The Role of Automation in Software Quality Assurance for Government Processes

Automation tests for software quality assurance have increasingly become more common to deliver strong products. Particularly for governments always under pressure to perform efficiently and serve better. They must always stay on top of their game by being strategic in their approach, embracing new technologies when needed and acting and reacting at scale.

Benefits of Automation Software Testing vs Manual Testing for Governments

The automation testing market expects to grow by USD 52.7 billion by 2027, having a CAGR of 16.4% during the time period. With private sectors already incorporating automation within their tasks, the public sector must follow suit.

Governments need automated tests to perform the same steps precisely every time and record the details to get consistent data. Compared with manual testing, automated tests can handle complex features more efficiently.  

On the other hand, manual testing not only enables personnel to assess software by functionality, but also the overall user experience of using it. It’s difficult to replicate this with automated software testing. Some test scenarios may be too complex or difficult to efficiently automate, making it a lot more realistic to conduct manual tests instead.

Keep Up with Updated Malware

In the digital technology era, malware and cyberattacks constantly threaten federal agencies. Even minor software updates can leave them exposed, putting extra burden on the developers to find and minimise these risks as they release new software. Through software automation testing, developers can detect errors while the code is being written, and identify the bugs and problems before the software has even been deployed.

Reducing Time and Cost

Governments need to streamline the process by testing the processes most at risk. Automated test management reduces the disruption time and delivers higher-quality software releases at a faster rate.  For example, using impact analysis AI during testing can reveal the estimated effect on schedule, effort, and risk a change can make in a specific application or feature. So, smart impact analysis can result in a 100% risk reduction rate and in cutting the average test scope for release by 85%.

Automation Software Testing to Mitigate Employee Churn

Public sectors often have high employee turnover rates, due to transfers or having contracted employees. As the new IT employees arrive, releases tend to get delayed as employees must catch up on all the information and ensure they are trained enough to understand and comply with the regulatory standards. So, it is important to incorporate continuous software quality and assurance testing so as to not be affected by employee churn. 

If you would like to learn more about the successful implementation of software quality and assurance testing, you may refer to our case study on Government utilities. In this study we display how we assisted in uplifting the organisation’s capability in the automation and test spaces.

Software Automation Testing Can Eliminate the Human Factor

Even the best engineers make mistakes during manual testing, especially because it can get tedious after some time. However, even the smallest mistake can have the biggest impact on government agencies. Using automated test environment management can result in close to 100% accuracy, giving your engineers more time to focus on other more important tasks.

Opportunities for Automation in Software Quality Assurance in Governments

In recent years, governments around the world have adopted several automation tools to better their civil services. Some of the areas where federal agencies can integrate automation are:

Finance

Governments have been using multiple software to disperse cash, manage financial processes, conduct budgeting, financial planning and analysis, etc. 80% of these processes have possibilities of automation within federal agencies. Jumping on this idea, in America the FBI is planning to roll out a software bot to pay invoices and update budget lines for both customers and vendors. The implementation of this bot means it will be possible to begin streamlining the entire process, making it significantly more efficient by eliminating the need for manual data entry. This also will help in preventing human error or mistakes commonly made during data entry.

Human Resources (HR)

With the federal government’s workforce comprising several million employees, most of the administration tasks can be automatable. Quality software can also handle payroll administration, record keeping, recruitment and other in-house activities. Currently, the trend of the digital workforce and Industry 5.0 is set to change the dynamics of the Australian working environment.

Electoral System

According to the German Constitutional Court, using automation in the electoral process can examine the results reliably without the bias of any specialist’s knowledge. This results in transparency. More and more government organisations are integrating automation frameworks within Electoral Management Systems to set up complex workflows, such as the sign-up process for ballot records to save time and resources.

Applications and Processing

There are endless applications needing to be processed within governments, ranging from payments and services to social welfare, to visas and tax returns. Software automation testing can help build reliable tools to read and write data, check for consistency and completion, solve quick problems, and even send and interpret emails. Within the US, roughly 30 states are using software to authenticate mobile driver’s licenses. Governments can use it to analyse public sentiments, create data entries with boosted security, and can even generate reports.

Automated Test Management Systems are Not Without their Problems

As governments increase automated-decision making systems (ADS)  within their work, there have been growing concerns about its negative implementations. After all, there have been many cases of families being bankrupted after being falsely accused of benefit fraud. There are also possibilities of ADS reflecting system issues of injustice and inequality, such as discrimination, infringing rights, sorting people into groups, wrongly limiting access to services, etc. 

Begin Your Automation Testing for Software Quality Assurance

While automation has its fallacies, the benefits outweigh the drawbacks. Governments need to embrace new technologies and look to incorporate automation testing for software quality assurance to deliver the best results for civil-facing tasks.  

KJR, experts in software testing have over 25 years of experience helping the Government assure their digital access and can help you with your complex technology-based projects.