The intensely competitive telecom industry globally is in the midst of major transformation, be it network transformation or business transformation or both.
While these transformations journeys are focused on greatly reducing costs of delivering services
and increasing customer centricity, the transformation journeys have to finally ensure a vastly improved end-user experience if they are to succeed. This means getting it Right the First Time, which means testing both networks and business systems thoroughly. The challenges for any testing function to achieve Right First Time (RFT) are numerous. With development now going “Agile” or largely iterative, this has led to continuous integration and testing, and has resulted in severely reducing the “testing time windows”. The earlier ‘serial handoff’ method of testing is no longer relevant with the large scale adoption of iterative development and continuous integration.
Another major impact of iterative development, is that despite testing windows decreasing, the test cycles have increased and so also has the need for increase in test coverage to ensure RFT. This is leading to growing pressure on test teams to reduce Cycle Time (CT) for each test cycle, so that a larger number of tests and test cycles can be undertaken in the shortened testing time windows. Under the prevailing conditions, it has become imperative for testing organizations to completely transform the way testing is done. 
Transformation Journeys
I advise and assist many organization on how to transform their testing organizations to meet these challenges. There are many aspects requiring transformation and each aspect spawns a transformation journey in itself. Our test function transformation model is based on the following guiding principles:
• Cost Transformation – an essential element of any transformation is to reduce the cost of testing services while at the same time increasing delivered quality. A major part of the cost of testing is resource cost. These costs can be reduced in many ways; we advocate a mix of Right Sourcing, Right Shoring, and keeping tight control on HTR Optimization. While driving down resources costs is quickly achievable, it is largely a one-time initiative. For costs to be further driven while at the same time increasing delivered quality year-on-year, it is very important to optimize governance, industrialize testing and increase productivity through automation, reuse and process improvements. These areas of transformation bring sustainable year-on-year benefits.
• Delivery Transformation – the very siloed approach in which testing teams operate provide many opportunities for resource optimization. Developing delivery models with appropriate governance structures and business interfaces, and implementing a flexible supply organization that optimally caters to the demands of the customer organization is the next step to transformation. Typically this is implemented by transitioning to a Test Factory/CoE delivery model. Front Door Demand Management, Metrics and SLA framework, Dashboard Implementation, Vendor Consolidation, Resource re-skilling and Role Rationalization and Process and Tool standardization are key areas of focus.
• Automation, Reuse & Process Transformation - all contribute to greatly increasing the productivity of factory resources. This third phase of transformation is about driving operational performance improvement. Typically this is achieved through initiatives like Framework based Automation, Shift Left (Assurance) that results in improvement of Quality of Inputs (QoI), COLO Labs that significantly reduced defect resolution cycle time, implementation of reuse through the creation of Test Accelerators and Automation Libraries and managing converged and shared Test Environments using the ITIL framework.
• Optimization - this fourth phase of transformation is going beyond the implementation of best practices to the conceptualization and rollout of Next Practices. Some key initiatives include making the test factory a Shared Testing Services hub, moving away from project based testing methodology to Release based Testing, E2E process performance ownership, and implementation of Risk Based testing methodology. This phase has to be led by very experienced practitioners, as it is about finding more effective ways of doing testing, by those who have successfully implemented conventional best practices and have fully realized the benefits and are deeply aware of the limitations of the conventional best practices.
