Once you’ve decided to introduce a technological product to your business, you should make sure it fully corresponds to all rules and regulations of a particular industry or domain. Compliance testing, also known as conformance testing, is the optimal solution for that. To prepare your product for market launch, perform this type of testing with your in-house specialists or engage a software testing company that specializes in pre-certification QA.
Adhering to common security and accessibility regulations
No matter the niche you’re in, your solution should be easy and secure to use. Only this way you can rest assured that end users will get an outstanding experience.
Robust penetration testing will empower you to identify and patch known and unknown vulnerabilities, ensuring GDPR and OWASP compliance. It’ll be a kind of a final, end-of-state check to make sure the development team implemented the required security practices such as end-to-end encryption, firewalls, authentication controls, identity management, request throttling, and more.
Also, conduct accessibility testing to ensure WCAG compliance. Conformance tests will help you timely address all possible inconsistencies in headings, landmarks, images, links, and form controls, making sure your solution can be easily accessed by people with auditory, cognitive, speech, visual, and other disabilities.
Tapping into domain-specific compliance
Depending on the industry you work in, security and usability requirements for your digital products might vary. So to successfully pass certification and start bringing tangible value to users, perform the corresponding conformance testing.
Healthcare regulations
So that your medical solution could be successfully implemented in healthcare environments to improve patient outcomes, it should pass HIPAA certification. By testing your healthcare product against the HIPAA rule, you will reveal and timely address possible security breaches around user role management, identification and authentication, audit controls, data encryption, and more.
HIPAA conformance testing sets the bar not only for patient data security but also for system interoperability. By checking your solution against these and other interoperability requirements — such as HL7 FHIR and DICOM — you’ll be able to ensure smooth information exchange among different medical solutions like EHRs, PACS, medical portals, mHealth apps, etc. And this means collaborative decision-making and, as a result, enhanced care quality.
Financial requirements
If you want to launch competitive solutions in banking, eCommerce, or any other business domain where payments are an indispensable part of a product’s functionality, you’ll need to tap into PCI DSS compliance.
As with testing against OWASP requirements, here you’ll need experienced specialists in penetration testing and vulnerability scanning. Such a combination of manual and automated techniques will help you detect real-world risks to your business, removing false positives.
PCI DSS compliance is a guarantee that your solution — whether it’s an e-store or a mobile banking app — is secure in case of a cardholder’s data compromise, i.e. firewalls are installed and effectively maintained, physical and virtual access to client data is restricted, the network is constantly monitored, and security policies are implemented.
Pre-certification testing for IoT devices
In the IoT world, pre-certification testing also plays an important role. And before a connected device can be actively used by consumers, it has to be checked against a number of predefined certification schemes such as LTE, CDMA, UMTS (WCDMA), GSM, and more.
Namely, pre-certification testing will help you measure device functionality as well as its transmitter and receiver performance under typical network and radio conditions. Also, by running conformance tests, you’ll be able to verify other key parameters:
- Over-the-Air (OTA) antenna performance
- Radio resource management
- VoLTE performance
- A-GNSS operation
- Carrier aggregation
Conformance testing in the eLearning industry
If your digital products revolve around online education, you’ll certainly need to turn to conformance testing. This way, you’ll make sure your courses are built according to all key industry regulations — such as SCORM, AICC, cmi5, and xAPI — i.e. they can easily communicate with any LMS.
Pre-certification testing is also effectively used to check your eLearning system against security (OWASP, GDPR, PCI DSS) and accessibility (WCAG) requirements, giving online learners an extra layer of comfort.
Final note
You can perform compliance testing at any stage of your software development project, whether your product is still in progress or on the way to market. Conformance with the necessary international and regional standards will guarantee that your software is able to deliver great user experience, i.e. it’s easy-to-use, reliable, and secure.
***
Yana Yelina is a Technology Writer at Oxagile, a provider of software engineering and IT consulting services. Her articles have been featured on KDNuggets, ITProPortal, Jaxenter, Singularity Hub, and Datafloq, to name a few. Yana is passionate about the untapped potential of technology and explores the perks it can bring businesses of every stripe. You can reach Yana at yana.yelina@oxagile.com or connect via LinkedIn or Twitter.
