Accenture recently held a two-day symposium for the clients of its testing services to look at how testing services are changing, showcase its latest offerings, and allow successful engagements to discuss the keys to their success and lessons learned.

Testing services are at a crossroads, as agile and DevOps have increased expectations around speed of delivery and driven convergence across the software development lifecycle. (NelsonHall’s Dominique Raviart has written and spoken about this on numerous occasions). This is necessitating a pivot in Accenture’s focus from testing to a more holistic view of quality.

The offerings and capabilities presented by Accenture indicated its views on the future of testing and IT services in general: a focus on user experience (UX) and highly automated delivery, which is necessitating changes in the capabilities of its personnel.

Expanding Universe of Testing Factors

Rather than being isolated as a single component of the SDLC, Accenture sees testing permeate across the lifecycle. That includes factoring quality as part of a focus on design thinking and UX; UX should now be a core focus of any IT initiative, internal and external to an organization. This shift has a direct impact on quality, with Accenture advocating an increased need to focus on the following key attributes:

• Experience: ensure seamless experiences regardless of channel and reflecting the voice of the customer
• Performance: ensure predictable behavior and gather user data in real-time
• Insights: optimize applications across the breadth of channels and devices for backward compatibility and future proofing
• Security: balance ease of use and privacy while reducing vulnerabilities.

Increasing Automation

Automation has become core to delivering test execution but its scope is now expanding, including applying AI concepts in testing as well as looking at how to actually test AI capabilities themselves. The use of AI and cognitive capabilities in testing can range from the management and generation of test data to the rationalization of test cases to optimize coverage.

In addition to exploring how AI can be applied, Accenture is rolling out platforms to drive automation in the delivery of testing services. These platforms include:

• Touchless Testing Platform: to manage the test process. Beyond running scripted, rule-based tests, it also orchestrates the testing process, incorporates analytics to optimize test coverage, and provides cognitive bots to assist the testing team and visualization tools. The platform includes technologies from Splunk, Saffron, Jenkins, GIT, HP ALM, Selenium and Tableau
• Omni-channel Testing Platform: for testing digital solutions across a breadth of channels, including reporting and analytics visualization capabilities. This platform includes capabilities from Perfecto Mobile, Applause for crowdsourced testing, and SOASTA for performance monitoring.

Accenture’s broad machine learning, automation and AI platform, myWizard, also offers a Testing Expert capability to provide analytics and cognitive capabilities.

These platforms are still in their infancy and the number of use cases of each will increase. Their use requires Accenture and other IT service vendors to revisit their personnel approach for delivering testing, from headcount to pyramid, to location, to skills.

Changing Workforce Needs

While these platforms are intended to reduce the cost of quality as well as improve the effectiveness of quality activities, they raise a bigger question regarding their impact on the broad personnel base performing much of these functions today.

Jeff Wilkinson, Accenture Test Lead for North America, says that while ~80% of the testing completed today is done manually, he expects this to have dropped to under 60% within three years. And not only will the overall quality organization shrink with this reduced workload, the role of the quality professional will also need to evolve.

One of Accenture’s clients, a large U.S.-based financial institution, has already begun evolving its delivery workforce to focus on quality engineering rather than on testing. This approach requires permeating quality concepts across the entire development lifecycle and necessitates resources to possess domain, analytics, data management, and tools knowledge.

This client team has re-organized its quality resources to a hybrid team of dedicated lines of business (LoBs) resources to embed these skills directly with developers and business analysts, as well as creating a centralized automation team acting across LoBs.

Another resource challenge is driven by the rise in devices employed by end-users. In part, this is being addressed by the omni-channel platform referenced above; however, no platform can address all permeations of devices. This has led to a rise in the need for crowdsourced testing, which Accenture predicts will be used on ~80% of digital engagements by 2018. This is a bold prediction; while it may be a little overstated, the rapid growth taking place in crowdsourced testing is undeniable. Crowdsourced testing from organizations such as Applause provide access to approved personnel available to test on-demand, who bring experience of a wide variety of devices and platforms helping identify specific defects without a long-term commitment by Accenture.

With examples from early adopters, as well as the maturing of its automation platforms, Accenture has begun to modify its delivery models, including for new opportunities, with modified organizations and skillsets. Accenture is also planning for increased productivity over the life of an arrangement, with these improvements spanning both direct testing efforts as well as upstream or downstream efforts such as requirements definition and deployment.

