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Two decades into the field and it never runs out of steam…
With twenty years of my life dedicated to the field of Testing now, of which 12 years were in Capgemini, I could go on and on about the subject. I started out as a consultant for Testing projects and organizations and eventually graduated to Business Development and Pre Sales. Today, I meet a lot of customers facing new challenges in Testing due to the emergence of digital technologies and the way they have to deliver in production, using agile or DevOps philosophy. This is where my time is spent as an evangelist for Testing Centers of Excellences, such as the Sogeti European Software Test Center in France, which is an entity dedicated for testing projects for all Capgemini & Sogeti clients across Europe. It is an exciting time for us as we look into the business development for this Test factory, with ~160 people working from France and ~30 people from Morocco. I work on pre-sales, proposals and business models, talking to different customers and trying to address their challenges with a pragmatic and added-value solution. We provide the Testing tools & services for a wide array of Industrial testing areas like functional, web & mobile, automation, integration, performance and every day is one more step toward meaningful collaboration for our customers.
The concern remains constant, pretty much!
We have ~30 different customers now and most of them have one common question – how to reduce cost while enhancing the quality and the ROI on Testing investments. With the traditional delivery models being outdated, they want to know how to scale DevOps projects. The massive adoption of agile & DevOps practices inevitably leads to a bottleneck in testing within their organization, since automation and continuous tests are taking precedence, with short delays but limited resources. Moreover, their testing organization is most of the time axed around dedicated vertical test teams, each one targeting one specific business domain or delivering one specific test type (ex: performance, integration …).
And if we add the volume of unused tools licenses (test automation or performance tools), this is where TCoEs have greater potential for effecting cost savings. Firstly, because they’re offer more flexibility with a real capacity of ramp-up and ramp-down when needed; secondly, because customers can apply for shared services across their organization in a work unit model; thirdly, because they don’t have to take care of licenses anymore since TCoEs like ESTC also include licenses quote part for standard testing tools in their work units. ROI is then measured by the cost of their application maintenance. One of the major goals of testing is to reduce this cost, by reducing number of defects and releases.
Testing Centers make all the difference
Test Automation is today one of the main focus given by IT departments to accelerate their go-lives. Being able to develop test automation and continuous integration is not a challenge anymore, but a must-have. This is where Test Center can help, by building automation components that accelerate testing and learn from past projects and technical challenges.
Testing is also a domain where creativity and innovation take a large place, with the advent of AI and IoT, and leads to give new answers to these challenges: Model Based Testing, Cognitive Testing, Business Driven Development, End to End Testing. Here also, our Test Centers are the best places to experiment and measure ROI on real business cases, in partnership with our clients and the editors.
The working model
Our testing center works on an onshore-offshore model with the balance brought in by RightShore. Sogeti has the biggest software testing center in Europe with 160+ professional testers in France, but many more offshore. Clients place their demands through a standardized demand management tool after which our service managers send back the corresponding quotation according to the contractual model. Then follows the associated planning and the commitment aspect, irrespective of the delivery location. A dedicated global resource manager ensures that right expertise is chosen to deliver according to expectations, in terms of time and quality.
Our clients collaborate with us across projects. Many of them don’t need a globally embedded testing team, but just the guarantee that the service can be properly delivered at any time. On the other hand, some clients need a continuous service with a dedicated team. Even they participate in the flexible working model of the Test Center, in terms of ramp up and ramp down. In any case, all our clients get the right quality at the right price. Mobile testing is also a good example where clients need (mainly due to device fragmentation) means they can afford. Test Centers propose industrial and shared solutions for mobile test automation and mobile test coverage.
Testing scene is about to evolve
IT organizations will require more and more flexibility in testing services and more innovative ways to test their applications in the coming years due to the massive adoption of DevOps / agile, test automation, continuous functional, performance, security tests.
With our assets like TMAP and TPI, and Test Centers like the ESTC, Sogeti demonstrates a real maturity in testing activities and helps clients reduce testing costs by up to 30%, and enhance quality on production.
