#ATAGTR2023 Speaker
Welcome to the 8th Edition of the Global Testing Retreat 2023!
About Speaker
Dinesh heads the Functional Automation wing at QE&A department, Cognizant Technology Solutions for the UK & Ireland, based in London. He has over two decades of hands-on experience in test automation. He is a passionate learner who enjoys questioning the status quo. A proponent of Lean thinking, a concept that is counterintuitive approach to efficiency, and firmly believes that Agile methodologies have strong ties with Lean principles. In manufacturing, you can observe someone physically shaping materials or assembling parts, but in IT, the work exists in the form of digital data, residing in hard drives or as conceptual ideas in people’s minds. In IT, we are knowledge workers. I believe that one of the most effective ways to preserve knowledge is through Automation. This automation can take various forms, such as simple regression test cases or scripts that automate the entire process from building to deployment. By encapsulating a person’s knowledge into a script, that knowledge becomes accessible anytime, anywhere, independent of the original creator. In knowledge-based industries like IT, traditional scientific management principles do not entirely apply. Scientific thinking enables individuals to make decisions based on solid empirical data, allowing them to improve and progress their work autonomously. Dinesh holds a Bachelor’s degree in Physics from Fergusson College and an MBA in Marketing from PUMBA, supplemented this with a diploma in computer science.
Zero Defects – Myth or Reality
Have been in the IT industry for well over 24 years; but I have never seen 0 (Zero) defects. We always get defects; how can we remove or rather eliminate defects, that is the question. I have searched far and wide in the IT space, but I have not come across any convincing answer. This forced me to look onto Manufacturing space – this is a far mature industry than IT. This is where I have been able to see that companies like Toyota have been able to make 1 engine every 32 seconds; without a single defects!! Car’s combustion engine is a complex to construct, and how can they have not a single defect!! Every time…consistently!
In IT, we have Glenford Myers who defined in 1979 – you execute a test cases with the intent to find a defect. Which means a defect has to first manifest itself, and then we fix it. Something is not right here – was my first instinct.
Take a SIM card; there is a small cut on one corner; this helps you always to put the card in right, you just cannot insert the card in wrong. This is precisely what I am looking for (this is called poka-yoke in manufacturing), why can’t we have something similar in IT, where-in, we PREVENT the defect from happening in the first place; rather than DETECT it!
There is a great sentence by W Edward Deming
Don’t depend on mass inspection to achieve quality. Improve the process and build quality into the product in the first place.
You have to improve your process; only then you can eliminate defects
This is when I was able to uncover a process called Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD); many people DON’T know how to implement it; hence they get defects. If you implement it correctly; defects just cannot come – its impossible. This I can say with firm conviction, since I ran this at the “Financial Conduct Authority” London. (The SEBI equivalent that we have in India); where I have able to get zero P1+P2 defects for the team that I worked on for over 6 months. We used to find about 4 defects per day before we implemented this practice; then after than we used to find less than 1 defect per day; this is a 75% reduction in identification of defects. With lesser defects, we have lesser work to do – no fixing of defects; what do you think the developers did, they pulled more user stories, improving team productivity by 25%.
There is tons of lean that has been implemented in here; we moved from resource efficiency to flow efficiency. Once has to change his process, mindset, team culture and take up different ways of doing their work.
Yes Zero defects is a reality that I have seen; which I could not believe at start; but very much possible, this requires great shift in mindset to make this happen.