Next Steps

Testing models have evolved considerably in recent years, and Accenture sees further changes are on the horizon. Greater integration of testing with other software lifecycle activities, such as agile development teams, is still growing. Accenture is still offering Testing CoEs as a stand-alone service, though tighter integration into agile teams is expected to expand, as long as segregation of duties concerns can be clearly addressed. The increased use of cloud environments for testing workloads will also drive closer coordination between application testers and infrastructure providers.

In line with these requirements, Capgemini has introduced Digital Fabric, an application development delivery solution supported by my3D, a virtual visual management toolset.

The core of Digital Fabric is design thinking, agile development, smart testing and DevOps and is intended to address the inherent friction that arises in each phase of the delivery lifecycle by weaving a common thread across disparate groups, including:

• Requirements & Design: between IT and business groups in understanding the business value while defining requirements and creating designs
• Build & Test: across a distributed development team, as well as test and operations, including around ensuring test coverage of all critical functionality.

Requirements & Design with RDV

Rapid Design and Visualization (RDV) is a methodology to accelerate the discovery, definition, and validation of requirements through applying design thinking principles, scenario and persona development and rapid prototyping. The methodology includes:

• Defining scenarios: based on analysis of existing personas and usage requirements, critical scenarios define the core requirements for the new or modified system
• Creating and validating screen layouts: using market leading tools such as iRise to quickly develop wireframes and screen layouts as well as define user interactions
• Functional simulations: conduct simulations to test that prototypes meet requirements
• Generating documentation: used as inputs to both the development team as well as the test team, reducing the effort to kick off each subsequent lifecycle stage.

The core of RDV is quickly defining and prototyping products through the building of wireframes and screen layouts. Tools such as iRise enable requirements to be documented directly in the tool, to maintain traceability and form the basis for test scenarios. These tools also enable the exporting of the defined specifications of the prototypes to provide documentation.

In addition to feeding into developing test cases, RDV will develop a sprint plan, mapping user stories to sprint cycles. These maps are then used during development to measure and report progress against the plan.

Development with ADC

To support the development phase, Capgemini uses its Accelerated Delivery Centers (ADC), based in the U.S., U.K., France, Poland and in Pune, India.  In these centers, Sprint teams (or pods) that range from 5 to 7 resources are stood up and work in Java and .Net, with scrum masters providing guidance across a number of teams.

The ADC’s pods of cross-functional resources work in agile 2-3 week sprints, employing test-driven design and behavior-driven design principles. Technical environments can be rapidly provisioned leveraging Docker for workload containerization. Additionally, the ADC leverages a number of tools and accelerators, including:

• BDD Swift, which automatically enables requirements to be translated into executable test specifications based on behavior driven design principles
• Jira, for issue and bug tracking
• App Swift, which generates application code based on the UX requirements outputs developed in RDV
• App Builder, to create user interfaces automatically
• Git, for version control
• RoboQ, for inspecting code quality in Java and reducing technical debt
• Cloud Swift, for deploying code into cloud environments such as AWS or Azure.

As depicted below, Capgemini uses its Continuous Delivery Orchestration Engine (CDOE) to manage these tools and other development and DevOps tools across the development and test process. Built on Jenkins, CDOE interfaces to a variety of tools via APIs. CDOE provides a single interface for managing the workflow across the development lifecycle, leveraging Docker technologies to migrate developed code from initial compilation to production readiness.

Testing with SmartQA

Capgemini uses its SmartQA platform to support testing work, encompassing the management of test data, test automation, and test environments. SmartQA manages the test process through its Command Center, taking inputs from a variety of tools including Jira, ServiceNow and Clarity as well as embedding analytics to both predict and measure the breadth of coverage, and the effectiveness and efficiency of the test process.

SmartQA automates governance and handshakes across the test process as well as providing support for each of:

• Planning
• Data creation, obfuscation
• Environment spin-ups
• Workflow, build train and job train
• UAT execution
• SIT execution
• System test execution.

Dominique Raviart will be looking at the SmartAQ product suite in more detail in an upcoming blog.

