Mindtree recently briefed NelsonHall on its work in testing automation, in particular on its Dynamic Test Engineering Platform (DTEP) IP which the company launched in 2015. With DTEP, Mindtree is centralizing access to several IPs and accelerators and hosting them on the cloud or on premise. DTEP, which automates the testing life cycle, includes several elements:

• Test support services i.e. dynamic provisioning of test environments hosted on Microsoft Azure (and also on AWS or on private clouds, when requested by clients) together with test data provisioning
• Integration with CI/CD tools (e.g. Jenkins) and test execution (based on HPE UFT, Sikuli, and Selenium)
• Several Mindtree IPs (Mindtree’s functional automation frameworks (functional, mobile, performance and digital) or open source software (e.g. code quality analysis with SonarQube and CI-CD Jenkins)
• A dashboard drawing data from HP ALM or other test project management tools and end-user data visualization (with templates designed for several roles including testers, testing project manager, and IT head) based on using open source (e.g. Google Charts)or COTS (e.g. QlikView, MicroStrategy and SAP BI).

Mindtree with DTEP is investing further in automation, based on mixing its own IPs, and open source software, as much as possible, while retaining COTS (to accommodate clients’ existing investments in software licenses).

Two aspects of DTEP stand out:

1. Mindtree has created a pre-integrated DevOps platform, with CI/CD and release automation capability. Such platforms are becoming a must have in the testing industry, though not that many vendors have developed such a DevOps platform. So this is still a differentiating factor for Mindtree
2. Mindtree has maintained its effort around digital (including UX and mobile). About four years ago, Mindtree was one of the first few vendors to focus on UX: at that time, the company trained its career testers on taking an end-user approach to testing and also assessing the performance of web sites from different locations. Mindtree’s UX testing approach has been formalized through IPs i.e. mobiWatch, pWatch and UILite. In short:

• pWatch helps assessing and optimizing the performance of web sites and mobile sites/apps from 30 locations and across combinations (i.e. combinations of browsers, networks and locations), and comparing their performance with competing sites
• mobiWatch assesses the impact of mobile apps and web sites on the device, and monitors key metrics from a device perspective (e.g. measuring how much those mobile sites/apps draw resources from the mobile’s battery, memory, CPU, graphics rendering and network)
• UILite provides compatibility testing . It assesses website variations across OS/browser combinations and highlights differences, as well as validates W3C usability standards. The tool also identifes the broken links.

Mindtree has two large clients that have adopted the full range of DTEP, as part of large engagements/managed testing contracts. In addition, it has ~20 +clients that use few elements of DTEP (but not the full platform). Deployment time is three to four weeks and DTEP is provided as part of the service (with clients bringing their own licenses when needed).

What is the roadmap for DTEP?

• Inclusion of additional IPs as cloud hosted tools, and further automation through model-based testing, using ConfomrIQ (or any other COTS compatible with the XML standard)
• Service virtualization based on CA Tech’s Lisa product is a key priority

DTEP is one of the initial steps for creating a platform, based on integrating existing IPs and accelerators at Mindtree. DTEP goes beyond testing frameworks as it expands from pure test execution to CI/CD and to digital. Full DevOps automation is in the horizon and AI/machine learning will probably be the next step for making sense of logs found in defect management systems, in ITSM and from servers.

To some extent, Mindtree pioneered the UX testing services industry, initially described as taking an end-user view of testing. The company continues to invest in its digital testing offering.