What will be the future of testing engagement models?

Analysts, such as Forrester, believe that traditional Managed Test Services (MTS) deals may be fewer in the future.

Recent Gartner Research findings suggest that MTS market will see a 15% growth. Organizations that are yet to mature in rolling out managed testing functions shall need to look at establishing an MTS organization while the organizations that have MTS organizations or equivalent need to look at Managed Test Operation (MTO) with aim to mature testing functions to Quality Assurance.

There is little doubt that organizations specializing in quality/test service offerings are looking at ways to align their models to client needs.

Both the providers as well as the clients are contemplating on the following questions:

• Provider Perspective: What do our clients need? What are we offering?
• Client Perspective: What do I need? What do I want my providers to offer?

Future of testing engagement models – point of view

Providers as well as clients have three plateaus in their businesses. I describe these plateaus in the following points:

• Business As Usual (BAU) Plateau: Clients want to keep lights on for a section of their BAU portfolios and manage their legacy applications to continue to service customers. Many of these engagements have QA & Testing embedded into the maintenance/enhancement projects. As we discussed earlier, given the higher split of QA effort in new digital transformation engagements, the share of QA effort in BAU maintenance/production support engagements has continued to shrink over the last few years. IT service providers have addressed this plateau with the Test Factory model to pool test for many engagements, with an ability to offer continuation of knowledge, availability of tools, centralized governance and capability planning, and service based on work delivered rather than continuing dedicated practitioners for engagements during lean periods.
• Industrialize Plateau: Clients want to industrialize their testing, get cost advantage, and route the savings from this segment to be able to spend it for new initiatives. Testing is easier to separate out as a validation step through the life cycle to be carried out by dedicated test practitioners, using the best of the process, methods, and tooling, and offering QA services to meet the agreed SLAs/KPIs. IT service providers have addressed this plateau with MTS to industrialize the manner in which the testing service is offered cost effectively. Managed test services leverage offshore, core/flex, process and tool assets, and transformational levers to carry out testing in an industrialized manner. Testing can be carried out in agile/Devops engagements remotely through the distributed agile method and Managed Test Services can be Agile-MTS with a flavor of distributed Agile. Distributed Agile has been discussed in Chapter 6, Testing goes an Extra Mile over Weekends. What is considered Innovative and Specialised today, needs to be offered as Industrialized in the future, and will soon become BAU in our fast evolving IT landscape. Refer to the following diagram:

  

• Innovate Plateau: Clients need to address to digital business and be present in multiple-modes—offline, online, and multiple speeds to cater to varied customer segments. Gartner Research refers to this as bimodal IT. Speed does not always come without cost. Clients seek specialized services (for example, new developments in agile/DevOps mode) based on their needs. To address this segment, customers need business assurance (for example. assurance of time to production, time to market, and reduced failures). High quality and timeliness are most important for this plateau. Cost reduction, while a relevant need, may not be addressed for this segment due to time pressures. Providers have addressed this need of Innovate Plateau with Specialised Test Services to cater to the QA need of agile/DevOps Testing with leading-edge automation tools, business assurance to partner with clients to reduce risk in the journey, and share the risks and rewards through agreed rewards and penalties.

DevOps mind

Would DevOps shrink the amount of testing? Are Predictions on increasing QA spends justified?

DevOps is actually spreading testing across the software development life cycle. The builds are smaller and so are the QA life cycles. There are continued multiple builds though offering advantage of speed, which does not necessarily mean less QA or lesser QA spend. With new development projects on the rise for digital transformation projects, overall QA spends will be on the rise. One of the challenges to address will be to achieve a balance of the triple objectives (time, cost, and quality) in the evolving QA/DevOps world.