The Great Resignation: Research and Innovation in the Testing Ecosystem

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The Need for Research, Innovation, and Testing Differentiation – Overview 

The testing ecosystem has witnessed major shifts in the past decades courtesy of technological advancements, innovations, disruptive trends, and a rapidly growing community of testers and QA engineers. While research, innovation, and continuous learning are essential across industries and organizations, these have even stronger implications in testing. Using online banking and the financial service industry as an example, we can see exactly how research and development (R&D) is integral to business growth and success.

Originally, banking applications would let users access accounts online for basic banking functionality including checking balances, depositing, withdrawing, and transferring money, alongside providing basic account information like daily, weekly, and monthly expenditures. However, as online banking grew, market-leading banks understood that more and more capabilities would be required from their users as well as offered by their competitors. Fast forward to today, there are many more functionalities behind a banking app including loan and credit card application processes, account creation and management, and even advanced budgeting and investing options. The list is sure to grow further as these trends continue.

In this blog, we will provide insights on how the era of the Great Resignation is impacting the R&D landscape for testers and QA professionals. 

How the Great Resignation is Orchestrating the Need for Research and Innovation

If you have been closely following our latest blogs on the Great Resignation, you already have plenty of details on how the shift-left in the workforce started and how it is influencing the ways businesses operate today. These impacts are going to be felt well beyond 2022 and the post-pandemic era. 

With resignations reaching record levels, the challenges are also felt by those who stay behind after their colleagues leave. As per Microsoft’s 2021 Work Trend Index, 41% of the workforce across the globe are looking to change their jobs. In a A similar survey of 3,400 enterprise workers done by Adobe, more than 50% of Gen Z workers plan to switch jobs.  These trends present substantial challenges throughout the technology industry, specifically throughout testing and QA.

Though these statistics portray both the severity and impact of the Great Resignation well, it is essential for businesses to further understand the motivation behind this movement.

Pandemic Epiphanies

The global pandemic of Covid-19 has been instrumental in causing a multitude of disruptions in both social and cultural aspects. Change is good and, as said by John D. Rockefeller, “Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great.” However, with every change comes the element of uncertainty followed sometimes by apprehension.

The workforce, especially in health and technology, has been at the receiving end of job uncertainties and remuneration cutbacks, forcing adaptations and change. Meanwhile, more and more professionals are burnt out due to the increasing workloads, potentially viewing this as an opportunity to jump ship and improve their quality of life. 

Remote Work Culture 

After a prolonged period of working from home, a vast majority of employees are reluctant to return back into the office. While the work-from-home culture has benefited enterprises immensely, employees have also been cashing in on it. With the Great Resignation in its full force, employees are encouraged to continue the hybrid or completely remote model of work. And, if asked to do otherwise, they might be tempted to quit too. 

Work-Life Balance 

If this global pandemic has taught us all one common thing that is to live life to the fullest. No amount of remuneration, recognition, rewards, or achievement will be able to replace work-life balance and good mental health. Thus, today’s workforce is preferring better balance and are leaving organizations with a toxic and “all-work-no-play” work culture. 

This is not going to stop here. In fact, it might have a snowball effect. Here are some of the key challenges that are anticipated in the foreseeable future:

Morale: When there is a large outflow of workers, it affects the morale of those who stay. This is especially so for those closely-knit teams and colleagues changing company culture.

Capacity Crunch: With employee attrition on the rise, the remaining slack needs to be picked up by other team members. This puts additional pressure and strain on the company and in turn can lead to a decline in productivity.
Knowledge Base: While it is possible to replace talent over time, domain and product knowledge are hard to replace immediately, even with extensive and descriptive documentation on-hand. A lot of knowledge is often lost which, again, puts an immense strain on not only the company but also those incoming replacements.
Ripple Effect: And after all of that, a ripple effect is being felt across the workforce. With attrition at an all-time high, workers are reevaluating their career and life goals. As a result, companies will have to contend with this ripple effect.

Connect the dots – how this great attrition is influencing research and innovation:

Skilled resource gaps are taxing and thus necessitate the adoption of robust, smart, and scalable test automation tools that can streamline and expedite testing effort and support the release flawless products.
The understanding that manual testing efforts can be augmented by leveraging test automation tools cannot be ignored. Research and innovation require QA professionals to invest more time in continuous learning, and perform research to drive innovation at work.
Considering the wide-scale popularity of test automation, the landscape is crowded with a multitude of options. Enterprises have to ensure that their test automation tool, testing processes, and outcomes remain cutting-edge. For this to be achieved, research and innovation have to take center stage.

Navigating the Continuously Evolving Business Territory with Automation

By adopting a “shift-left” approach to automated testing, enterprises can ensure rapid feedback on their app. This helps facilitate innovation while removing risk factors like introducing bugs, security risks, hindering customer experiences or impacting business processes. Furthermore, enterprises can improve the quality, speed, and efficiency of their web and mobile apps, giving them a leg up on the competition through supercharged digital innovation.

Here are some statistics shedding further light on the topic:

77% of organizations find it difficult to juggle increasing quality, efficiency, and speed with developing and testing core application code
85% of development managers believe it is becoming harder to innovate without compromising quality and increasing the risk of bugs being introduced into the application
53% of development managers say the biggest barrier to achieving agile development and DevOps is the time required to test
90% of respondents believe automating more test cases is the key to achieving faster innovation
87% of respondents say it is important to automate more test cases in order to overcome the growing skill shortage
80% of respondents believe that unless automated test coverage increases, bad code will continue to find its way into the application

How Qyrus Can Help 

Enable your teams to respond to these unprecedented challenges with Qyrus, the most powerful low-code/no-code test automation platform. 

Build and deliver higher-quality applications faster and more efficiently while saving time and money and increasing speed to market. Optimize application functionality and user experience by utilizing codeless and efficient test building, automation and infrastructure, and AI/ML capabilities. Qyrus can be your go-to test automation partner, and here is why:

Effectively fill the skilled resource gaps and enable today’s QA professionals for tomorrow’s opportunities and challenges 
Quickly release products, web, and mobile applications faster to the market than your competitors

Consistently deliver seamless and comprehensive customer experiences 
Optimize cost and resource efficiency at all times with reusable automated tests
Automate repeatable tasks, leaving more resources for R&D

Still, looking for more reasons to embark on your automation journey? Connect with test automation experts at Qyrus right away! 

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