WHITE PAPER

DO MORE WITH LESS IN SOFTWARE

Indumathi Devi

Abstract
Faced with pressure to deliver more despite ever-shrinking
budgets and shorter timelines, most companies struggle to
balance the cost of innovation with business demands. Testing
is a critical area where neither speed nor quality of output can
be compromised as this leads to negative business impact. This
paper explains some cost-effective strategies that enable testing
organizations to improve efficiency within their testing teams
while ensuring high-quality output.
 Introduction
Even as the demands for agile software
increase exponentially, testing budgets
continue to shrink. Software testing
teams within most organizations struggle
to deliver quality software in shorter
timelines and tighter budgets. Further,
most software tests tend to reside in
silos making integration, collaboration
and automation challenging. Thus,
organizations need innovative testing
solutions and strategies to balance quality,
speed and cost.

External Document © 2018 Infosys Limited

1. Test with an end-user by undertaking real business user journeys lead to conflicts between developers
mindset across the system and test commonly and testers. Most teams have a polarized
used workflows in short testing windows. dynamic where testers search for defects
The job of testing goes beyond checking By mimicking real user journeys, such and must prove how the program is
software against preset requirements or testers identify higher number of critical erroneous while programmers defend their
logging defects. It involves monitoring production defects. code and applications. Cross-functional
how the system behaves when it is actually teams eliminate such conflict by gathering
being used by an end-user. A common members with different specializations
complaint against testers is that they do 2. Empower cross functional who share accountability and work toward
not test software from the perspective of teams common goals. For instance, ‘testers’ are
business and end-users. Effective risk- Agile and DevOps methodologies in simply team members with testing as their
based testers are those who understand software testing are forcing teams to work primary specialization and ‘programmers’
the system’s end-users and deliver value- together across the software development are those within the team who specialize
added testing services that ensure quality lifecycle (SDLC). Engendering test in coding.
products and meet clients’ expectations. independence is not about separating
To do this, testers must evaluate products testing from development as this can

This team structure encourages people the practice of continuous integration (CI) • Integrating various components that
to work with a collaborative mindset and and continuous delivery (CD) into their may change continuously and need to
sharpen their expertise. Such teams can be testing services. Irrespective of the level of be regressed frequently
small, with as few as 4-8 members who are DevOps maturity, CI/CD will provide only
• Automating data redundant tests
responsible for a single requirement or part limited value if not paired with the right
of the product backlog. Cross-functional kind and degree of testing automation. • Using the right set of automation tools
teams provide complete ownership and Thus, organizations need a robust, scalable and frameworks
freedom to ensure high-quality output – an and maintainable test automation suite • Moving beyond just the user interface
important step to realizing the potential of covering the areas of unit, API, functional, and automating unit, APIs and non-
agile. and performance testing. Automated functional tests
testing saves effort, increases accuracy,
improves test coverage, and reduces • Continuous maintenance and use of
3. Automate the automation cycle time. To ensure automation success, automated test suite
Running an entire test suite manually organizations must focus on: On its own, test automation is important.
is time-consuming, error-prone and, However, when automation is integrated
• Automating the right set of tests,
often, impossible. While some companies with a CI/CD pipeline to run every time
particularly business-critical end-user
are yet to on-board agile and DevOps new code is pushed, the benefits in time,
journeys and frequently used workflows
capabilities, others have already integrated cost and quality are multiplied.

External Document © 2018 Infosys Limited

In a fast-paced and evolving digital world, companies want their IT partners to do more
with less. When it comes to software testing, this places heavy pressure on software testers
who are required to push high-quality code faster at lower cost. To streamline software
testing, organizations need an approach where their testers adopt an end-user mindset by
testing real user journeys and critical business transactions. They must also create efficient
cross-functional teams that collaborate to achieve common goals and deliver value-added
testing services. Finally, automating different layers of testing and practicing CI/CD will
facilitate continuous testing and reduce time-to-market. These cost-effective strategies will
help software testing professionals improve productivity and deliver more with less.

About the author

Indumathi Devi is a Project Manager at Infosys with over 15 years of experience in software testing. She has effectively executed multiple
software testing projects. Working in different domains and technology stacks, she has assisted numerous clients in implementing robust
software testing solutions for manual as well as automated testing.

For more information, contact [email protected]

© 2018 Infosys Limited, Bengaluru, India. All Rights Reserved. Infosys believes the information in this document is accurate as of its publication date; such information is subject to change without notice. Infosys
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