TCS recently briefed NelsonHall on the intelligent testing system (ITS) it launched in April 2013 in an effort to automate tasks across the software testing lifecycle. It intends to  expand usage of test automation from test execution to include other tasks e.g. test design and test support services such as test data management and service virtualization.

ITS integrates COTS tools e.g. Informatica’s ILM and CA LISA’s service virtualization with TCS IP around software testing. ITS in its first release included service virtualization and test design automation. In its V2, ITS functionality expanded to test data generation and management -test data generation being one of the significant pain points of test design, along with test creation and maintenance.

Major features of ITS include:

• Test case scenarios generation, including
  - Generation of test cases for UI and middleware/systems integration testing
  - Automatic binding of test data with test cases (see below)
• Test support services:
  - Creation of test data and management including sub-setting and masking
  - Service virtualization: creation of virtual models and middleware testing
  - Test data binding
• Integration with test execution COTS.

TCS is offering ITS with two options: embedded within multi-year managed testing services contracts, or under the traditional license model.

TCS also bundles with ITS, COTS such as CA and Informatica and is therefore able to offer the full ITS including IPs and COTS under one price. Where the client has already purchased a license from CA or Informatica, TCS will use the client’s license.

TCS has a go-to-market agreement with CA and Informatica.. The company, however, does offer professional services around other COTS outside of the scope of ITS e. g. IBM GreenHat, HP Service Virtualization and Parasoft.

TCS is maintaining its investment in ITS, having launched V2.0 in the Fall of 2013 and V 3.0 planned for Fall 2014, expanding capabilities of ITS to:

• Test design: supporting SAP testing based on the TCS test case repositories around SAP applications
• Test support services: service virtualization: increased support of mainframes; and integration with TCS’s test environment provisioning offering and IP;
• Integration with BPM tools for model-based testing
• Miscellaneous: increased reporting capabilities; data migration validation.

Later on, with release V 4.0, TCS ASU intends align with major initiatives in TCS’ vertical units e.g. for the airline industry, insurance, banking and hospitality. With this, TCS intends to provide pre-integrated applications and IT to clients with modernization needs.

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With the introduction of ITS, TCS is aiming to integrate different tools and link test case creation based on repositories and model-based testing; test support offerings based on test data creation, service virtualization, and test environment management; and test execution. With these three major areas, TCS is covering the testing lifecycle. Given the breadth of technologies, programming language and the rate of technological innovation, the potential for enriching the features of ITS has no limits; in all likelihood, TCS will continue to invest in developing the features of ITS for some time.

With software testing still being a labor-intensive activity, most vendors active in this area have put in place an IP and tool strategy, identifying gaps in their IP portfolio and aiming to fill those. In the last five years, the range and depth of offerings and tools/IPs has increased significantly.

With ITS, TCS has focused on integrating best-of-breed tools, making them more able to exchange data and test scripts and overcome some of the limits of selecting best-of-breed COTS separately. Of course, TCS investment has a price: where previously TCS provided its own IP as part of its testing service, the company is now selling it.

There is more than this effort on automation and on integrating tools. TCS, and other vendors active in software testing, are also now touching on the dev-ops area, with its continuous development approach and its usage of software release management software. NelsonHall will comment further on this in its forthcoming Targeting Software Testing report.