Suyash Dubey | Posted on | 2 min Read

Asia’s leading software testing conference, QAI STC 2019 concluded on December 6th, 2019. The theme of this year’s STC was architecting continuous quality: think, transform, and thrive in an Intelligent future. The STC is a platform for experts to display ideas, experiments, and experiences to explore challenges and suggest techniques and innovations to overcome common problems.
 
Avinash’s keynote focused on the future of testing which was lauded by the top minds and became the highlight of the event.
 

 
pCloudy was the title sponsor for the event and so we got a bigger platform to showcase our contribution in shaping the future of mobile app testing.
 
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More than 500 experts from around 130 software companies gathered to learn new trends in testing, share their ideas and grow their network. There were 14 keynotes from the industry leaders and 50 professionals got a chance to take the stage and share their views about the emerging technologies.
 
pCloudy -STC 2019
Let’s have a look at the major learnings from this event.

Future of Testing


The STC started with a keynote by Avinash which provided insights about the future of work, applications, and testing. How “We Working” will be the primary organizational model and algorithmic management will take over the middle management to some extent. He also talked about how people will have to constantly upskill to work with the ever-changing technology and the work-life challenges will increase in the future. A digital mesh architecture will allow enterprises to build an agile, flexible, and cloud-ready ecosystem. This will enable real-time connectivity of employees, business processes, business data, and services to help address high volumes of traffic and become cloud-native and mobile-first.
 

Quality Engineering and Digital Transformation

 
There was a great emphasis on quality engineering at the STC as most of the organizations are trying to take QE to the next level. Quality engineering focuses on the end-to-end management and the basic principle is the all the teams should bear the responsibility of maintaining the quality in the process. Software QE is the assurance of high standards in the software development life cycle while implementing DevOps and Agile.
 
pCloudy - STC 2019
The main role is played by testers who create, implement and maintain systems used to control the quality of production processes. These people need to have a deep understanding of all the technological activities and evaluation principles.
 
pCloudy - STC 2019
Quality engineering methodology is even bigger in scale than the traditional QA approach and that’s the reason that QEs cannot work in silos. In quality system engineering, people in multiple roles like IT architects, designers, test engineers, project managers, business architects, etc., must cooperate to meet customer expectations. Quality engineering is driven by emerging technologies such as AI and Big Data analytics. Automation is the driving force behind turning the traditional testing into a more effective quality support model.
 
pCloudy - STC 2019
The quality engineering team usually partners along with the business users and the product managers for having a better understanding of the required product details to match up the problems since the starting of the product to the last stage.
 
pCloudy - STC 2019

Artificial intelligence, Machine learning, and IoT

 
The recent development in AI, ML and, IoT were the buzz creators. Experts elaborated on how augmented analytics will be utilized for creating, developing, and consuming analytics by combining these technologies. An augmented analytics engine can identify, filter, and analyze data, and then recommend what needs to be done next without the need of an IT team. These technologies will make data-driven insights accessible to a much larger set of workers.
 
pCloudy STC2019
The conference turned out to be really productive with good insights about emerging technologies and tools. It was a great opportunity to connect with software testing experts and professionals from around the globe. To say the least, it was a remarkable event where we got a great response and positive feedback from the crowd.

Trends We Witnessed at STC 2018

The biggest Software testing Conference in India, QAI STC 2018 came to an end on 7th December with the most insightful and pragmatic discussion that can disrupt the software testing eco-space. The focus of the event this year was on the theme – Quality by Design: Convergence of Testing, Lean, Intelligence and Automation.

 

We were the title sponsors this year and so got a bigger platform to showcase the NEXT we are bringing in mobile app testing world.

 

software_STC2018
There was an array ideas displayed, experiments and experiences to explore challenges and suggestive techniques and best practices to successfully to overcome the common challenges.

 

With the top minds in software testing coming together to share the latest trends, tips on stage and through conference networking opportunities, STC this year too has succeeded in bringing forth excellent insights about future of testing in rapidly changing times. More than 30 top companies participated in this one-of its kind Expo where we have witnessed some of the monumental key developments that would shape testing landscape in the coming years.

 

Over 500 software testers gathered and more than 12 empanelled speakers graced the expo for 2 days. Attendees heard from experts like: Avinash Tiwari, co-founder, pCloudy, David Parker, Director, Smart Bear, Rajini Padmanabhan, V.P, QA Infotech, Anand Vaishampayan, Director – Cloud Application Migration Services, IBM, Dr. Shankar Ramamoorthy, Customer Success Officer, Harman Intl., Anupama Jayakumar, Director, Schneider Electric to name a few.

 

Avinash’s keynote session on “Will AI be another Tesla for software testing?” became a huge hit as he set the tone correct talking about trends like AI and Predictive Analytics that can disrupt the mobile app testing industry.

 


In between the sessions, the pCloudy booth was flooded with people. Our team of five did their best to answer questions and get feedback from those who are already using pCloudy as well as folks who were new to pCloudy.

pCloudy boothpCloudy booth

 
Q&A Session at pCloudy booth
Here are the biggest lessons that we learnt at the STC event this year:

 

1) Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are setting up new standards in mobile app testing market:

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in testing, tools, processes and methods have shown a significant improvements in search results, recommendations, forecasts, and other predictions.

 

Testing practitioners are recognizing the potential for advances in AI and ML to be leveraged for automated testing—an area that still requires significant manual effort.

 

Last year we came up with something which was quite new to the market, our AI-based test bot for Mobile App – Certifaya. This year we see this trend catching up.

