Can Agile Testing Spread Its Magic In The Retail Sector?

In today’s technology fueled world, retailer shops are making unbelievable innovations to satisfy the mixed demands of the customers. Imagine the robots delivering your shopping order at your doorstep! If this kind of service is offered to any customer, it will definitely be relaxing and will help augment the sales. In the retail market, there are varieties of selling strategies. Be it pop-up stores, digital price tags, engaging kiosks, or magic mirrors, it has become one vital task to be updated with the digital revolution in the retail world.

While the opportunities are increasing, there are lots of challenges like security, logistics and operational that are responsible for freezing the industry’s growth. Famous online brands like Amazon are spreading widely across the world, and yet, facing problems of creating Omni-channel effect. Omni-channel effect is a type of retail which integrates the different methods of shopping made available for the consumers. So it is trying to create more physical stores to meet to the customer requirements.

Nowadays, retail sector is growing fast for all type of brands (small and large). To relate with the changing phases in the retail sector, Digital Transformation is making the way. You have no other option except building a Digital Perspective, regardless of which type of shop you have.

In these scenarios, the Chief Information Officers (CIOs) will be working as the trusted advisors to the senior management team. CIOs will guide the businessmen on technology adoption, acceptance and building a strong digital infrastructure.

It has become imperative to prioritize and enable technology investments to facilitate effective data management. This will naturally create value chains to make the data competitive enough to deal with volatile, unpredictable and taxing business environment.It is also equally important to construct the robust consumer interface and test them to match with the customer requirements.

Agile methodology works on the QA (Quality Analysis) approach. When it comes to using the Agile approach, the entire team will be responsible to get the outcome. Here, Testing team and Development teams work together for evaluating the code and developing it thereafter. Agile testing has following advantages-

• Here, both the testers and the developers work together to debug the software in daily scrums, which leads to better communication.
• As developer and tester works together in a team, time gap between developing and testing is less.
• Agile fragments the teams into small sprint cycles with a goal and a small set of features.

Agile is known for its quality improvement. It works for constantly innovating projects. This is especially helpful in the retail sector, where the applications are constantly varying for the best interests of the customers.  Agile scrum roles specially Scrum are quite different from the traditional roles other software development methodologies.

To know more about the industry status, I studied some analyst reports and gathered the information about the challenges faced by the industry leaders and Retail Specialists in the Retail sector as follows-

• The problem for the retailers is to manage a large amount of data.
• Retailers are struggling to manage the data, and also it should be available at the right times and in right dimensions.
• Various new technologies and daily system updates are creating challenges for the IT departments.
• Retail models keep changing and it is a problem to adopt them.
• To ensure that the data shared at the terminals are secure and cannot get leaked
• Digital Transformation needs the complete investment of human efforts.

The challenges are tough! But the opportunities are much brighter. Agile Technology can bring some great opportunities like- adopting Omni-channel processes, widening market fragmentation, improving offline selling process and effective data management.

Discover your full project management potential with PRINCE2 Foundation trainings. Master the industry standard methodology from anywhere, anytime.