Quality Determines Your Business Success PROJECT PARTNERS
COVER STORY
Quality Determines YourSuccessBusiness
Andreas Golze, Senior Vice President –Quality Engineering & Assurance, at Cognizant, waxes lyrical about the importance of quality assurance in IT. ognizant is an American servicesinformationmultinationaltechnologyproviderwith a global presence. Andreas Golze is Senior Vice President – Quality Engineering & Assurance at Cognizant, which is recognised as one of the best-valued quality assurance teams worldwide.
Andreas takes the example of a smartphone, which receives updates on a regular basis. Any
So, why is quality assurance in IT important? Andreas answers, “If you are buying any consumer goods, you look for functionality and experience that meet your expectations. For many years, this has not been a concern for IT solutions. Quality in IT simply meant that the user is not complaining. With widespread digitisation, we are using IT enabled or enhanced solutions more than ever before. Consequently, IT must meet the same quality standards as every other component of the final product or service.”
upgrade should not negatively impact your ability to operate the device because it has a quality level you are happy with, and you expect the provider to maintain that quality level throughout the device lifecycle. Andreas continues, “To efficiently maintain the established quality, a continuous and intelligent fully automated test platform is required. Continuous quality assurance is the key to success for modern businesses. We are helping our customers to build, maintain and operate these platforms, using the latest technologies. With this, we can guarantee and maintain defined quality levels over time.”
“Quality assurance has become integral to product or service experience”
ANDREAS GOLZE, Senior Vice President –Quality Engineering & Assurance
6 Andreas believes the investment in quality assurance is a business decision. He explains, “At the airport, you go through a security check. You could argue that we have safer flights because airport security is doing a great job. The other way of looking at it is that mankind has become better, and we do not need airport security. If you want to compromise, you could decide to only check every second person. The big question is where your comfort level lies, whether you would prefer everyone to be checked, or every second or third individual. At the end, the time and cost of checking are only justifiable if nothing
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quality would have on the business in the broader sense.”
In a world that is becoming increasingly digitalised, software is changing much more during the lifespan of an application. With people depending on software to go about their everyday lives, Andreas explains that this is what is driving the heightened demand for quality assurance. He says, “My job is to help providers of services that are using IT to make sure their customers are getting the service they expect without a glitch”
“Quality assurance has become integral to product or service experience. If you take energy suppliers, for example, they are now moving into what they call smart grids. The energy supplier is making the provision smarter, which will save you money, but at the same time, you expect it to always work. The basic assumption when you sign any contract is that the service level will be maintained. With software, the likelihood of something going wrong if you don’t establish quality happens. So, if the cost for doing quality assurance were to become too high, there would be no business case.” To remain economical, Andreas says you must innovate, improve productivity of your quality engineering and assurance team, and keep the cost level low enough that it makes business sense to do the quality assurance. He
10 continues, “We try to establish commercial thinking with all our customers. For example, with an application that is used by millions of people on the planet, if it has a small problem and users cannot connect to the server, the business impact would be massive. Spending a little more on quality assurance is justifiable because the return would be significant. There is no point in taking the risk. This is what drives the business case of quality assurance – it depends on the impact that lack of
Service providers are required to always meet the expectations of the end user. Failure to do so could result in the customer going elsewhere or requesting their money back. Andreas explains, “My job is to help providers of services that are using IT to make sure their customers are getting the service they expect without a glitch. In many business processes, software becomes the bigticket item because if it is not working, you have nothing. The weakest link determines the strength of the chain. In nine out of 10 cases, software is the weakest part
assurance“Quality is like the airbag in the car, providing a safety net for IT and the end user”
13 assurance in the right way is very high, and that is why its importance is going up.”
“We continue to help our clients around the globe to improve business outcomes with our next generation QA approach!”
ANDREAS GOLZE, Senior Vice President – Quality Engineering & Assurance
16 and has the highest likelihood of failure. It is also changed continuously whilst everything else remains the same. The likelihood of introducing failure through software into perfect working processes is therefore very high.”
The focus on quality is also increasing because new legislation requires companies to now do testing. Andreas continues, “Whether you are a bank or a medical device supplier, by law, you cannot use software that is not tested. You must prove it has
17 been tested and keep the records of the testing. As the number of regulations are going up, more quality assurance is needed. For all critical systems, it is essential that IT is flawlessly operating, and that can only happen with quality assurance. Quality assurance is like the airbag in the car, providing a safety net for IT and the end user.”
Automation helps to increase the productivity and hence drive down “Tricentis is an excellent automation tools provider. Efficiency and productivity are key for the economy of quality assurance”
3. Partnerships with tool providers to help the tester be more effective. Cognizant has partnered with Tricentis on the automation side.
Andreas explains, “Tricentis is an excellent automation tools provider. Efficiency and productivity are key for the economy of quality assurance.
