DISRUPTIVE TECHNOLOGY IMPLEMENTATION

Maintaining Quality during Disruptive Technology Implementations

Maintaining quality during part or wholescale implementation of decentralised, disruptive technologies such as Blockchain is of paramount importance to all organisations.

No matter the technology or applications introduced, there is no silver bullet to achieve an end-to-end quality landscape.

Blockchain is an example of the current trend in disruptive technology adoption. As with any technology implementation, the requirement for quality, risk management and governance remains critical. We will work with you to identify the correct solution, one that aligns with your business requirements.

Blockchain QA & Test Strategy

We will carry out an initial discovery exercise, followed by analysis of our findings and then make recommendations on the introduction or optimisation around the quality assurance and validation of any relevant Blockchain requirements.

Typical Blockchain Test Approach:

• Blockchain Implementation – Blockchain in its infancy is already proving fruitful for many organisations. However, it still requires careful consideration, implementation planning, process reviews, quality assurance, Testing and Release Planning etc.
• Technology is known for being highly secure – only at the point of execution, during transport, final validation at the destination. Quality, assurance and endpoint validation will undoubtedly still be required for organisations who have onward journeys of the data/transactions – this could be an internal process or related to external regulatory requirements.
• Audit & Compliance – while many of the applications utilising disruptive technologies like Blockchain are an auditable record in themselves, it is still crucial that from an e2e perspective, organisations are still meeting the regulatory and compliance requirements placed upon them.

Functional testing – As with traditional testing (regardless of methodologies used, i.e. agile, waterfall, v-model etc.), unit, integration & system testing needs to be considered. It is likely that any organisation will want to keep pace with their implementation of new, quicker technologies and this means any associated test and validation strategy needs to be faster and leaner. Automation and effective regression packs are paramount to manage risk when adopting complimentary disruptive technology.

Non-functional testing  – This is primarily Performance & Security focussed. As an example, The continuous integration and continuous delivery approach should be considered where testing is executed several times in a day. A version control system should be used to keep tabs on updates. Service virtualisation should be used to access virtual forms of the required testing stages.

The blockchain infrastructure updates organically, frequently and hence, requires a continuous approach to quality and testing that provides a continuous assurance.

“Automation and effective regression” are key components in securing harmony between efficiency and pace.