Distributed Delivery with my3D

To improve cohesion among globally distributed teams, Capgemini has developed the my3D (distributed digital delivery) toolset. My3D covers the following functionality:

• Skills management: a repository of skills across the team to enable the quick assignment of work to the most appropriate team member as well as the identification of skill gaps to meet client demand
• Virtual visual management: a set of virtual white boards to manage tasks across a globally distributed team. My3D can connect to ticketing tools and visualizes data in 80 different ways. Individual project teams can customize the information connected and shared, becoming the fabric across teams and a common dashboard for use in daily standup meetings
• Innovation and crowdsourcing platform: started initially to gather feedback and requirements for the My3D toolset itself, this component of my3D allows for collaboration and crowdsourcing across project teams to drive innovations, creating a virtual continuous improvement list
• MyKPI Dashboard: to provide visibility across the project team of current project metrics and status. myKPI leverages integration to ITSM tools such as ServiceNow and Capgemini is in the process of developing integrations with Jira for project tracking, enabling my3D to act as a single project status dashboard once completed later this year
• Maturity matrix assessment: measures and visualizes the maturity of individual agile teams within the project.

In addition to these core capabilities, my3D also offers an app store that enables self-service procurement of DevOps tools by teams. Rather than tying in all development teams to a preferred set of tools, my3D enables Capgemini to offer flexibility in toolsets while also minimizing the time to initiate the use of those tools.

Capgemini has trained over 45,000 employees and client team members on the use of my3D and rolled it out to centers around the globe. Capgemini is also using it for internal staffing and metrics tracking in addition to the client engagements it supports.

One example of a client engagement where my3D is being leveraged to deliver application development is a global bank. Capgemini worked with the bank to roll out my3D to address the bank’s objectives of reducing IT spend through improved quality as well as eliminating gaps in metrics reporting and providing a single global view of project status.

To meet the bank’s objectives, my3D deployed 56 digital workspaces, live incident and defect tracking from ticketing systems, and enabled daily stand-up meetings across 1500 FTEs. The my3D skills management functionality was used to identify skill gaps within the incident management team to target training and reduce incident resolution times. My3D has become the central console for managing, monitoring, and reporting to a globally diverse team.

Capgemini is encouraging the development of new functionality within my3D through the use of its embedded innovation and crowdsourcing platform. One area being targeted is the expansion of integration across the toolset, enabling further automation and ‘zero-touch’ processes. An example targeted for roll-out this year is the automation of integrating sprint plans into my3D to auto-populate the activities assigned to each team member.

In general, these toolsets and processes also lay the foundation for Capgemini to incorporate next generation capabilities that will further accelerate service delivery. Integrating cognitive capabilities that link identified defect and technical debt issues with training plans for resources, or using available resource skills to inform the building of sprint plans, are simple examples of how these toolsets can provide even greater value when further integrated and analyzed.

Achieving results with financial services clients

Financial services is currently the largest industry population in the Accelerated Delivery Centers, accounting for approximately one-third of the total ADC client base. One example of Capgemini’s application of Frictionless AD is with a large European bank, where the bank’s traditional waterfall development cycle could not keep up with accelerating regulatory changes.

To define requirements and develop designs for the bank, Capgemini had the product owner travel to India and work on-site with the Capgemini development team. The joint team defined six personas as the basis for defining requirements and then leveraged iRise to build out wireframes. Capgemini estimates that this joint effort supported by iRise reduced the workload from weeks to days and that ‘feature waste’ (time spent on developing features that aren’t required) was reduced by 20-30%.

To complete the development activities for the bank, Capgemini stood up 22 pods, each comprised of five resources. App Builder was leveraged to translate the requirements from iRise into usable, pre-defined Java code blocks, reducing development effort.

To accelerate the testing effort for the bank, the requirements gathered in the RDV were loaded into Selenium to develop automated test cases using BDD Swift, with orchestration by Jenkins. This increased test code coverage and reduced defects in production.

Elsewhere, a global financial services firm has seen a 50% reduction in its technical debt. While still in progress, the bank projects a total of 50k savings in project hours which has enabled it to engage with Capgemini for more projects, growing Capgemini’s footprint at the client by 50%. In another project, Capgemini reduced defects found in SIT and UAT by 60% and improved time to market by 30%.

