As software development teams are pressured to deliver products faster, testing must adapt. In this article, Damien Johnson explains that teams must align their software strategy to the new context. A unified test management system should become the centralized hub that brings together the key components of the quality assurance (QA) strategy to minimize operational risks.
Author: Damien Johnson, Field CTO, Tricentis
Tech ecosystems are becoming increasingly complex, and teams are under more pressure to deliver quality software faster. As a result of these truths, enterprises have moved away from more traditional, static methods of development and testing – such as the waterfall model – and toward flexible and speed-prioritized approaches like Agile, which relies on short cycles with continuous feedback, to reach their business goals.
While this shift has enabled faster release cycles, enhanced resource efficiency, and resulted in easier adaptation to dynamic environments, it’s common for project visibility and team communication to fall through the cracks, ultimately at the cost of efficiency and software quality. To close these gaps, teams need a clear strategy, shared accountability, and systems that reinforce visibility and consistency throughout the entire testing process, all of which has become even more nuanced with the evolution of artificial intelligence.
Building a unified test strategy
The shift to Agile and DevOps has too often left test strategy documentation behind. In an environment that prioritizes shorter release cycles, an iterative approach, and automation of repetitive steps, it is crucial that all stakeholders understand what is necessary to get the job done.
Alongside rigorous and technical software testing, strong and clear communication is just as important. Without it, software development teams often default to working in silos, which can lead to misunderstandings, duplicate work, and missed opportunities to identify defects early.
The July 2024 CrowdStrike outage serves as a cautionary tale of what can happen when an organization’s testing strategy breaks down. A single faulty update, pushed without sufficient quality controls, caused a widespread global outage. While the issue itself was technical, it revealed a deeper gap: a lack of clear software testing ownership, alignment, and communication. Had there been a unified test strategy with well-defined roles and oversight, the error might have been caught before deployment. The incident underscores the importance of a testing strategy that defines responsibilities, but also ensures all stakeholders are aligned and accountable.
Before testing is underway, software development teams should align on their test strategy, scope, and objectives for the project, ensuring they connect to wider business goals. They can also agree on what tasks and oversight to give to AI tools in order to save resources and enhance testing. This planning phase is a key opportunity to break down silos and build mutual understanding across functions. It also helps testers ask the right questions, consider cross-functional impacts, identify new avenues for efficiency, and develop a shared vision for quality.
This alignment is reinforced by how testing is structured. Teams should leverage a layered testing approach that incorporates multiple testing types-unit and integration testing, end-to-end, performance and load testing, and AI-powered testing-each building on the last to validate different aspects of the application. This approach helps teams understand how each testing phase contributes to the overall product quality, ensuring issues are identified early and often.
Establishing unified test management
A unified testing strategy also requires unified test management. Cohesiveness and clarity are paramount: a single test management interface serves as the single source of truth. If not properly tracked, test automation can quickly become separated from business requirements, especially with the rising use of open-source tools. Unified test management ensures automated test results are directly tied to business requirements to get the full picture of test coverage.
Fragmented toolchains and untracked automation scripts often lead to inconsistent testing results, where the same scenario might pass in one environment but fail in another. A unified management layer ensures consistency in test execution, environment configuration, and result interpretation across teams.
When test results are scattered across tools or require manual collation, it slows down decision-making and introduces bottlenecks in the release pipeline. Centralized reporting and standardized automation or AI workflows reduce friction and enable faster, more confident go/no-go decisions.
Unified test management also enables organizations to scale test automation from hundreds to thousands of tests across different test machines. This is especially prudent for growing companies that require test management needs to scale with them in stride. At the same time, unified test management establishes governance and traceability for all testing, both increasingly important as ecosystems grow more complex.
A unified test management system should serve as a centralized hub that brings together the key components of an effective quality assurance (QA) strategy. It should house unified testing standards and methodologies along with a shared knowledge bank to drive consistency and collaboration.
The system should be able to leverage automation strategically to enable teams to innovate without losing sight of quality. A centralized test case repository enhances traceability and reusability, while robust reporting and analytics offer visibility into test coverage, quality metrics, and release readiness. It should also store AI guidelines and documentation to ensure consistent outputs, ensuring AI test automation seamlessly works alongside testers.
Closing the quality gaps
Disjointed testing systems create cascading issues: missed defects, inconsistent results, delayed releases, and frustrated teams working in silos. When done properly, testing systems transform from potential bottleneck to growth catalyst. By prioritizing clear testing strategies, leveraging AI to accelerate execution, and unified test management that upholds consistency and visibility, organizations are well on their way to deliver quality software at speed, which ultimately drives faster business transformations.
The complexity of enterprise landscapes is rapidly evolving as cloud technologies and best-in-class systems push innovations into the business process every day, week, and month. The interdependencies of these systems expand the traditional quality assurance and delivery functions to support concurrent changes and the availability of test environments to conduct end-to-end process validations. The days of validating a single application or function, as a unit, are gone; everything is highly dependent on heterogenous technologies, external systems, data, APIs and availability.
An integrated and holistic view to quality delivery is mandatory for an organization to deliver business assurance. It’s no longer only software quality but it’s ultimate value to the organization without increasing operational risk.
About the Author
Damien Johnson is a seasoned technology executive with over 35 years of experience in enterprise business systems. Currently serving as the Field CTO at Tricentis, Damien engages with large enterprise customers to develop target state enterprise landscapes optimized for use in heterogeneous, composable, and autonomous environments.