QUALITY. PRODUCTIVITY. INNOVATION. endava.com

Is Testing a Commodity? Endava Executive Network

London, 23 June 2015

Testing is a critical activity for modern software delivery organisations but the

approach used varies widely and there is little agreement as to what

constitutes effective practice. The key question for many people is not

whether testing is a commodity but whether there are parts of testing which

can be safely treated as a commodity service?

On Tuesday the 23rd June, Endava hosted an evening networking event – first

of a series of Endava Executive Network programme. The evening was

introduced by Endava’s CTO, Eoin Woods, and commenced with a discussion,

facilitated by Endava’s Head of Testing, Mark Firth. The event was attended by

senior IT managers from banking, payments and insurance companies.

QUALITY. PRODUCTIVITY. INNOVATION. endava.com

A topic for debate

The term commodity is specifically used for an economic good or service when the demand

for it has no qualitative differentiation across a market.

The opinion of our event’s attendees on whether testing can be commoditised was that the

majority of testing is an expert activity, similar to software development, and requires a

blend of technical, domain, people and process skills. A couple of areas where it may be

possible to commoditise testing were thought to be some aspects of mobile and cross

browser testing.

The key to commoditising a service is to apply a consistent measurement for the delivery of

that service. However with a highly complex activity such as software testing there is no

universally recognised standard and most of the attendees reported that the quality of the

testing services they consumed was based on perception. Also when buying a commodity

you pay for the good or service rather than the people who provide that good or service and

within this group the vast majority of testing was paid for through the provision of teams

rather than services.

Views and opinions

on the core testing skills and trends

Domain expertise

There was split opinion on the importance

of domain expertise required to conduct

effective testing. While it is generally

regarded as vital to have some domain

expertise to test complex applications,

some of the attendees believe that the

reliance on domain experts testing

manually could be reduced by automating

some of the tests, while others said that

their testers had worked on the systems

for several years and they did not have

the time or budget to invest in

automation.

Agile and test automation

Two of the companies in attendance have

mature agile development approaches

with high levels of test automation during

the development sprints. The view of the

Head of Testing of one of these

companies is that organisations will have

to fully automate testing in the future in

order to survive and in order to achieve

that, testers need skills more closely

related to software developers than

traditional manual testers.

QUALITY. PRODUCTIVITY. INNOVATION. endava.com

Key takeaways

The overwhelming conclusion from this

group of testing experts was it was

difficult to commoditise most testing

activity and even if it is possible, it is rarely

possible to do so without destroying much

of the value of the testing. Opinion in the

group was more varied on the subjects of

domain knowledge and automation. Some

attendees rely on manual testing by

domain experts, while others feel that

there are other ways of addressing the

challenge – notably though automation.

On the subject of automation, there were

again a range of views, from those who

are aiming to automate almost all testing,

to those who feel that for their systems

such an investment could never be

justified.

We plan to run more testing themed

events in the near future to continue to

build this community of testing expertise

to share ideas and practice in a neutral

environment.

Thank you We would like to thank to our speakers, Eoin Woods, CTO Endava, and Mark Firth, Head of

Testing Endava, and to all those who came to the session for all their inputs on the topic

and the sparkling conversations generated during the event.

To continue any of these conversations, feel free to get in touch with us at:

TestingServices@endava.com.

About Endava Endava is a leading IT Services organisation with over 2,250 full time employees.

Headquartered in London, Endava has offices in the UK, USA, Germany, Romania, Moldova,

Macedonia and Serbia, and reported revenues of £64 m for the financial year 2013 -2014.

Supporting the full software lifecycle, Endava covers application development and

management, testing, digital media, infrastructure management and cloud services.

Industry-focused verticals are led by professionals who speak the customers’ language,

designing services for clients, complemented by world class delivery. Endava’s solutions

transform systems, platforms and processes for the world’s leading brands in Capital

Markets, Banking, Payments, Insurance, Media, Retail and Telecommunications.