World Quality Report 2022-2023: A commitment to value outcomes in quality engineering

What value do you expect your quality engineering to deliver to the business? It’s an important question because software testing and quality assurance activities have moved beyond purely detecting software defects before go-live and enabling quality at speed to broader value measures.

In this year’s World Quality Report (WQR), we learn that the two most important objectives for quality and test activities over the coming 12 months are business assurance (helping business growth, business outcomes) and ensuring end-user satisfaction and experience. If these are the top-ranked objectives, how can quality engineering teams go on to demonstrate that they’ve delivered the expected value?

Improving brand image

To answer this question, the WQR survey set out to understand what respondents felt would bring most value to their organizations. Asked to rank the top three most important value focus areas, the two most cited were brand image improvement (55% of respondents) and reliability of products and services (52%), followed by customer retention, cost efficiency improvement, and social responsibility contribution, all on 49%.

Why is it important to understand what the value focus areas are? We believe that once you know the key target values, a process of both value stream mapping and value stream management could help in better and continuously managing the quality engineering activities that deliver them. Interestingly, 60% of the WQR respondents said they used value stream mapping to improve their testing in agile/DevOps projects.

Every step of the software development cycle

Micro Focus, with whom Sogeti and Capgemini jointly publish the World Quality Report, succinctly describe a value stream as including “each step required in the software development process to deliver a product to the customer”. They add that value stream management aims to help teams “improve workflows, eliminate waste, increase automation, and remain compliant”.

With this in mind, among the recommendations that we make in the World Quality Report are to define concrete and measurable value indicators that are connected to business objectives for each quality engineering project. Further, it’s important to ensure that quality and test results are connected and related to these value indicators. Consider implementing a value dashboard by which stakeholders and team members can continuously view the progress and development of the value indicators.

Get in touch

If you’d like to hear more about the role of value stream mapping and management in quality engineering, please get in touch.