30 Minute Interview

Testing for productivity

Shiva Jayagopal, Vice President - Testing Practice, Keane India talks to Satyam Pati about testing, automation, people as well as frameworks and models.

Shiva Jayagopal

Shift in thought process

“The industry is asking me how to develop products in lesser time. It is not just about testing but advisory functions and answering questions like, how do I improve quality and implement test automation. QA assessment is now becoming a major aspect of the testing process,” said Jayagopal.

The development industry is maturing and with that the focus on testing is undergoing a change. The industry doesn’t merely demand testing as a last mile part of Product development life cycle (PDLC) but wants to know how testing can add value and reduce TCO.

It is all about performance engineering rather than performance testing. The requirement is for architects, coders and domain experts. Unlike a standard developer, a tester is in tune with the product requirements from the outset.

At the beginning, not the end

Testing is no longer something to be done at the end but rather a part of the PDLC from the very beginning. As an analogy, he said, “You cannot make changes in the plans of 100 storey building once it is completed. Similarly testing is now done from the beginning of a project and done at every stage. Problems thus can be detected earlier without the need to go back every time there is a problem.” Testing has evolved more or less into a continuous process.

Frameworks and Models

“All testing strategies at the end of day are targeted at increasing return on investment and reducing TCO,” said Jayagopal. It is no more just about skills but about enhanced productivity. In terms of technologies, the stress in testing is on creating frameworks rather than individual tools. Again considering the multiple tools and platforms being used by enterprises today, the requirement for frameworks that can deal with this diversity and utilize these tools cannot be underestimated, points out Jayagopal. “To this end, we have released a framework which can support open source tools and also we have existing frameworks which can utilize multiple proprietary tools,” mentioned Jayagopal.

The future of testing and perhaps the whole development process lies in the application of models where the inputs are the requirements and the code is automatically generated. Therefore you don’t change the code, just the model. This can have a revolutionary impact on the world of IT because it might fundamentally change the way we look at software and this in itself implies that coders need to stress more on requirements and end result productivity rather than just the code.

“That it is one of the reasons we stress on people who can think and learn rather than those who just have skills and great grades. In fact one can teach skills but teaching one how to think is a more difficult ballgame,” said Jayagopal.