• Revenue £4,288.1m up +5.6%, up +6.7% at constant currency (CC)
• Operating profit was £143.8m, a margin of 3.4%, down 330 bps

The decline in profits was anticipated with a warning given by the company to this effect only a few weeks ago. In this period, Serco reported a net exceptional charge of £90.5m, reflecting principally the Electronic Monitoring settlement and one-off costs, together with an estimated £21.0m of other indirect costs in relation to the UK Government reviews.

As forecast by the company in its H1 announcements, growth slowed down, in H2 2013. In fact it halved.

Contract wins in H2 2013 included an ITO contract extension for the EU and an FM contract with the Canadian defense. But BPO contract wins completely dried up in H2 2013. This perhaps reflects the problems of Serco’s Global Services division which was most impacted by the electronic monitoring debacle, reporting -350bps decline in operating margin.

Serco admits that clients did not want to talk to it until the issues had been resolved. New contracts have started to come in once again (such as the Lincolnshire Council contract) since Serco settled the matter with the U.K. government.

Apart from the MoJ expenses, divisional margin came under pressure from upfront expenditure on existing contracts. These included:

• A ~£15m working capital investment in transformation for Shop Direct in 2013 and further anticipated but smaller outflow in 2014. Returns are expected to begin from the contract in year 3 (FY15).
• Suffolk Community Healthcare redundancy cash costs of c£5m; no effect expected in 2014.  

It has not been an easy year for Serco in some of its international businesses either. In Australia, a change of government and policy has resulted in revenue attrition in its contract with the Department of Immigration and Citizenship for which Serco runs a number of detention centers.

In America, the outlook remains uncertain due to Federal funding challenges around programmes and contracts, but Serco has won a number of new contracts in the region, including the $1.25bn 5-year federal Eligibility Support (ES) contract by the United States Department of Health and Human Services' Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) but this is likely to be at relatively low margin.

Serco has done well to achieve topline growth despite its annus horribilis. 2014 will be a year of repair and rebuild for Serco. The new CEO, Rupert Soames, and a number of new non-executive board appointees, are likely to go to start with a major review of the business. Serco's strategy of diversification should help with this activity, providing it with a broad set of options for rebuilding the business.

Serco has updated its guidance for 2013 and 2014 following its clearance by the U.K. government to bid for new contracts.  Serco expects a mid-single digit percentage organic decline on 2013 revenue due to:

• Lower levels of incremental work won across the group to date
• Attrition from contracts lost such as electronic monitoring
• Volume reductions in its Australian immigration detention services contract
• Assumptions as to the extent to which it will be successful in securing further rebids and extensions as well as new bid opportunities during the year
• Adverse currency movements in 2013.  The impact of this has reduced revenues in 2013 by ~£50m and profits by £8m.

Adjusted operating margin is anticipated to decline by ~50 to 100 basis points on 2013 due to greater than previously envisaged margin reduction resulting from the revenue impacts described above, and the incremental costs of the agreed corporate renewal programme.

Serco's ongoing portfolio management resulted in further non-core disposals in 2013. These businesses contributed £43m of revenue and £7m of profit up to the point of disposal last year and will not contribute to revenue and profits in 2014.

In 2014, Serco expects:

• Continuing additional costs of £10m a year related to the corporate renewal programme within its adjusted operating profit
• One-off costs incurred in 2014 of ~ £15m for external advisers and other directly-related costs of programme implementation, including initial training and systems set-up
• A further restructuring charge estimated at £10-£15m will be incurred in 2014 to implement reductions in headcount and related costs.

Market consensus for 2014 Adjusted operating profit is currently £277m but Serco anticipates a result that could be 10-20% lower than this for ongoing activities, on a constant currency basis.

The profit warning came on the same day that Serco announced clearance by the U.K. government to bid for new contracts. Serco announced that it expects a mid-single digit percentage organic decline on 2013 revenue due to a number of factros including:

•     Lower levels of incremental work won across the group to date
•     Attrition from contracts lost such as electronic monitoring
•     Volume reductions in its Australian immigration detention services contract.

Adjusted operating margin is anticipated to decline by ~50 to 100 basis points on 2012 due to greater than previously envisaged margin reduction resulting from the revenue impacts described above, and the incremental costs of the agreed corporate renewal program.

In 2014, Serco expects continuing additional costs of  up to £40m related to the corporate renewal programme, external advisers and further restructuring.

Market consensus for 2014 adjusted operating profit is currently £277m but Serco anticipates a result that could be 10-20% lower than this for ongoing activities, on a constant currency basis.

