In my experience, managing testing and quality activities is becoming more about managing compliance, security, and contractual activities than worrying about feature testing and scalability. Sure, feature development and scalability need testing, it’s just that we have industry practices in place that handle these more effectively than a team of testers and old-school tools.

What do you see as changes to the scope of your testing activities? If you manage testing, especially in a business-to-business context, two primary areas are becoming more important to the business: Compliance, Security, Contracts, and Operational Readiness.

• In the last few years cybersecurity and compliance activities have only grown in importance to the CEO. Managing solution requirements will require a dedicated focus on security and compliance across the board. Both security and compliance need to be built into the solution and be built into the company processes and procedures.
• Working in the business-to-business domain or delivering solutions to the public sector will often face operational readiness trials. Make sure your test lead addresses the contractual terms and operational readiness. This is both if you are the customer or the vendor of IT solutions.
• Scalability and performance used to be a big deal. Now we have better performance practices and observability tools. The field of Site Reliability Engineering is all about the practices of proactive scaling and performance reducing the for explicit testing up-front for many of the non-functional requirements.
• Similarly, feature testing used to be a big deal to juggle. The industry best practice for software development teams is a holistic approach to a whole team testing effort. Supplemented with test coaches to enable stream-aligned teams to deliver quality features. It’s less about managing a long list of feature test cases.