Recorded 07/10/19

Agile Development and Continuous Delivery are rapidly becoming the de facto standard for software development. The key business driver behind these initiatives: delivering new functionality to your customers faster. This is easy to state in theory but much harder to achieve in practice: the level of quality of your services must be maintained! If your system goes down once a week every week, your customers are unlikely to be happy.

In order to realize the desired business goals of Agile and Continuous Delivery, it is thus essential that entire team – developers, testers, and the business – have a highly accurate, near real-time measure of the risk and quality associated with the features in your delivery pipeline. This calls for extensive and accurate testing. In fact, making testing the central component of your delivery process is the most critical challenge that teams need to address.

The Need for Radical Flexibility in Test Automation

Identifying the quality and risk of new features to an acceptable level of confidence means carrying out a large number of different types of tests: code analysis, unit, functional, performance, regression and stability tests, usability analyses and more.

It also means carrying them out fast: organizations cannot afford to wait for lengthy manual tests, or complicated, manual analyses of test failures. Add in manual maintenance of the test code, the test environment parameters, and test data and it is clear why, for organizations relying only on manual testing, it is virtually impossible to implement real-time quality awareness effectively.

Test automation is a prerequisite for full-speed Continuous Delivery. But we need to go a step further: it is critical that your test automation is dynamic and flexible. The attributes of quality and risk that need to be measured will differ between projects, use cases and over time: performance in one case, security in another, usability and functionality in the next. As a result, the types of tests and test tools that need to be used will never be static.

Mind the Automation Anti-Patterns!


Our Speaker:

Vikas MittalVikas Mittal – Global President, Digital Assurance, Xebia
Vikas Mittal is the Head of Xebia’s distinguished Centre of Excellence—Digital Assurance (DA). The IIT Delhi alumnus joined Xebia in 2019, and his responsibilities include strategizing DA processes, optimize operations, and improve practices for seamless execution and successful deliveries of DA projects. His focus area also traverses the development of automation solutions for Software Testing Lifecycle and DevOps using the latest technological innovations in Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics.

Leader by spirit, Vikas is spearheading the team of Digital Assurance professionals at Xebia, helping and supporting them all in accomplishing their personal as well as company goals. His expertise in architecture, design, and implementation of test automation frameworks and solutions enables him to serve Xebia’s high-end customers well.

Vikas pursued various certification programmes viz; HP Mercury LoadRunner v9.0, HP Mercury LoadRunner v 9.0, HP Mercury VuGen Software 9.0, HP-Mercury Certification Quality Center 9.2, and HP-Mercury Certification Quick Test Professional 9.2 that helped him develop technical skills and competencies.

His career history of 15 years features eminent employers in the global IT industry such as Infogain, IBM Global Services India, CMS, and Fiserv. In 2002, the young and dynamic engineering graduate began his career as Quality Assurance (QA) engineer and grew up to work at senior-level positions of Global Head, Quality Assurance, Global Head of Testing Horizontal, Chief Solution Architect, and QA Lead in top-notch IT & software development companies.

Prior to joining Xebia, Vikas had worked with Infogain for four years as Chief Solution Architect and Global Head of Testing Horizontal, where he supervised the execution of largest CRM Migration testing projects for performance testing and functional test automation for Microsoft Dynamics. He also managed the largest global ERP migration to SAP S/4 Hana for a Fortune 10 company. All the company stakeholders immensely value his contribution to establishing Infogain as a thought leader with Fortune 500 companies.

Presently, Vikas is simultaneously working on Atal Innovation Mission which is an endeavor of Government of India to encourage and promote a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship, particularly in tech-driven sectors.

Besides being a tech maestro, Vikas is the keynote speaker and mentor, too who loves to empower individuals by sharing his life-learnings and impart knowledge to them.

Speaker Details:

Vikas Mittal – Global President, Digital Assurance, Xebia
LinkedIn: /in/vikasmittal/
Twitter: @vikasmittaldel