A shift from application testing to quality engineering

Narsimha Rao Mannepalli

As 2015 fades out, we take stock of the effort invested and lessons learnt. Here are some glimpses of the major changes that have taken place in the application testing space in 2015. These include the burgeoning demand for skill enhancement and the need to evolve testing capabilities and deliver quality engineering. With a forward-looking approach, investments in this area can pay off big time.

A look back

The year we saw fresh energy in the testing services space with renewed focus on innovation, specialization and automation. As businesses evolve and move into a new world, we are seeing an ever increasing need for decreasing ‘time to market’ and at the same time, a far greater ‘ cost of failure’ making testing/verification and validation lot more business and time critical. This is necessitating a greater shift from pure testing to the larger quality engineering aspects.

We have taken the ‘Big Bet’ approach, thereby putting greater premium on solutions and competency building in the newer areas of business. We have seen significant growth in specialized IT testing services such as mobile technology, data engineering, digital, analytics and security testing - indicating great potential ahead.

The concept of zero distance implementation, focused on project level innovation, is gaining good traction amongst our customers. Also, scaling up the talent pool across specialized IT services such as performance management, mobility and data management is a concern due to the shortage of talent in the face of rising demand for skilled professionals in the industry. This has to be overcome by a combination of increased usage of tools / automation in projects and also a lot of effort on competency building and this can help testing take the quantum leap in 2016. Focus on not only the automation of test ‘execution’ phase but also on the entire life cycle of application testing will help us deliver the big benefits on the expected higher productivity.

Investments in 2015 will bear fruit next year

We have made investments with a focus on innovation and specialized services. We are also investing in the areas of testing/validation in the CI/CD environments which are increasingly becoming the order of the day. Our dedicated focus on machine learning, artificial intelligence and automation will bear results in 2016. For instance, we conducted automated peripheral application testing on a Robotic Arm based testing solution where we automated the testing of end to end business scenarios involving peripheral devices. This resulted in reduction of cycle time and enabled testing from offshore based locations reducing cost. We optimized effort by using automation utilities to accelerate test data set-up activities, team quest graphs, data mining, creation of social security number, and reports generation.

Our strategic decisions are helping us move ahead. Acquisitions in areas like package applications testing, mobility and security are some of the key choices that have empowered us.

The road ahead

When businesses embark on their digital transformation, providers must be in a position to lead them in the right direction and provide value at optimized costs. The emergence of new engagement models such as “As-a-Service” entails the need to educate clients about their benefits. While the shortage of readily deployable talent appears to be a concern at this point, the overall testing landscape is brimming with opportunities and is likely to take off in a big way in 2016.

With more influence from business buyers, larger-scale and more critical business outcome testing, we need to work more towards ensuring a particular business process as opposed to how a particular application works. There is a trend towards a much more holistic approach to testing, in which value comes from looking at process outcomes and key performance indicators.

We are looking to provide differentiations such as industry specialization, agile and DevOps methodologies along with the flexibility and new business outcome based models to win new businesses and remain within client accounts.

The author is SVP - Service Offering Head - Independent Validation Solutions, Infosys