The Hindu : Business : Cognizant introduces platform to foster innovation in testing

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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
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Business

Cognizant introduces platform to foster innovation in testing

Special Correspondent

Platform offers testing solutions
at three levels
Innovation, crucial to evaluate
and provide direction to ideas

— PHOTO: R. RAGU

KNOWLEDGE SHARING: G. Sumithra (left) and Allen Shaheen (third from left), Senior Vice-Presidents, Testing Practice, Cognizant, Mohammad Zahoor (second from left), IT Director, PEMCO Insurance, Partha Iyengar (second from right), Vice-President, Gartner, and R. Chandrasekaran, President and Managing Director, Global Delivery, Cognizant, at a function at Siruseri on Thursday.

CHENNAI: Testing of applications and products has emerged as the fastest growing segment for the IT industry. Many software companies offer testing services on a standalone basis, focussing on supporting enterprises’ and product companies’ testing needs through independent verification and validation of their software. Cognizant, a provider of information technology has launched a comprehensive platform to foster innovation in testing.

The platform will facilitate ideation, catalyse knowledge sharing and showcase testing innovations that help reduce testing effort, time and cost while improving the quality. It will also enable statistical validation of the significance and adaptability of innovations to testing projects. The company has also established an innovation council comprising technology and business experts to evaluate and provide further direction to ideas emerging from this platform, according to G. Sumithra, Senior Vice-President, Testing Practice.

Addressing journalists, after the inauguration of the testing platform, Ms. Sumithra said testing solutions were offered at three levels — functional, specialised and management consulting. With the launch of this platform, the company would now offer end-to-end solutions to its clients. With the advent of test automation tools, automated testing had led to significant saving in time and effort especially in regression testing. Ms. Sumithra said that with the help of this platform the company could contribute high-end testing that involved strategic test management consulting. The company, at present, had more than 9,000 people who were career testers testing code written by Cognizant as well as by third parties such as clients and competitors. She said over 75 per cent of the code tested by Cognizant was provided by clients or third party vendors. She said the company’s testing practice was aligned with specialised industries such as financial services, healthcare, manufacturing/retail and telecommunication, media and entertainment. The company had also set up a testing centre of excellence.

Allen Shaheen, Senior Vice-President, Testing Practices, said with the current economic slowdown, many clients would prefer to cut cost on testing especially in functionality testing. However, in the current slow down, the companies would like to look into management consulting in a serious way. This demand of the clients would increase the need for high-end testing in future.

The platform was inaugurated by Mohammad Zahoor, IT Director, PEMCO Insurance, a Cognizant client. Cognizant had reduce testing cycle-time, applied the Lean Six Sigma methodology, optimised testing efforts at PEMCO, and also supported in completing the overall test cycle on schedule.

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