 

There are quite a number of new tools focusing on NLP driven Automated Test case generation to AI driven self-healing automated tests. Good to see competition in this space! The race has just begun.

 

AI and ML in Mobile App testing

 

2) Predictive Analytics is going to disrupt the software testing ecosystem:

Another major learning at STC event this year has been the growing importance of Predictive Analytics in Software Testing. We are in the age of Analytics where the test data captured are translated into actionable insights for future improvement. These solutions proactively identify problem areas in the testing processes and indicate the way forward to achieve a high-quality software product. Predictive analytics uses mathematical algorithms and machine learning technologies to forecast outcomes of software testing procedures. This technique uses current and past data to generate insights and locate potential points of failure in software testing outcomes. This enables the development and testing leaders to proactively address issues early in the lifecycle, and hence faster and easier. The combination of test automation and advanced analytics will enable software development and testing managers to spend more time on strategic activities that drive greater business value over a longer term.

 

We succeeded in setting the tone right at STC this year.

 

Predictive Analytics in Software Testing

 

Our use cases on AI and Predictive analytics became the talk of the town.

 
predictive analytics bot open
 

Surely, AI and Predictive analytics are going to disrupt the mobile app testing space.

 

3) Digital Transformation and its impact on testing:

Most of the testing teams are already witnessing the impacts of digital transformation initiatives such as DevOps adoption and scaling Agile. From achieving quality@speed, to tooling, to team structure, to application architectures, almost everything has changed. Enterprises are already adopting shift left approach to keep pace with the growing demands from digital transformation. Shift left testing is an approach to software and system testing in which testing is performed earlier in the lifecycle (i.e., moved left on the project timeline).
Here, at STC this year, another major trend we came across was the growing importance of omni-channel testing. With digital transformation, Customers today are exploited by choices that are never ending in the actual sense of the word. But the customer expects to receive the consistent user experience across all platforms. Omni-channel User Experience Testing helps tune your digital applications and customer experience across functional tests, compatibility, usability, and app security tests.

 

4) No more Quality Assurance; it’s all about Quality Engineering:

Another major trend seen at STC this year was the focus from Quality Assurance towards Quality Engineering. Today, the goal of Agile is to persistently test, dissect and enhance quality throughout the development lifecycle, as opposed to only towards the end of the cycle. In this environment, mere ‘assurance’ through process monitoring will not help achieve high quality standards. Engineering quality into the management, development, operation and maintenance of IT systems and enterprise architectures is the only way organizations can ensure end-to-end quality the current environments demand.

 

The principles of “Shift Left” has heavily influenced the transition to Quality Engineering. Test and development teams work together in a continuous integration model and it is very important to design code which is testable and easy to integrate. This in turn allows for quick localisation of a problem and to assure individual parts are working before a significant amount of software is combined or integrated together. Dheeraj Sinha talked about how this digital transformation is changing the role of QA, the skills required, the methodology, processes involved and taking it to an all new different level. He aptly quoted- “The focus of QA shouldn’t be to find defects but to enable others to find defects.”

 

Share the experiences and learning you had at QAI STC event this year in comment section. Don’t forget to like us on LinkedIn for more updates and the latest information about us.

pCloudy 2016 at a Glance

 

I hope you had an amazing year, so we hope you are enjoying the festive time with your family and friends. We would like to take a moment to thank you for supporting us through out the year, which has been a great year for pCloudy. We achieved several milestones in the year 2016. Here is summing up the year. Thanks again and wishing you happy holidays.

Summing Up the Year

Geography

pCloudy extended its device cloud operations to US and Philippines. Our customers are now able to test their Apps on local devices and local networks of India, US and Philippines.

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Device Cloud Growth

We grew rapidly this year becoming one of the largest device cloud provider from India.

2016-achievements

Industry Recognition

pCloudy got recognition from top Industry Analysts from across the globe.

Gartner_logo ET Telecom tech-portal

Presence in Global Events

pCloudy was part of all major global testing conferences. Support of audience was phenomenal.

Jenkins World 2016

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Software Testing 2016

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Start East Testing 2016

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New and Improved UI for Device Access

Based on feedbacks from users, we came up with new UI for device access page. Now it’s easier and faster to test Apps on devices. We received many thumbs up from the users.

new-ui

Launch of in-built Automation Engine (OpKey Integration with pCloudy)

pCloudy becomes the only device cloud to have a record and playback engine in-built. This allows customers to quickly create automated scripts without writing a single line of code.

opkey-spy-mode

Robotic Integration for IOT App Testing

The future of app testing in IoT lies in integrating app interaction with external hardware triggers. pCloudy released it’s first version of pBot for NFC and Payment terminal testing.

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Advance Features

We implemented many new features to ensure that our users gets full range of Test capabilities for their Mobile Apps.

ADB Bridge – Developers can use this feature for real time debugging of their Apps

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Network Simulation – Now Apps can be tested on variety of Network conditions

network_simulation_ui

Automation Live view – While users could run their tests on multiple devices, now they can see it as well

automationliveview

Support for new tools

pCloudy now supports most of the popular open source tools used by Dev and Test community. We added Espresso, Monkey Test

espresso-new monkey-test

Many New Integrations

While we had a great working platform in by the end of 2015, there were still several integrations required. We wanted to give far more to our customers – Jenkins, Android Studio Plug-in, Eclipse Plug-in.

jenkins android-studio eclipse

A Lot of Fun

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Final Words

We are very happy about all of our achievements in 2016, but even more so, we wish you many new exciting starts and remarkable successes in 2017. Our team will continue to exert every effort to improve our products and make your Mobile App triumph with pCloudy platform.

Have a Happy Holiday and New Year.