TESTING COVID TIMES

 

Innovation as Always

Innovation has always come out of the toughest of situations. This continues during our current pandemic as well. When numerous businesses have been forced to shut down with the slowdown of the market, innovators have been working at lightning speed to bring out inventions and processes into the industry to try and keep business afloat as much as possible. From drone delivery of medicines and food to easily pocketable UV sanitizer stickers, we have seen technology innovations that have been helping people and businesses continue as they were before. Additionally, new technology like the Aarogya Setu and social distancing apps for restaurants that help businesses restart after the lockdowns are also gaining prominence.

The IT Impetus to Innovation

Almost all of the innovations we have seen during pandemic has been possible due to Technology. Be it the actual product or service itself being a technology, to using technology to deliver the service or product to the end customers to making the marketplace safer for use of the service, everything has been achieved with technology. IT professionals are the lot of people we saw working the most after healthcare workers, day and night, meeting impossible deadlines to churn out solutions that helped economies move ahead.

IT Organizations have raised up to the current business need by reducing turn-around times, enabling remote deployments and building products and services on the fly to support demand.

Responsibility of the Testing Practice

While IT is playing a crucial role in supporting business domains to reach customers using technology and is fast replacing earlier business models, the underlying tone of the businesses that are prolific during pandemics is also that of low cost. And at times like this it is usually the testing practice that falls under scrutiny of cost reduction programs. To ensure that companies do not lose focus on Quality and continues delivering robust services and product Quality teams have to ensure that they reinvent and adapt where required.

Adoption of automation has to go up significantly because there is less and less time available for the industry to test. Right now, when it is all about how time to market can be made shorter, most organizations will be forced to cut down on elaborate manual testing. It is imperative to adopt automation in order to attain maximum test coverage and cycles of test execution.    

At Prakat, we have always had a tradition of creating strong testing assets by continuously innovating with inhouse accelerators and processes that can help kickstart testing earlier in the lifecycle. We help our customers build strong automation frameworks that can be replicated across their assets and be used to reduce the ideation-to-market times for new products and services. This has helped us cope well with the changing trends in the industry, support critical deployments of clients and respond quickly to changing needs of our client base.

Organizations need to adopt wider automation testing to be able to support continuous innovation and to be able to capitalize on the current requirements of the industry. This also helps build a stronger delivery practice, avid bottlenecks for releases and re-prioritize work based on the situation to attain more productivity.

GAAD 2020 : Accessibility during Crisis

" Like every year we got together for GAAD, this time online, with people from across the globe to talk about the one thing that unites us - our passion towards an inclusive world.

A week later, as I think of all the GAADs we have come through and all the milestones we have covered, I can't help but go back to the roots of where my accessibility thoughts were born. I was inspired by an aunt who spent a big part of her life helping people with disabilities live with dignity. She was herself inspired by a personal loss in her life. I meet many people like this who are either inspired by profound incidents or their own necessities to learn what accessibility is and work towards inclusivity. The strange things about current times is that everybody is facing accessibility issues at this moment.

The past few weeks we have all been trying to live under limited infrastructure, making the most of things and any technological support has been lifesaving. The same is what we have been aspiring in the area of accessibility. To be able to make lives easier by simple and much needed changes. Just like how from today, every IT service and product will consider a Covid like situation as contingency to work through, so should we consider accessibility as a parameter that all our IT should seamlessly work with.

The past few months have seen innovators think more deeply about psychological aspects of working under limitations, assistive technologies that can help mitigate such situations etc. And this is what we have been advocating through GAAD every year: that technology be made to suit working under limitations and caters to humans across all spectrums.

This year's GAAD brought in so many thinking points to ponder over, in all these areas. The psychological aspects of working under different circumstances, technology empowerment at a cognitive level, the importance of technology in helping create environments of positive mental simulations, building interfaces that are easy to use and connect to. We discussed how we believe that designers and developers should have that empathy and not assume that everyone they know is starting from where they're starting from. There were in-depth discussions about products and services that are currently available in the market that have helped people through these tough times and how these features are also accessible features. It reiterates the message we have conveyed in all GAAD events. Make services and products accessible not to cater to a particular crowd but to improve its overall efficiency and acceptance. We talked about how students are coping and learning through Covid times, and how this area poses a growing interest area for ideators and entrepreneurs who can identify and build solutions to cover gaps. We talked about challenges, learnings, policies, initiatives and way forward. And I could see the silver lining of the Covid times, because now inclusivity and accessibility is everybody's need of the hour. I can't wait for GAAD 2021 to see all the new milestones we would have collectively achieved towards universal inclusion."

- Anuradha Biswas