The physical business world has given way to digital solutions with applications, networks, and operating systems taking the center of the stage. In recent times, the IT infrastructure has become a crucial component in an organization’s success. Its security, accessibility, usability, and performance are what stakeholders across the industry vertical are focused on. With this increased focus on IT systems, digital assurance services has become a fundamental concern for companies to achieve customer satisfaction and engagement.

However, implementing an effective digital assurance strategy, especially in the era of artificial intelligence and machine learning, can be challenging. But what are some best practices and lessons learned in implementing an effective digital assurance strategy? Let’s find out.

Best Practices and Lessons Learned in Implementing an Effective Digital Assurance Strategy

Implementing an effective digital assurance strategy is crucial in ensuring the quality, security, and reliability of software systems and applications. Here are some best practices and lessons learned to consider when building and executing your digital assurance strategy:

1. Define Your Program Strategy

A clearly defined program strategy for digital assurance is crucial. It provides a blueprint of steps to be followed and processes to be affected by implementing a digital assurance and testing strategy.

What’s more, it defines the objectives of your digital assurance strategy, enabling you to understand what you want to achieve. This may include improving security, minimizing defects, and enhancing software quality. Also, consider aligning your program strategy with the overall business goals to ensure its effectiveness.

Once you have aligned the strategy with business goals, finalize the sequencing of the relevant testing activities to achieve the desired objectives.

2. Involve Relevant Stakeholders

A digital assurance strategy affects multiple departments, ranging from development to business teams. Therefore, it’s crucial to include stakeholders from different areas of the organization.

Collaborating with these stakeholders in gathering insights, defining appropriate testing and assurance activities, and identifying risks can be crucial. It helps ensure that your digital assurance strategy addresses the concerns and needs of relevant parties. This leads to a better and more inclusive digital assurance strategy, making it more effective upon implementation.

3. Build/Choose a Business Process Model

Business process modeling involves planning or selecting a digital assurance testing model. This model serves as a reference to build test cases and user stories, monitor process components, verify functional needs, and finalize test objectives and requirements.

The business process model should create test components and requirements and traceability for design. Also, it should lay out a plan for assuring delivery sequencing and mitigating risks. Once you’re done with business process modeling, build business scenarios to verify testing and its outcomes.

4. Perform Risk Assessment

An effective digital assurance strategy identifies potential threats, risks, and vulnerabilities in your software systems and apps. So, it’s crucial to perform a comprehensive risk assessment to identify potential loopholes in your digital systems.

Consider the external and internal factors that may impact the quality, security, and reliability of your digital assets. This will help you identify all potential threats in your digital environment. Utilize this risk assessment to prioritize your digital assurance efforts and allocate resources effectively.

5. Leverage Automation

It’s no secret that automation streamlines processes and tasks. Also, it frees up your workforce, enabling them to focus on mission-critical activities that require human intervention. In the age of machine learning and artificial intelligence, automation capabilities have significantly advanced.

Embracing automation in digital assurance can improve accuracy, effectiveness, and efficiency. For instance, you can use technologies and tools for test automation, deployment automation, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD). Automation can streamline testing processes, identification of defects, and accelerate feedback loops.

6. Prioritize Security

Security has become a major threat to digital systems, with hackers targeting these systems to cause data breaches. In fact, security incidents have risen significantly over the past few years, with some costing up to millions of dollars.

Security breaches often occur because digital systems often run on multiple platforms with different levels of vulnerabilities. So, your digital assurance strategy should consider and prioritize the aspect of security testing.

Conduct thorough vulnerability assessments, code reviews, and penetration testing to identify and fix potential vulnerabilities. Also consider various security practices, such as:

• Regularly updating your software systems to ensure they are actively protected from emerging threats.
• Encryption.
• Access control.
• Profiling
• Authentication and authorization.
• Data validation.

7. Monitor and Measure Performance

How do you know if your digital assurance strategy is effective? You cannot determine your strategy’s performance if you haven’t set relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics.

So, when implementing your digital assurance strategy, define your KPIs and metrics clearly and ensure they align with your objectives. Regularly evaluate and report on these metrics. Use the insights generated from the KPIs and metrics to discover areas for improvement and make informed decisions.

8. Implement Continuous Testing

As part of ensuring continuous delivery, continuous testing ensures that testing activities are seamlessly integrated into the software development process. Break down your testing into smaller, manageable units and perform tests continuously, throughout the development lifecycle.

Adopting this testing approach allows for the early detection of issues and bugs. Also, it facilitates quicker remediation and faster feedback.

9. Evolve and Adapt

Digital assurance is a continuous process. So, as the business grows or scales, your digital assurance strategy should evolve and adapt to changing business requirements, industry trends, and technological advancements.

Regularly update and review your strategy to integrate new tools, best practices, and methodologies. Stay abreast of the latest technologies, including blockchain, AI, machine learning, and industry standards like OWASP Top 10 and ISO 25010.

What’s more, embrace DevOps and agile practices to enable faster and more efficient software development and deployment. Staying flexible and proactive will enable your digital strategy to remain relevant, effective, and aligned with the ever-evolving software development landscape.

Final Thoughts

Implementing an effective digital assurance strategy is not a walk in the park. It presents numerous challenges that, if not handled properly, can impair its effectiveness and efficiency. However, by following these 9 best practices and drawing from lessons learned, you can build an effective digital assurance strategy that improves the quality, security, and reliability of your digital products and ecosystem.

Are you ready to implement an effective digital assurance strategy but stuck on where to get started? Indium Software is the perfect digital assurance provider. Contact us and let our experts handle your digital assurance strategy needs to perfection.