We recently talked to Testbirds, the largest Europe-headquartered crowdtesting firm, founded in 2012. We found Testbirds upbeat after the pandemic. The company had an excellent year in 2020, achieving revenue growth of 30% as organizations, challenged by closed offices, turned to Testbirds to conduct crowdtesting of their digital initiatives. This was followed by another excellent ye[...]

  We recently talked to Cigniti about its digital ambitions and its acquisition of RoundSqr. While remaining focused on quality engineering, Cigniti has quietly expanded its capabilities to RPA over the past three years. This extension is logical: RPA shares much with testing, relying on creating and maintaining bots or test scripts. This is the start: Cigniti has broad ‘digit[...]

  We recently talked to Qualitest regarding its acquisition of ZenQ. ZenQ is the latest in a series of recent acquisitions by Qualitest, under the ownership of PE BridgePoint. The company acquired four firms in 2021: QA InfoTech (QAIT) in Bangalore, doubling Qualitest’s presence in India Olenick in the U.S. Telexiom in Germany Comply, an Israeli company that added [...]

  There is a big divide between IT sustainability and quality engineering (QE). In IT, sustainability is emerging from a carbon emission niche, expanding from a consulting to an execution phase. In QE, the focus remains primarily on functional automation with continuous testing/DevOps and AI as primary drivers. In short, the two have little in common. As such, we had not anticipated[...]

  NTT DATA recently announced the long-planned merger of its international business with NTT Ltd., the overseas ICT unit of Japanese telecoms giant NTT. The combined NTT DATA and NTT Ltd. will have revenues of ¥3.5tn (~$26.2bn) and 180k personnel. With this move, NTT unites its two ICT units into a single entity, driving its vision of One NTT. The merger will remove some overlap[...]

  On June 14, 2022, Atos announced the unexpected separation of its IT infrastructure services unit, Tech Foundation, from its BDS and Digital units. With this move, Atos has aggregated its high-growth and high-profitability units into a new company, Evidian. Its infrastructure services capabilities will stay in legacy Atos, with the objective of stopping the revenue decline and improv[...]

  The war in Ukraine has brought EPAM Systems (EPAM) under the spotlight. Although headquartered in Newton, PA, EPAM has a delivery network heavy in Central and Eastern Europe. It was founded in 1993 in New Jersey and specializes in service development, digital platform engineering, digital product design, and custom software. However, with its first offshore development center opening[...]

  NelsonHall recently attended the ‘Infosys Cobalt World Tour’ conference in New York and, as the world begins to open up again, it was great to engage with Infosys executives face-to-face. Infosys presented its Cobalt Cloud strategy and use cases to increase awareness of the benefits to the marketplace and highlighted that its cloud approach is focused on achieving busi[...]

  The world of quality assurance (QA) is continually evolving, alternating between cycles of centralization and decentralization. QA became part of testing CoEs in the 2000s, driving process standardization, test coverage and automation. More recently, in its latest organizational model, it has become part of the agile development structure and is spread across agile projects. Quality [...]

  NelsonHall is currently updating its bi-annual IT services forecasts, and here’s a quick look at some of the headlines for 2022. COVID-19 no longer a threat to IT services spending growth The world has evidently changed since our November 2021 update. The pandemic now seems largely under control, despite spikes in China. India, the world’s IT services hub, is gradua[...]

  We recently talked to Erik van Veenendaal, the head of the TMMi Foundation, which promotes the TMMi QA process improvement methodologies. TMMi Has Become A Widely-Accepted Methodology for Test Process Improvement Founded in 2005, the TMMi Foundation is a not-for-profit organization focused on improving corporate test processes. It launched its TMMi methodologies at a time when [...]

  The software testing/QA industry relies on three steps for functional testing: Defining test requirements (what do I need to test?) Test case creation (creating detailed instructions) Test scripts (using these test cases to develop scripts operated by a functional test execution tool, e.g., Micro Focus QTP, Tricentis Tosca, and Selenium Grids). Broadly, these three ste[...]

  DevSecOps Emerging Application security testing has been part of functional testing for many years without being a significant investment topic. Organizations have typically favored functional testing automation while moving to agile/continuous testing; they have considered application security testing as an afterthought. With the increased emphasis on cybersecurity, applicatio[...]

  Dominique Raviart gives his reaction to today's announcement by Atos, who issued its second profit warning in seven months.[...]

  Here’s how NelsonHall expects the IT services market to shape up in the year ahead. IT spending will be sustained in 2022 Organizations quickly resumed their IT service spending in 2021: after a decline of over 3.4% in 2020, IT spending rebounded in 2021, reaching 6.9% year-on-year growth (of course, against a soft compare). We are predicting growth of 5.5% in 2022. IT[...]

  Since its creation, the software testing services industry has focused on regression testing, i.e., ensuring that previously developed software still runs after a new build. Regression testing is the core of all QA activities and has been widely adopted as part of multi-year managed services contracts. The financial services industry, with its extensive application estates updated by[...]

  We recently spoke with Qualitest, the world’s largest QA pure-play. The company is in investment mode to accelerate its growth, backed by its majority owner, PE firm Bridgepoint. The company has added Cognizant leaders to its executive team (CEO, CMO, and India MD positions) with the intention of reaching $1bn in revenues in the next five years. In support of this drive to a[...]

  The world of OT has been consulting-centric in recent years. Although their focus on digital manufacturing and IoT opportunities has intensified, enterprises have typically engaged their IT services partners mostly for use case identification, PoCs and pilot projects. Large-scale build projects have been uncommon. But the pandemic has put digital manufacturing firmly at the top of[...]

  Capgemini is aiming for low or no maintenance and support fees as part of its ADM offering. Depending on its level of responsibility for development activities, the company commits to reducing maintenance and support activities and is, therefore, making a bold statement unheard of in the IT industry. To achieve such high aspirations, the company believes Sogeti's application t[...]

  We recently talked to Infosys Validation Solutions (IVS), Infosys’ quality assurance unit, and discussed its continued investment in AI to automate testing and validate chatbots and AI models. AI-Based Analytics from Test Case and Defect Data The primary AI use cases in QA are around analytics: QA and development produce a vast amount of data that can be used for guiding [...]