'Today's testers wear cap of end-users'

BANGALORE, INDIA: Mindtree further expanded its capability with the acquisition of Aztecsoft in 2008. Furthermore, MindTree recently underwent a re-organization where it instituted six separate divisions, including a division focused on independent testing.

Speaking to Akanksha Prasad of CIOL, Subodh Parulekar, co-head of the Testing Business Unit in MindTree, talks about the testing domain, how the entire domain has evolved over years and how it is moving to an end-user focused model.

Could you brief us about the Mindtree testing portfolio?

MindTree's independent testing unit has more than a decade old test practice, with 2000 test experts. At present, the independent testing business constitutes around 25 per cent of the company’s employee strength contributing to roughly 25 per cent of Mindtree’s revenues.

MindTree drives predictable quality, innovation and competency in its domain-based testing solutions through its pillars of excellence - MindTest, MindTree’s testing methodology, Test Labs - where new testing solutions and frameworks are created and innovation takes place; and Testing Academy nurtures testing talent in the organization and focuses on building careers in testing.

We offer core testing services like functional testing, test automation, test strategy and planning, and test centers of excellence. Apart from this, we also provide specialized testing services based on quality attributes, including performance, security, globalization, usability and pre-certification testing.

Performance testing is offered as part of the performance engineering package, which encompasses performance strategy and system evaluation, performance testing and simulation, analysis, tuning, benchmarking and regression.

Security testing helps expose flaws in the product design and implementation that make it more vulnerable to security attacks.

Globalization and Localization testing involve testing a product or an application to ensure it is “world ready”, including launch in specific markets. MindTree has partnered with Dynamic Language and Translations.com for linguistic accuracy and translations support.

Lastly, the pre-certification testing. This service helps our customers determine their application compatibility with various platforms including Windows, Linux, and VMware to name a few.

How do you see the entire testing domain evolving from past years? What is the latest in the industry?

The testing industry has evolved significantly over the past few years in different areas viz. process, business model, technology, governance, services, objectives.

There has been a big shift from just testing to quality testing. Today the testers wear the hat of the end-users; every application or software is made considering the end-user experience, emphasizing defect prevention. This has also helped in further cost reduction, as the companies today try and find defects right at the design phase rather than finding them in the final stages of the SDLC.

During the initial days, testing was largely a manual exercise. Around four to five years ago, there was a gradual shift from manual testing towards automated testing, and today we are talking about gray-box and white-box testing.

So, there has been a continuous evolution form black-box to white-box testing and gray box-testing, which is one of the most adopted techniques for testing service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications, and this would continue growing with the demand of SOA.

Talking of trends, I would look at them from two angles - business trends and technology trends.

On the business side, more and more customers are looking at agile methodologies, which results in faster time to market, being more receptive to customer requirements, reduced cost of delivery and improvement in quality. Some organizations, especially the SMBs, are looking at accelerators and re-usable frameworks, to further cut-down their costs.

Other trend is the ongoing inclination of customers towards outcome-based pricing model. They are aligned with demand for cost-effectiveness, time to market, reliability. Our belief is that two to three years down the line around 50 per cent of the contracts would use a hybrid model, where you have elements of both traditional- and outcome-based models.

From technology point of view the industry is embracing developments around virtualization, business intelligence (BI), data warehousing, SOA, SaaS and cloud computing.

How do you see the testing market growing? What is your estimate of the market size?

There is a good demand for testing, especially off-shoring. According to a 2008 report, the market for software testing stands at $13 billion of which about $6 billion is being outsourced to offshore locations including India. The market is expected to touch $20 billion by 2011, of which share of Indian Testing market would be close to $10 billion.

A lot of talks are going around regarding cloud computing and on-demand testing? How is cloud engagement in test practices?

Cloud takes various roles in testing practice, be it testing the cloud platform, cloud-based applications, or testing applications through cloud and many more. At this point, less than ten per cent of the testing revolves around cloud platform. Though the volume is not high, moving forward it would play a big role.

As regards on-demand testing, our test automation and test strategy are well defined areas where we have on-demand offerings. We also have an on-demand test automation framework, which could be accessed online. We are in the process of piloting it internally in a SaaS-model.

Another common practice is testing SaaS applications and cloud platforms and help in on-boarding applications to the cloud through our testing solutions. We have experience in testing components of Microsoft’s cloud offering, Windows Azure.

The other aspect is test environment, where we have a virtual lab in partnership with Skytap, to use their virtual lab solution over the web. Enterprises can scale lab resources up and down as needed from Skytap’s pool of virtualized infrastructure. Lab operations can be tightly controlled through a full-featured virtual lab management application.

What according to you are the challenges in the testing domain and how does Mindtree tackle them?

One of the biggest challenges in this industry is the availability of the right skill-set. If a company wants to go deep in testing capabilities it needs to have the core skills cut across all areas. We at Mindtree offer an independent career path in testing, and help test minds build strong expertise in testing through a focused learning framework.

Other challenge is the domain expertise; testing is a need across all verticals/segments, apart from being an opportunity. It also brings with itself the need for domain expertise. We have a strong focus on domain-based testing solutions, covering domains such as communication, travel and transportation, BFSI, manufacturing and so on.

For example, for travel and transportation we have verified and validated applications including portals for vehicle rental, cargo handling, airline accounting, billing, and hotel reservations.

Also working on mission-critical applications becomes a challenge. The testing companies need to be ready with solutions real-time. They need to work on a propagation to serve the customers on both onshore and off-shore model. Like, we have our testers working in the customer’s environment.