RIGHT Blogs                                                              

Hybrid Delivery Model – Strategically distributed teams working towards one goal

Ever since outsourcing has emerged as a way of conducting business, cost has remained a dominant driving force for the same. Customer requirements challenged the outsourcing service providers as they evolved their service offerings through nearshore, onshore, offshore and onsite delivery models. In this exercise of addressing customer inhibitions to outsourcing, the service providers evolved their delivery models, utmost of which is the hybrid model which is a blend of more than two of the above models.

Application modernization – Five driving factors

Enterprise needs keep evolving over time. This makes the existing applications ability to meet the evolving enterprise needs questionable. Aging application portfolio and legacy systems need to be assessed for modernization. Application assessment for modernization will have a two pronged approach – First is to identify the driving factors for application modernization and next will be to assess the level of overhauling required for the modernization of the application portfolio.

Interactive Voice Response Systems (IVRS) Test Automation

It is challenging to setup automation for IVR systems because of the complexity of setting up test systems, synchronization of calls being generated with call flow being used, ability of the automation framework to be able to simulate all supported actions of the call flow and large volume of calls to be generated.

I wanted to share my experience in setting up test environments for automation testing when testing IVR systems with DTMF functionality. At the end of this blog, I have outlined how the same approach can be used for automated testing of Speech enabled IVR systems.

Can 100% test automation be achieved?

Some of the challenges commonly seen with automation are:

1.When the first build comes out in a sprint/iteration, it will have defects. These defects may be blocking and hence may not allow for automation script development to proceed. And at time, most critical issue is to find defects and report so that developers could fix them quickly to complete the functionality.

Transitioning in outsourcing engagements – Don’t fail to see the risks!

Transitioning program lays the stage for the setup and mobilization of an outsourcing engagement. It is during this stage that the outsource service provider is trying to get up to speed on its customers processes, infrastructure, and applications in order to provide the contracted services. The effectiveness of transitioning program decides the successful delivery of the services engaged for and the outsourcing value it generates, as it provides significant inputs for shaping up the project plan and solution design.

Test Automation – Do you have the business case?

Test Automation is increasingly becoming a key phase in the testing life cycle. Driven significantly by the time, cost and quality components, companies have recognized the benefits it confers. Faster time-to-market, reduced testing cycle time, lower testing costs, maximized test coverage are a few explicit benefits that companies look for from test automation.

Application Performance Management

Performance management in general is about optimizing effort and maximizing returns. In the context of software performance management the effort and returns are reflected in the software scalability, speed and stability aspects. Performance issues around response times, downtimes and post production crashes, infrastructure bottlenecks and under/ over utilization of resources impact the ROI on the IT investments. Cost implications apart, such performance failures may damage corporate brand leading to loss of business and revenues.

Visual State Manager (Expression Blend Part 3)

From the previous blog which gave an overview on setting a movie or a sound file to the Silverlight media element, let’s take the application to the next level by adding some more functionality using Visual State Manager, State Groups and States. The relationship between VSM and States is that the states are executed by the former. Here again I am emphasizing on building minor features without much effort in terms of XAML or C#.

Media Element (Expression Blend Part 2)

Expression Blend does not yet support using live XML data (RSS feeds) and you need to write some C# and XAML to achieve the same. As I looked at using and exploiting the Silverlight Media Element control, I was tempted to write this blog and in probably 6-8 steps how one could create major functionality with a few lines of code. The goal for me is to keep things simple for easier maintainability as well as providing a good primer using which the user can explore further. I have recently downloaded Expression Blend 4 Release Candidate and the following steps use the same.

Collaboration as a tool to build great teams and products

What is cross group collaboration?.When I was first introduced to this concept in my previous organization, I was wondering what it is and why there is so much hype around it. So much so, it was included as a part of a competency that you could measure the effectiveness of yourself while working with teams located across the globe. Now that was a different story as the Organization was so huge that there was an absolute need.