QA Talks With George Ukkuru

Hello Everyone, this is Kanika Vatsayan, VP & Head Operations at BugRaptors. I would like to welcome all to our BugRaptors’ QA Talks.

QA Talks, as most of you know, is a platform where we connect with different individuals to learn about their personal work experiences and have their views on various topics such as Software Testing, Automation Testing, Regression Testing, Digital Assurance, Quality Assurance, QA Transformation, Agile Testing, Enterprise QA Strategy, Regression Testing, DevOps, and many more, yet most probably related to the software testing domain.    

Also, QA Talks aims to obtain deep insights from leaders who’re working in top companies, specialized in Software Testing Services and Quality Assurance. Throughout the online interviews, they help us know how they’re bringing a digital transformation, driving a change, and making a significant impact in industries using emerging technologies and innovations, and how they’re leveraging Agile, End-user approaches, and other best software testing practices to manage the software engineering process and the software testing life cycle. At BugRaptors, we’ve successfully conducted over 100 interviews with several QA specialists and tech giants of independent software testing industries. The time has come now to introduce to a very eminent and practical leader at UST and our new guest – George Ukkuru. UST is a global digital transformation solutions provider, and George has been associated with this organization for more than two decades. He is recognized as the go-to person for testing-specific experiments amongst his peers and is always appreciated for his core expertise that is optimizing cost, quality generation by deploying the right set of tools, platforms, and practices, and the strategies that he utilizes well for improving speed to market. 

Kanika Vatsyayan: Thank You, George, for sparing some time to talk to us. It's a wonderful feeling to have a famous leader in an interview who is well-versed in testing & test automation.   

George Ukkuru: Well, thanks, Kanika. I am also very delighted to be an interviewee of BugRaptors QA Talks.  

Kanika: Pleased to have you George. Well, How did you get into testing? 

George: In the year 2000, I was hired by Caravel Information Systems in Bangalore as VB and ASP Developer. Unfortunately, rather Fortunately, after a few weeks of joining the project, I was assigned to went on hold, and I was told to move into a testing role temporarily. The assignment was around testing the first version of an E-Learning product that we were building for a customer. I started liking the job that I was doing and decided to continue in the testing stream.  I was the first tester in this organization. By the time I moved out from the organization, we had a seven-member testing team, and we were testing multiple products.  

Kanika: Tell us about the Noskript platform. 

George: UST NoSkript™ is a Next-Gen Quality Engineering and application certification platform designed for digital enterprises to bring agility and end-user centricity into the software engineering process. Combined with multi-layered analytics and AI algorithms, the platform amplifies the capabilities of multiple QE solutions, tools, and frameworks to support continuous quality injection. The enterprise-class cloud-native platform blends the power of NLP, deep learning, and AI technologies to optimize testing. The digital analytics hub provides more than three dozen pre-built integrations with industry tools to overlay information from multiple data sources across the enterprise and drive intelligent QE. 

Kanika: What additional features are you going to add to Noskript? 

George: The product's latest release has an MS Teams plugin that will help business analysts and non-technical testers execute test scripts using text chat. We have also built an AI-based Test Optimization solution that allows customers to optimize their regression test packs by automatic purging and merging test cases. We have several other features like Chaos Engineering and Performance testing capabilities that we plan to release by Q2 of 2021. 

Kanika: Should all regression tests need to be automated? 

George: Ideally, yes, but there might be technical challenges in automating every test case. Also, there might not be enough ROI automating all of your test cases. Ideally, all API-based regression tests should be automated, and the next best candidate should be your end-to-end workflow tests or business process tests. One can achieve anywhere between 80% to 95% coverage for an end-to-end workflow test pack. The most crucial step is to optimize your regression packs before you start automating them – Junk in – Junk Out! 

Kanika: How much time is appropriate to spend on regression testing, and why? 

George: Suppose an organization uses a non-automated approach. The effort will be between 30% to 50% of the overall effort. But if there is a good automation strategy and approach in place, the regression testing effort should be less than 5%. It would be best to reuse the automation scripts developed within sprints for regression, executing test scripts in an unattended mode, and self-healing for script maintenance.  

Kanika: What does the future hold for application testing? 

George: The future is very bright as we continue to see insufficient quality for applications in production and low levels of automation. Functional and Sprint Testing will not be centralized, but this may not be the case for specialized testing types like performance or chaos engineering. We might see more usage of AI to solve testing-specific problems. There is a shortfall of good SDET's, and there will be a significant demand pipeline.  

Kanika: According to you, what are the top automation testing trends to look out in 2021? 

George: The adoption of BDD-based and open-source automation tools is going to increase for automating custom applications. The usage of scriptless testing tools will be focused on packaged applications like SAP, MS CRM, SFDC, etc.  

We will see the use of AI to design automation scripts, derive insights from test runs, self-healing of automation scripts, etc.  

More organizations may start using their existing Robotic Process Automation tools to automate their end to end tests 

In Sprint, Automation levels are going to increase, and there will be a heavy focus on Micro Service/ API based automation.

Kanika: What is the role of test automation in security testing? 

George: Security is a key focus area for all enterprises and this has resulted in the adoption of shift-left security testing and DevSecOps practices. One should focus on static analysis of code and integrate capabilities like BDD Security into the existing automation framework to carry out Dynamic Application Security Testing within sprints. Adoption of DevSecOps practices will help to improve collaboration, improve speed and reduce the cost of quality.    

Kanika: How do people find you online?   

George: Here are some ways to connect with me online :

Twitter: @ukkuru  

Facebook: Facebook profile  

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ukkuru/  

Blog: http://testermania.blogspot.in/  

Kanika: Thank you so much for joining us and helping us take your interview on our platform, QA talks. It was an exciting interview session with you, and I am thankful for your valuable time that you gave to us, especially to share your great backstory and talk to us on essential testing topics. I hope we will have another conversation again as there is so much to learn from you.   

George: Thank you, Kanika. I am looking forward to connecting with you again, and we will discuss more over testing & test automation advancements in the future for sure.   

Kanika: Oh, that’s great. Thank you so much for your concern. Have a nice day!

George: You too, and stay safe.