CI: As DevOps matures, organizations are focusing on finding ways to consolidate and standardize their DevOps processes, tooling and implementation – in order to scale DevOps throughout business. Kindly, share your insights on this segment.
Maneesh: DevOps transformation for an organization is a journey. The key to DevOps maturity is seamless automation for development, deployment, testing and monitoring. Organizations must build a tool-chain that helps them become efficient and stay effective. Also, as DevOps matures, besides processes and the tool-chain, organizations need to focus on the cultural changes in terms of the way their teams work and communicate in the DevOps / agile context.

CI: As more companies look forward to Software Quality Assurance service to improve their workflow and productivity, a number of challenges related to infrastructure and legacy systems have risen. What measures should a provider adopt to increase efficiency in the Software Quality Assurance service?
Maneesh: Without a doubt – automation is the answer to increase efficiency and reducing total cost of quality. Infrastructure or the lack of it, especially in the UAT or test environment can render automated quality assurance useless. This is where service virtualization and API testing plays a key role. Legacy systems relate to digital IT applications via interfaces, APIs/micro services and this is where API testing helps in integrating multiple moving parts into delivering a singular ‘WOW’ experience to the end-user on their mobile screen.

CI: With a majority of organizations making a foray in the digital world, the need for digital transformation will require a huge shift of focus towards digital testing. Give us your opinion on this?
Maneesh: The digital experience that an enterprise creates is determined by the quality of software that powers it. There is no digital testing or non-digital testing. We believe quality must be defined from the point of view of the end-user (customer) who will consume the IT application/ ecosystem.

Take an example for insurance, the core system is legacy system with the Black and Green screen. On the front end, there is IoT (FitBit) that an end-user wears, there is an app that collects the data from FitBit and there is a cloud analytics engine that dynamically generates the quarterly premium and syncs up with the core insurance system.

One cannot differentiate between digital or non-digital testing because the entire business process or customer journey is across multiple legacy and digital applications – and the entire journey must be tested end-to-end. That said, mobile applications, unlike legacy systems, are upgraded frequently – 2-3 time a week. New methodologies catering to digital applications that rely on Quality Assurance best practices help guarantee quality for digital applications. Mobile labs, IoT and robotic labs and customer experience monitoring ‘bots’ help digital transformation projects succeed.

CI: With growing demand for cloud and mobile technology, it is important to master the skills of advanced security and compatibility testing. What are the recent security updates for testing services and what needs to be done?
Maneesh: With the advent of mobility – a different smartphone in every hand and over 26000 models in the market, delivering a consistent end-user experience in terms of compatibility (OS, browser, mobile, network) and performance is paramount.

Digital apps need to be tested for performance, functionality and compatibility on demand. Clients demand a robust digital lab where the device matrix is continuously updated. For example, we had the iPhone with OS 12 available for testing within 48 hours of the launch. With cloud based mobile labs – the client today has the flexibility to run automated tests across devices, networks, OS and browsers anytime and from anywhere.

CI: What level of changes do you expect to see in the way organizations adapt to challenging software quality assurance and performance testing landscapes in the near future?
Maneesh: With DevOps and Agile becoming a way of life, organizations are shifting left. They find defects faster and earlier in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), help enable the developer to track his ‘Performance Budget’ so there is performance built into the code at the start and enable the developer to automatically unit test his code.