Accelerating government IT modernization: 4 best practices

Constituent services can be supercharged through government agencies’ IT modernization and digitization efforts. To achieve success on these initiatives, a strategic and calculated approach to testing is needed. In their recent Tech Spotlight on IT Modernization, Federal Computer Week (FCW) spoke with Dr. Grigori Melnik, Chief Strategy Officer at Tricentis, about how the implementation of automated testing can expedite the IT modernization process while ensuring confidence in the outcomes. Melnik outlined 4 best practices to speed up modernization:

1. Clearly define test goals and ownership. To lay a strong foundation for effective testing, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the objectives and scope of the testing efforts. By defining test goals, with a common understanding across the agency, you can ensure that all stakeholders are aligned and working towards a common vision.
2. Deploy a testing platform that offers elevated levels of testing. Choosing the right testing platform is critical for successful IT modernization. Agencies should look for a testing platform that offers elevated levels of testing with abstraction to gain business-level involvement in authoring tests and results. With such a platform, agencies can collaborate with subject matter experts to define test cases and workflows more effectively. Additionally, agencies shouldn’t seek just any automation tool, but a platform that can help manage large, complex systems in a way that enables the team to break things apart and understand complexity.
3. Engage business experts to help define test cases/workflows. Involving agency business experts in the testing process can significantly enhance its effectiveness. Business experts possess valuable domain knowledge that can contribute to the identification of critical test scenarios and requirements. By involving them in the test case/workflows definition and analysis of results, you can ensure that the testing efforts align with the agency’s mission and objectives.
4. Focus on data migration as it is essential to success. In IT modernization initiatives, data migration is critical to success. Agencies should keep an eye on data governance, integrity, security, and privacy to ensure a seamless transition and minimize risks associated with data management. For a successful modernization initiative, it’s important to systematically test the entire data journey — from source systems, through your data warehouse, to your final report, visualization, or step in a process.

These best practices provide a solid foundation for successful automated testing as part of IT modernization initiatives. By starting with these best practices, government agencies can accelerate the modernization process through automated software testing, improve the quality of their systems, and ultimately drive better outcomes for their constituents.

Automated testing can also help facilitate regulatory compliance, such as meeting Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) requirements, as well as hone the economics of modernization. Bottlenecks in highly resource-intensive implementations are easier to discover with automated performance testing, and also provide a foundation for cloud infrastructure consumption modeling to see the potential costs.

Ultimately, automated testing solutions can be key to unlocking future capabilities while also supporting legacy systems. Tricentis’s test automation platforms offer such solutions. They deliver native support for more than 160 applications and technologies plus parallelized execution — from on-premises to the cloud, across mainframes, mobile, custom and packaged applications, documents, APIs, and microservices. That broad reach simplifies and hones testing across government’s sometimes bewildering range of technologies and platforms. With machine learning advancements, Tricentis empowers agencies to visually drive end-to-end test execution.

Want to learn more? Get insights on implementing automated testing as part of your IT modernization initiatives here.