I recently talked with Wipro about its crowdtesting capabilities. Here, Wipro has a different positioning and service portfolio from crowdtesting pure-plays, with a stronger focus on automation frameworks (with its mobile website and app testing framework), and access to mobile device labs.

QaaS: an aggregation of testing offerings at scale

QaaS is an aggregation of several different offerings: at its core is a former service offering, TaaS, which has brought a shared services and shared software tools focus to QaaS. Back in 2011, Wipro wanted to accommodate the many small contracts requiring non-functional, technical, and mobile website testing by providing a cost competitive service. The company launched TaaS to automate orders and quoting, relying on a service catalog and list price approach. Later on, it expanded its service offering to an internal crowdtesting offering, still relying on the TaaS principles.

Wipro’s acquisition of Appirio in 2016 introduced Topcoder, a crowdsourcing business model with a huge community of ~1.2m members. Topcoder has a rich service portfolio, including ADM, digital, UX, and AI, and is growing. Topcoder markets its testing services under the "real-world testing terms. And there is also TopGear, a crowdsourcing program launched in Q1 FY17 with Wipro, based on the same principle as Topcoder, but relying on an internal crowdsourcing approach, rather than external. Finally, Wipro is including in its QaaS offering a shared services and shared software tools capability found in its Flex DC testing offering.

The resulting aggregation is at scale: Wipro's delivery relies on ~65k external crowdtesters, ~7.1k registered internal crowdtesters, and reliance on onshore testing consultants, Wipro's TopGear, FlexDC, and specialized testing CoEs and labs. In total, we estimate that Wipro's QaaS offering can involve up to ~80k people.

Crowdtesting portfolio

QaaS is currently structured around two main offerings:

• A core mobile website and app testing offering, comprising of (manual) functional testing and cross-browser testing
• UX testing, including usability testing and accessibility testing (through a partner, Prakat).

Delivery is done through Wipro's hybrid model:

• Internal crowd (Wipro personnel, selected by the client), mostly around functional testing
• Topcoder's community, mostly on exploratory testing.

Also included in QaaS are test case design, and script creation, Wipro's mobile testing framework based on Appium and Experitest's SeeTest, and mobile app certification (according to app stores' guidelines). Access to mobile device labs, along with its mobile testing framework, are an area of differentiation in Wipro's QaaS offering.

The company offers access to mobility lab "on hire", based on technology provided by pCloudy.

Finally, as part of QaaS, Wipro also provides advisory services around testing maturity assessment, digital testing consulting and advisory services. Such services are delivered onshore and offshore, and are not crowdtesting services per se, but reflect Wipro's TaaS portal legacy of automating test orders.

Wipro’s crowdtesting roadmap

Wipro wants to maintain its dual crowdtesting positioning, which reflects emphasis on functional testing automation, and delivery using internal and external crowds. The company therefore has several priorities, one immediate priority being to target Wipro's existing client base.

A second priority is related to delivery: with ~65k external crowdtesters, the company believes it has more than enough bandwidth to supply manpower to, on average, 120- to 150 FTE-strong contracts it currently wins. It is therefore focusing on gaining more technical skills (around specific software tools such as Neoload and Tricentis), mostly through increasing the scale of its internal crowdtesting community.

In the long-term, Wipro believes its combined shared services and tools, and crowdtesting approach, can potentially disrupt the testing industry. The company wants to maintain its investment, focusing on automation, performance, and mobile testing. It is building testing scripts around mobile app compliance, certification, and migration that will be downloadable from QaaS. Finally, Wipro is investing in a diagnostics offering that it wants to promote standalone as a complementary offering to its testing and QA services. The diagnostics offering will initially be based on analyzing data from a variety of data sources including production logs, defect management, and ITSM software tools, and through AI, working on defect prediction from one release to another.

Conclusion

In summary, Wipro has a distinctive positioning in crowdtesting services, with an emphasis on mobile test automation, capabilities with internal and external crowds, a focus on shared services, and access to mobile labs on a consumption basis.

Will this positioning help Wipro QaaS reach the solid growth of tier-one crowdtesting vendors such as Applause, Bug Finders, passbrains, and Test Birds? We can’t help noticing that those vendors are heavily investing in developing their UX testing and market research portfolio. Wipro highlights that it is already engaged, and that under its real-world testing tagline for Topcoder it already provides exploratory testing. The full UX testing portfolio is probably the next step for Wipro.