Test Center Challenges

The Test Factory, or equivalently the Test Competence Center, embodies the concept of software quality centric organizations relying on people, processes and tools.

Traditionally, we think of testers as the writers of functional test scripts through a long and tedious manual process. This manual testing process typically extends from the system under test requirements assessment to successful test verdicts passed against the final application code delivery.

This is not the case anymore, especially not in the context of high maturity testing practitioners groups. For these teams Application Lifecycle Management impliesrobust iterative software delivery from the inception phase (i.e. the business needs capture phase) to the product delivery. 

 

The emergence of Test Competence Centers reflects the need for global organizations to specialize their resources in Testing. Practitioners are software quality assurance teams who address potentially complex, distributed, agile and ‘right-shoring’ contexts.

Smartesting® software solutions address this need by extending the value of Testing for the following business imperatives:

•    Globalization, with off-shoring and outsourcing

•    Regulatory Compliance for auditability

•    IT Governance for Business Alignment

•    ERP and Legacy applications migrations

Application Lifecycle Management implies robust iterative software delivery from the inception phase (the business needs capture phase) to the product delivery phase.

Test Factory resources are composed of testing tools users who want to be productive and predictable while delivering both reliable and flexible enough testing, through systematic functional validation.

The Smartesting® solution addresses the needs for more predictability and productivity within functional testing competence centers. Smartesting® addressed domains falls into four main categories where different Test Factory needs may apply:

• ERP based core business applications: One time, possibly replicated, enterprise project application relying on business analysts and architects for Project Management. This is combined with a joint but separated organization which can be outsourced or offshored/nearshored.

• Maintained core business applications, typically supporting business processes: Large to medium size transactional IT applications relying on distributed teams with business analysts, software architects, core development teams, and externalized test and validation organizations.

• e-Commerce strategic applications, typically developed by system integrators: Opportunity for supporting on-going Quality Insurance efforts at mature software development organizations who seek productivity gains and cost of testing reductions due to large scale/long term application life cycle management of their in-house applications portfolio.

• SOA upcoming transformation projects: Emerging needs for SOA Governance of new enterprise projects, including improving application lifecycle quality with new paradigms such as model-based testing with Smartesting.

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