This significantly reduces the risk of regressions impacting production.
• Enable Continuous Testing: Integrate automated tests into the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring that every code commit, patch deployment, or configuration change triggers a set of relevant tests. This provides immediate feedback on system stability and allows for early detection of issues.
• Cater for diverse technologies: AutomationFlex is tool-agnostic and leverages a wide range of automation frameworks and technologies to cater to the diverse platforms and systems within an organisation’s ecosystem, from legacy systems to modern microservices and cloud platforms.
• Reduce technical debt: By automating repetitive and time-consuming manual tests, AutomationFlex frees up valuable human resources to focus on more complex, exploratory testing and problem-solving, ultimately reducing technical debt in the QA process.
• Provide actionable insights: Generate detailed test reports and dashboards that provide clear, concise insights into the impact of changes on platform stability, enabling quick decision-making and efficient remediation.

For instance, when a critical security patch is applied to an AP endpoint, AutomationFlex can automatically trigger a suite of API and end-to-end application tests to confirm that connectivity, data flow, and core business processes remain unaffected. Similarly, after a data stack upgrade, the framework can execute performance tests and data integrity checks to validate the upgrade’s success and identify any performance bottlenecks.

Assurity Intelligence: Dynamic testing with on-the-fly script generation

While AutomationFlex provides the foundational automation, the truly dynamic nature of O-QA is unlocked by Assurity Intelligence. This innovative capability leverages advanced techniques to overcome the limitations of static test scripts, providing unparalleled agility in testing.

Assurity Intelligence enables:

• Intelligent test script generation: Utilising data analysis, machine learning, and potentially AI-driven algorithms, Assurity Intelligence can analyse system logs, API specifications, and historical test data to identify areas of change and generate relevant test scripts on the fly. This means that instead of manually updating test cases for every minor change, the system can dynamically create them.
• Adaptive test execution: Based on the type and scope of a change (e.g., a minor API endpoint change vs. a major platform upgrade), Assurity Intelligence can intelligently select and prioritise the most impactful tests to execute, optimising testing time and resources.
• Exploratory testing support: While automation handles repetitive tasks, Assurity Intelligence can guide human testers towards high-risk areas or newly introduced functionalities that require more nuanced, exploratory testing, maximising the value of human intervention.
• Reduced test maintenance overhead: By dynamically generating and adapting test scripts, Assurity Intelligence significantly reduces the manual effort associated with test script maintenance, a common pain point in traditional automation. This allows QA teams to focus on higher-value activities.

Consider a scenario where a new feature is deployed that modifies several existing APIs. Instead of manually updating dozens of individual API test scripts, Assurity Intelligence can analyse API definition changes and automatically generate new test cases or modify existing ones to validate the updated functionalities and their interactions. This dynamic approach ensures comprehensive coverage even in rapidly changing environments.

The Assurity advantage: A holistic approach to platform assurance

By combining the robust automation capabilities of AutomationFlex with the dynamic intelligence of Assurity Intelligence, Assurity Consulting offers a holistic and future-proof approach to platform assurance. This enables organisations to:

• Accelerate release cycles: Deploy patches, upgrades, and new features confidently at speed, knowing the underlying platform’s stability is continuously validated.
• Minimise risk: Proactively identify and remediate issues before they impact production, reducing downtime, mitigating security risks, and preventing costly outages.
• Optimise resources: Automate repetitive testing tasks, allowing skilled QA professionals to focus on complex problem-solving, strategic planning, and innovation.
• Improve user experience: Ensure that applications and APIs remain performant, reliable, and secure, leading to a consistently positive user experience.
• Achieve compliance: Maintain a demonstrable audit trail of testing activities, supporting regulatory compliance and governance requirements.

With our capability and expertise in digital transformation, platform assurance is no longer a static goal but a continuous journey. Organisations must embrace an on-demand, adaptive approach to quality assurance that can keep pace with the inherent dynamism of modern IT environments. 

Assurity Consulting, with its deep expertise and innovative solutions like AutomationFlex and Assurity Intelligence, provides the framework and capabilities necessary to achieve this. By empowering dynamic and intelligent testing, Assurity enables businesses to innovate with confidence, ensuring their critical applications, APIs, and systems are always running as they should, regardless of the changes beneath.