Serco's financial woes have been compounded by a change of Government in Australia, its second largest market. Tony Abbott, the new prime minister, has pledged to stop the flow of boat people into the country by shifting the work to overseas centers. This has resulted in a decline in volumes in the detention centers that Serco manages under contract for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

On another front, in January, Serco's health provision in Suffolk was criticized after a four-month NHS review found services were being provided safely but improvements were needed. The areas for improvement were reported to include staff morale, recruitment and retention, communication with GPs and commissioners, equipment stores and procedures at the Ipswich care co-ordination centre.

Serco has been implementing a major corporate renewal plan as part of its negotiations with the Cabinet Office. As well as extensive management changes, and a renewed and refreshed code of conduct and governance, Serco has committed to creating a  separate division for its U.K. Central Government work to increase focus and openness for Government as a collective customer.

Other key measures include:

• Enhancing transparency and access, with reporting of operational and financial contract KPIs, and greater engagement of customers at contract and departmental level.
• Establishing formal Ethics Committees and Ethics Officers in each division, accompanied by the redesign of its whistle-blowing process to the highest international standards
• Measuring the progress of attitudinal change throughout the organization with ongoing independent culture and ethics reviews.

Axelos was incorporated in July 2013, 51% owned by Capita, 49% by the Cabinet Office but governed by a separate board from the parent organizations. The company will be fully operational from January 1, 2014. Axelos is the owner and accreditor of the best practice methodologies.

Its aims are:

• Quality: to raise the quality bar for products and services delivered to clients for the full Best Management Practice portfolio
• Relevance: to improve the relevance of the portfolio to the business, e.g. demonstrable value to managers, CIO and CEO
• Growth: to grow internationally in both public and private sectors
• Innovation: to adopt new ideas and standards in communication, learning and management
• Collaboration: to be a social business with open and transparent communications and to integrate with other frameworks.

Axelos is looking to achieve these objectives by:

• Extensive use of digital channels including enhancing the existing Best Management Practice web site for multiple channels built on top of an enhanced document management core. Use of digital channels will include gamifying the learning tools and provision of information and material for practice tests on-line and as apps for smart devices
• Growing the online communities of practice that contribute to enhancements and development of the portfolio. It has already run product workshops in London, for attendees from the wider international ITSM and PPM communities to discuss subjects such as international tailoring and ITIL improvements
• Develop multi-national offerings for major organizations and industries.

The company is based at Capita’s offices in London. Capita provides Axelos with back office services such as HR and payroll, F&A and IT. Currently, there are 10 employees but Axelos is recruiting.

Axelos is in effect the new custodian of the best practice portfolio. The jewels in its crown include the widely adopted ITIL and PRINC2 methodologies. The JV is the vehicle to free the custodian from public sector constraints on commercialization to grow the revenues from this valuable portfolio. There is potential to grow the best practice products into international standards.

As a new company, Axelos is very privileged to have a strong portfolio of products which also lends itself well to client interactions in communities of practice and social networking, where ideas for enhancements can take shape faster, and be of value immediately after they are formally released. There is much value in collaborative and crowd-sourced innovation that Axelos can potentially tap into. There are already communities of practice based around the existing products, and Axelos will be looking to take them along its journey of evolution.

The challenge for the JV is to develop a new lasting operating model that successfully combines collaborative innovation, and crowdsourcing - benefiting from the wisdom of its communities of practice, while growing the business commercially. There are some good practice examples in the open source software community. Axelos should be looking at all options assessed against the requirement of protecting its IP.

The restructuring of NPS division last year, to focus more on services, combined with a number of contracts starting in 2012 helped improve NPS revenue. Contracts that started in 2012 include:

• The Blue Badge Improvement Scheme
• Athena - the managed service for data sharing by Essex Police and six other forces

NPS is also more agressively marketing its housing software internationally, reporting expansion in New Zealand, Australia and Canada, though no growth data was provided.

NPS' £170m contract with C2k to provide an Education Cloud for all schools in Northern Ireland was a major win for the company. Other contributors to the division's revenue improvements include managed services contracts with mid-market customers in the UK, including Christian Aid, Almac, Doosan, Wolseley, AAH Pharmaceuticals and the Driver and Vehicle Agency in Northern Ireland.