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Oct 15, 2024, by Dominique Raviart
Virtusa recently briefed NelsonHall about how it conducts GenAI testing. With the emergence of LLMs, Virtusa has seen a rising interest in understanding how to validate them. However, testing LLMs is not easy, as traditional testing approaches are not relevant to LLMs. It requires reinventing software testing and looking beyond the output of a transaction.
Non-Deterministic LLMs C[...]
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Jun 21, 2024, by Dominique Raviart
Wipro recently briefed NelsonHall on its GenAI investments for quality engineering, discussing the creation of use cases and sharing the thinking behind some of its decision-making.
Wipro’s GenAI investments for QE are part of the company’s ai360 program, a $1bn investment that includes activities in developing use cases, training, and GTM. The launch of its QET GenAI [...]
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Apr 03, 2024, by Dominique Raviart
NelsonHall recently talked with Eviden, Atos’ consulting and application services business, about its QE practice, Digital Assurance.
Digital Assurance has 5k quality engineers, 65% offshore, reflecting a high leverage in North America (due to its Syntel heritage) counterbalanced by Atos’ large European public sector client base. The practice has aligned its service po[...]
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Apr 05, 2023, by Dominique Raviart
We recently talked to Qualitest about its latest acquisition, Q Analysts, its sixth since 2019. Qualitest has been on an accelerated transformation journey under the ownership of PE BridgePoint. Q Analysts further strengthens Qualitest’s capabilities in next-gen digital QA, with expertise in testing AI-based devices such as AR/VR/MR headsets and generating data for training AI [...]
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Dec 12, 2022, by Dominique Raviart
Software testing continues to be an industry of contrasts: the primary activity, functional testing, remains a human-intensive activity, despite the accelerated adoption of continuous testing (i.e., bringing functional automation as part of DevOps).
But testing has also grown in a highly specialized set of activities, earning the name of Quality Engineering (QE), ranging from supp[...]
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Nov 24, 2022, by Dominique Raviart
We recently talked to ValueMomentum about its QE approach to product-centric development and testing. The company is helping its insurance clients improve the quality of their applications using agile best practices and DevOps tools. In support of this, ValueMomentum has refreshed its automation approach and created a continuous testing platform articulated around design (shift-left)[...]
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Nov 14, 2022, by Dominique Raviart
TCS recently briefed NelsonHall on its approach to site reliability engineering (SRE) in the context of quality engineering (QE).
SRE emerged almost a decade ago as part of the shift-right move, targeting production environments beyond traditional IT infrastructure activities such as services desk and monitoring activities. While no definition of SRE has fully emerged, TCS points [...]
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Sep 02, 2022, by Dominique Raviart
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[...]
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Aug 18, 2022, by Dominique Raviart
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[...]
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Aug 09, 2022, by Dominique Raviart
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 [...]
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Jul 11, 2022, by Dominique Raviart
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[...]
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May 04, 2022, by Dominique Raviart
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 [...]
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Feb 11, 2022, by Dominique Raviart
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 [...]
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Feb 07, 2022, by Dominique Raviart
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[...]
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Jan 20, 2022, by Dominique Raviart
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[...]
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Dec 21, 2021, by Dominique Raviart
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[...]
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Sep 13, 2021, by Dominique Raviart
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[...]
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Jul 02, 2021, by Dominique Raviart
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[...]
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Jun 10, 2021, by Dominique Raviart
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 [...]
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Feb 15, 2021, by Dominique Raviart
We recently talked to passbrains, the crowdtesting pure-play with dual headquarters in Hamburg and Zurich that has just been acquired by German IT service and VAR vendor, msg. The acquisition is timely for passbrains. Its founder died in the summer of 2020 at a critical time, as the firm was developing the 2.0 release of its crowdtesting platform and diversifying its client base[...]
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Sep 03, 2020, by Dominique Raviart
We recently talked with CSS Corp about its investments in QA, in particular its new Digital Assurance offering. Digital Assurance targets UX QA, an area that has not had the attention it deserves.
Clients have prioritized investment in continuous testing & automation
While many large organizations have devoted considerable time and effort to continuous testing and func[...]
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Jul 28, 2020, by Dominique Raviart
QA pure-play Qualitest recently briefed NelsonHall on a new AI-based offering the company launched in 2019.
The testing services industry began to deploy AI-based offerings about three years ago, starting with AI-based analytics use cases, looking at where and what to test better. Since then, the focus has shifted to AI-based automation, looking initially at the automated creation[...]
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Jun 08, 2020, by Dominique Raviart
We recently talked to crowdtesting specialist firm Testbirds about how the firm has adapted to COVID-19 and the macroeconomic conditions.
In the past two years, the crowdtesting industry has realigned its capabilities around agile testing, primarily providing services for mobile apps and websites along with chatbots and connected devices/wearables. The realignment has been success[...]
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Apr 27, 2020, by Dominique Raviart
Capgemini’s Sogeti recently introduced a new TMAP book, Quality for DevOps Teams., which is a direct successor to its TMAP NEXT book published initially in 2016. TMAP NEXT has remained one of the methodology bibles that guide QA practitioners in structuring their testing projects.
Sogeti has added regular updates around agile/scrum development, IoT, and digital testing that [...]
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Apr 16, 2020, by Dominique Raviart
We recently talked to Shishank Gupta, the practice head of Infosys Validation Services (IVS), about how the practice is adapting to the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing economic crisis. Of course, the initial focus has been on employee health, helping clients, and enabling its employees to work from home, getting access to tools, applications, and connectivity.
The QA practice i[...]