Q & A with Kenny Small, VP Delivery, Qualitest’s US ERP Practice
Few quality professionals have the Enterprise tech expertise of Kenny Small, who leads Qualitest’s ERP practice in the United States. Originally from the UK, Kenny started his career as an SAP functional consultant and moved to the US in 2017 to grow Qualitest’s capabilities across ERP, CRM and HRIS applications. He has led dozens of QE projects for top brands across numerous industries, helping client-partners boost efficiency and profitability while reducing risk.
Kenny shares his insights about emerging cloud computing trends and how you can avoid the significant—and often hidden–business and technical risks posed by the cloud.
A: The year 2021 was the driver for accelerating cloud strategies and cloud diversification, resulting in hybrid cloud landscapes. Now that these landscapes are up and running, we are seeing an accelerated concern about how to manage them.
Another trend is seamless collaboration. It’s relatively old news that the pandemic caused a shift in workplace norms, but how this disruption settles and consolidates will be the focus for many brands through 2022. It’s more than supporting remote work. Enterprise applications are being further integrated to promote collaboration not only among business users—think Slack and Salesforce integration–but also among the applications themselves. In fact, recent projections call for the data integration market to treble in the next five years.
This means more APIs, more data integration and more business risk as we introduce complexity while redefining business processes.
A: There are two main risks companies often face at the infrastructure and application level, although the particular cloud model and service can heighten or lower the risks.
The biggest risk is integrating these applications across different landscapes, having them seamlessly share data, with a focus on the right data at the right time to support business functions. With multiple applications, often sitting on different infrastructures, exchanging business-critical data that needs to be transformed and following different security protocols, the risk of failure is likely and significant. It only takes one incorrect field, or one instance where error handling lacks enough robustness, for an integration to fail.
Moving to the cloud also significantly limits a company’s control over updates, because cloud apps are driven by their own update protocols and schedules. Businesses have little time to respond to these changes and updates. The enterprise is moving towards a continually fresh, evergreen landscape, where cloud applications will force down updates, similar to what happens with mobile devices.
The challenge here is not just on the cloud application itself, but also the upstream and downstream applications that exchange data with the cloud application. This is heightened when the upstream and downstream applications are also on a cloud and are receiving their own regular updates.
Add in regular bug fixes and enhancements, and you have changes occurring weekly–even daily! It’s making us rethink slightly the age-old rule that business drives technology. In this environment, business processes need to be adapted to prosper.
A: Continuous testing is key to ensure control over the quality released into production and have constant visibility into the quality status. QE companies need to create a new narrative and define the best practice approach.
For example, at Qualiest, we’ve recently established global COEs to challenge norms and rethink the approach. This has led us to end-end, AI-driven automation executing business process-driven test scripts, with a focus on being targeted, not just fast. In this way we are helping companies complete a transformation, evolving first from Quality Assurance to Quality Engineering and now to Digital Engineering, all working to guarantee Brand Assurance.
In an environment with continuous, often federated updates, targeted testing helps protect a client’s schedule and budget without slowing down business processes.
A: We take a Risk-Based Testing approach, prioritizing tests by business and technical risk. The process has four main parts:
A: The most essential quality is a business process-driven mindset. Businesses need QE experts who can assess the ability to execute the business process, not just the technology that supports it.
Another best practice is business reporting. Understanding the results is often an overlooked part of continuous testing. QE needs to go beyond just pass or fail. Business-driven reporting is essential. We need to understand where the failure occurred and why, capturing all auditable evidence along the way to ensure issue triage is as fast and targeted as the solution.
Speed is another imperative. The value of targeted AI automation is reduced if it takes a week to make a decision on the results. This is where interactive data analytics systems and reporting dashboard tools can really help.
Finally, introducing next-gen tech is critical, not just to keep up but also to drive the narrative. Without it the solution might be fit for today, but potentially not tomorrow.
