Testing As A Service – Models

[Jonathon]

View the webinar recording and slides Here

The Testing landscape is changing forever, the traditional approach to providing business value through testing is constantly being challenged. So businesses need to constantly re-examine the real value of testing services as an integral part of their overall delivery capabilities. The tendency has been to rely on complex hybrid resourcing models made up of internal resourcing and/or external resourcing (near shore, mid shore and off shore), to strive for Testing Centres of Excellence (TCOE).

The question is: are traditional Testing as a Function (TaaF) as part of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) model still valid? Or whether Testing as an Activity (TaaA) needs to develop a new Solution Delivery Lifecycle Integration (SDLCi) model supporting Business on a Page (BoaP) to provide business visibility through powerful Model-Based Design (MBD) techniques?

Traditionally, with the Software Development Lifecycle (SLDC) (e.g. Waterfall) key Testing as a Function (TaaF) resources were retained in-house, in order to benefit from their extensive domain expertise and increased understanding of business requirements.

Modern approaches such as organisation-wide / enterprise agile (OEA) adopt more Testing as an Activity (TaaA) approaches by utilising cross-functional teams that are re-useable, re-deployable and have dynamic resource allocation. Such teams are no longer specific to purely Testing as a Function (TaaF) but contribute to and integrate with other business deliverables as part of, say, the proposed Solution Delivery Lifecycle Integration (SDLCi) model.

This aligns with last year’s EuroSTAR (2013) topic from conference chair Michael Bolton’s theme of Challenging Testing? This explored the fundamental question as to who should be providing testing services?

Businesses should focus on business, and not try to be Testing Centres of Excellence (TCOE).

Similar questions have also been raised as to whether businesses should be retaining highly skilled testing professionals specialising in areas such as performance and security when that is not their core business offering? (e.g. a large supermarket chain spending £millions each year on building Testware Automation Frameworks (TAF)).

Performance and security testing disciplines are good candidates for ‘Testing as a Service’ models that can be provided at a fixed usage or output-based price .

At a recent Gartner presentation, I had discussions on this topic with Gartner’s researchers. It was apparent that the increased focus on business delivery is not just about chasing the ‘Hype Curve’ and the ‘Magic Quadrants’ promoting Solution Integrators (SI) maturity but also:
• How to drive True Innovation powered by the Cloud?
• How to gain Business Actionable Insight (BAI) through Big Data?
• How these approaches can empower businesses to improve the understanding of their core business through abstraction or encapsulation of business processes by adopting the Business on a Page (BoaP) model.
 
Over the last 5 years I have been actively exploring Testing as a Service (TaaS) models. The key focus has been on the core businesses differentiators such as agility, visibility and flexibility which are achieved by:
• Real adoption of Cloud platforms (Public, Private or Hybrid) and services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)
• Improving the Time to Market through Continuous, Integration, Build & Delivery (CIBD), ‘Shift Left’ (Test-Driven Delivery) or ‘Shift Right’ (Service Delivery i.e. DevOps), ‘Shift Up’ (Business Acceptance Testing) and ‘Shift Down’ (User Acceptance Testing)
• Providing dynamic Solutions (Products or Services) through pluggable Service Oriented Architectures (SOA), Web Services (WS) and Application Programming Interfaces (API)
• Managing Portfolios of these Services (API, SOA) over bespoke design of Applications for a specific Customer or Client
• Focusing on the All-Channel Customer Experience through the Digital Enterprise journey for Transformation or Convergence supported through Social Intelligence or Enterprise Gamification, rather than building platform specific User Interfaces (UI)
• Leveraging powerful Service / Network Virtualisation platforms that support Test First Delivery (TFD) methodologies as the Solution delivery enabler not the delivery mechanism i.e. which Technology or Platform?
• Integrate ‘As A Service’ Solution Integrators (SI) that provide the end to end Business Delivery process linked to quality deliverables directly enforceable Service Level Agreements (SLA) with defined Business Acceptance Criteria (BAC), measurable by Key Performance Indicators (KPI) as well as complying with the businesses appetite for Risk Mitigation / Exposure.

As the above topics are too diverse to cover in detail here this discussion paper will focus on how to integrate ‘As A Service’ models within Testing as an Activity (TaaA) that add clear value to the Business Delivery process through the following models:
• Testing as a Service (TaaS) +
• Test Platform as a Service (TPaaS) +
• Test Infrastructure as a Service (TIaaS)
• Test Automation as a Service (TAaaS) +
• Functional Testing as a Service (FTaaS)
• Performance Testing as a Service (PTaaS) +
• Mobile Testing as a Service (MTaaS)
• Security Testing as a Service (STaaS)

In particular, the topics shown with an plus sign will be directly challenging the current industry perception of what a ‘As A Service’ models means? Resulting in unlocking truly consumable testing services and through the creation of a Global Testing Marketplace (GTM).

[Jonathon]

Hi all,

Just to start this off. Firstly I hope that you enjoyed todays Webinar on Testing as a Service – Models.

http://www.slideshare.net/Jonathon_Wright/euro-star-testingasaservicemodelswebinar

This followed on from Paul Gerrards discussion paper on ‘A new model for testing’ after spending the last 5 years talking about ‘Testing as a Service’ and ‘Test Automation as a Service’ I really wanted to explorer the whole ‘As a Service’ in more detail so I put together a discussion paper around this:

https://leanpub.com/taas

EuroSTAR will be sending out a cut down version of this eBook (complementary) over the next few weeks.

Equally I’m happy to send a free copy of the Preview Edition if you send me a email to [email protected]

I’m looking forward to hearing what everyone in the testing community thinks of ‘Testing as a Service’ Models and discussing it further with you all on TestHuddle or this years EuroSTAR in dublin.

[Ronan Healy]

The fear of being first to respond…!!!
Enjoyable webinar.

[Jonathon]

Ronan,

Thanks for the positive feedback! Always great to hear!

Great post on Windows 1.0! I actually still have a VM with it on (as well as Windows 10 (minus the zero).

https://huddle.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/on-this-day-november-1st/

I may try and dig out XRunner and load it on Windows 3.11 then try and get it to work HP Service Visualization in the Cloud?

Whilst I’m waiting for the flood of questions (which is good) note I like your response the best!

Jonathon

[Ronan Healy]

Ha! Thanks Jonathon. You might have lost me there! Sadly I was too young for Windows 1.0 but I do remember testing (out of curiousity) every icon on Windows 3.1!

[Padmaraj]

Thanks Jonathon to bring light on all Testing As A Service Models.

[Arlene]

Hi Jonathan,

Which among the testing-as-a-service models is the easiest to setup and where there are quick wins for testing? Just wondering when shifting from the traditional to as-a-service models where would be the best area to start.

Thanks,
A

[Jonathon]

Hi Arlene,

I spoke at the BCS SIGIST on Friday around ‘Testing as a Service – Models’ and for me the easy wins for testing would be:

Test Platform as a Service – Continuous Assessment, Insight, Quality, Learning (connected intelligence) – to support shift left platforms that enable you to do better testing supporting lean/agile practices and provide viability of the Quality.

Test Infrastructure as a Service – Continuous Testing, Build, Deployment, Delivery, Support, Maintenance – to support shift right infrastructure that allows you to deploy in the TestOps / DevOps (operations world).

Happy to send you a copy of the full ebook which is scheduled for release by TestHuddle in September.

/Jonathon.

[Author]

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