1. People with a testing mindset
2. Industry-scale products to help the tester get their job done efficiently e.g. tools for automation and robots for device testing
Andreas highlights three key components needed to carry out quality assurance:
ACCELERATE YOUR TESTING
“The number of SAP updates has increased in recent years, and enterprises are finding traditional, manual testing methods can’t keep pace with rapidly launching new products and services. Our alliance with Cognizant means that, together, we’re positioned to help clients address this challenge with a simplified and flexible approach to testing and speed their releases.”
End-to-end testing isn’t easy. Today’s applications evolve at a rapid-fire pace and are often highly connected with other systems across an enterprise IT landscape. But success is simply about understanding the challenges, identifying the best ways to overcome them, and introducing the right processes and technology to help put those plans into action.
— Chaim Frenkel, Vice President of Strategic Alliances, Tricentis
Discover how today’s leaders boost speed, maintain quality, and reduce costs with enterprise test automation in Tricentis’ Executive Guide to Accelerating Digital Transformation.
Your end-to-end testing likely includes a combination of both enterprise applications – such as SAP – and custom-developed, customer-facing applications. Testing across a complex set of disparate systems makes it difficult to know if something does go wrong. By introducing advanced test automation tools, organisations can test all of the necessary workflows within an application, including the connection points with other applications.
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Get your free guide A powerful partnership: Cognizant and Tricentis deliver world-class solutions for modern testing challenges
Pulling in production data and anonymising it for security purposes, adding another layer of complexity for testers, and creating risks in the case of any kind of audit. Introduce a test data management tool to automate the creation of synthetic test data, which mimics production data but doesn’t carry the same risk since it is not actually real user data.
Accounting for difficulties with test maintenance because every time a component of the application’s user interface changes, the test needs to get updated along with it. Combat frequent updates by prioritising certain workflows over others based on risk, so QA teams aren’t overwhelmed with writing and rewriting end-to-end tests for every possible workflow. Handling an ever-increasing volume of connected apps (on average, 33 different systems!) means a lot of dependencies on web services and third parties that may have costly simulations. Use a service virtualization solution that can mock external systems for end-to-end testing and avoid paying for expensive simulations or relying on a live version of the system, which can contribute to test flakiness.
Ensuring end-to-end testing alignment when testing is distributed rather than centralised, leading to duplicate work, building custom integrations between tools, and communication breakdowns. Align on a solution that synchronises information across the variety of technologies each team uses to create a single source of truth and make the hand-off from one team to the next more efficient. 1. 2.4.3.
For an SAP S/4HANA migration project to proceed on time and on budget, organizations need fast feedback on whether each round of changes achieves the desired result. Cognizant and Tricentis offer a first of its kind integrated testing solution that ensures a seamless transition of critical business applications from SAP Enterprise Core Components (ECC) to SAP S/4HANA.
The alliance combines Tricentis’ automated, AI-enabled tools for continuous testing with Cognizant’s expertise in implementing enterprise-wide SAP projects. The addition of AI transforms business processes by utilizing intelligent automation and introduces changes faster and with more frequency. The success of this partnership initiative led to recognising Cognizant as a Tricentis SAP Transformation Partner of the Year in 2020.
CHALLENGE SOLUTION
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4 SOLUTIONS TO END-TO-END TESTING CHALLENGES
OVERCOMING SAP S/4HANA MIGRATION TESTNG CHALLENGES
20 Andreas shares the example of a bank that used to do two system updates every year, with each update taking a team of 20 people about a month to complete. They now carry out updates every six weeks, and the execution time is only a couple of hours. Andreas adds, “The productivity of the test teams is improving because of smart automation. We use AI to reduce the number of test cases with virtualisation and automation to execute the needed test cases in a shorter timeframe.”
Cognizant as Tricentis’ preferred implementation partner, and Delphix as Cognizant's preferred test data management software
Delphix is the industry leader for DevOps test data management.
Moresupplier.people are using digital devices that depend on IT processes that are working properly, so the demand for testing is increasing. Andreas says, “The biggest challenge for us is to improve our capabilities when it comes to productivity. Testing will become much more the cost for the test execution. At the same time, it improves documentation and quality of the test execution as it eliminates human errors. This follows the same logic that we already know from automation in mass production. Production lines, if set up in a smart way, produce more at a lower cost with a higher quality.”
Cognizant and Delphix have been partnering since 2017, creating solutions in the test data management. In the SAP business area, Tricentis, Cognizant and Delphix provide a strong combination for testing; Tricentis being the officially preferred SAP test software provider, “Delphix is the industry leader for DevOps test data management. Cognizant and Delphix have been partnering since 2017, creating solutions in the test data management”
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22 industry specific. It will be different if you are testing entertainment software from the media industry versus logistics software for a large steel company. As a quality assurance expert, you will need a better understanding of the underlying business to do a proper job. We are using robots for the physical interaction involved in testing devices. For example, a robot can test an ATM machine. We have been doing this for the last few years, now it is scaling up considerably. For us, this will be a major area of research, development and Theimprovement.”marketgrowth for digital quality assurance is estimated at between 15 and 20 per cent year on year. Andreas concludes, “We continue to help our clients around the globe to improve business outcomes with our next generation QA approach!” For further information on Cognizant, visit www.cognizant.com
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