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Ranga Reddy,
CEO,
Maveric Systems
“Companies should sign up for testing at the same time they sign up with the application vendor”
Spotting the potential of independent software testing early on, Ranga Reddy co-founded Maveric Systems in the year 2000 and has since led the company as its CEO. Maveric is now a leading testing company, with development centers in India, UK, the Middle East and USA. Reddy talks to Sanjay Gupta, Sr. Associate Editor, Network Computing, about his company’s focus, how enterprises should look at testing, and industry trends. Excerpts:
Any particular reasons why Maveric has chosen to focus on BFSI and healthcare segments?
Maveric Systems strongly believes that domain competency and product expertise, coupled with testing knowledge, deliver exceptional value to customers. This view has led to the choice of vertically aligned services and thus BFSI naturally emerged as the first choice as it has the maximum IT spend compared to any other vertical. Insurance and healthcare verticals have a few areas of overlap, and thus allow for extension of client references from insurance to healthcare as well as ease in cross-vertical resource redeployment (resulting in better utilization ratios). Thus, we have chosen Healthcare as our second vertical focus. Maveric also has strong focus on test automation which is vertical-agnostic.
The market for software testing in India is growing much faster than the overall software market. Why is that so and what are its implications?
Testing market across the globe is growing at a rate faster than the development and maintenance markets. This is primarily due to the unprecedented focus on lowering the total cost of ownership and systemic changes mandated by the industry regulations such as SOX, MIFID, etc.
It is often a constant complaint of testers that not enough time is left for testing due to deadline pressures. What do you think is the way out?
Ideally we desire that the clients sign up for testing at the same time they sign up with the product/application development vendor. In reality, the testing contracts are assigned during the fag end of development cycle. Further, in most situations the functional requirements evolve during the customization/development lifecycle of the project and the same are not well-documented. The key success factor for a testing firm is to be able to take up test design without comprehensive functional documentation and cut the test design and execution time by 50%. Maveric has developed preparatory IP that enables us to crunch the traditional design and execution times by 30% and enable clients to meet their stiff time to market deadlines.
How does test automation help enterprises struggling to maintain the quality and robustness of their business apps?
At this juncture test automation is largely focused to enhance the speed and reduce the effort (by a fraction of 10-25) in test execution pertaining to stable applications that undergo periodic modifications. We see a greater benefit if enterprises focus on test design automation.
How should companies address the questions of ‘how much to test’ and ‘when to stop testing’?
The decisions on how much to test and when to stop testing largely get influenced by the budget, available time and the past experience of the decision maker. In our view how much to test is to be based on statistical modeling of risk rather than the above factors.
In your experience, how are Indian enterprises placed vis-à-vis companies in more mature IT markets when it comes to software testing?
The companies in the more matured markets are moving from single-vendor bundled contracting (development, testing, maintenance and support) to multi-vendor unbundled contracting scenario. We expect the mature enterprises to move toward independent pure-play testing vendors from the current scenario of choosing large SI as testing partners in the next 2-4 years.
We have observed that companies from emerging markets are also behaving in the above manner wherever IT investments are substantial in nature.
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