 The talk was presided over by Mr. N. N. Subramaniam, the founder and Director of Maveric Info Systems. He started his career in management consulting and then started up Maveric Systems which slowly evolved into its niche field, software testing. The company is now an independent and exclusive software testing company having ISO 9001:2000 Certification, employing over 230 testing professionals across India and UK. Maveric’s focus areas include banking, financial services, insurance, telecom and health care. They have three categories of clients. These are end users like ICICI, ABN Amro, Standard Chartered Bank etc., product/solution providers like Infosys, I-flex, Polaris etc. and service providers/system integrators like IBM, Honeywell, EDS etc. Three of their most significant customers recently won over are GE Capital International Services, State Bank of India and Indian Bank. He mentioned about two of our alumni who are working on the GE account.
Mr Subramaniam enlightened us on service offerings provided by the software testing industry. These included Requirement Assurance Services, Testing Life Cycle Process Consulting, Testing Life Cycle Execution and Post Execution Support. When asked about the expertise required, he explained that there were domain and technology consultants who specialize in assessing and defining project risk well before an output goes into testing. Requirement Assurance Services may be in requirement review or design review. They help customers to identify gaps in software and functionality, evaluate designs, architecture and performance of systems. Expanding on queries in the consulting domain, he explained the presence of quality audits in the field of the testing process. These include defining test processes templates, testing process improvement and metrics definitions, defining release processes etc. In test execution, companies assist their customers during the software development lifecycle and engage in various forms of testing like Functional Testing, System Integration Testing, Usability Testing, Data Migration, Installation Testing, Interoperability Testing etc. For post execution support the industry offers production support services and training to the client’s testing team, on using test cases for future releases, maintenance of test packs and testing repository. He explained the above using Maveric’s own examples and from some of the industries best practices.
On behalf of Maveric Mr. Subramaniam expressed a keen interest in extending an industry oriented academic partnership with ASB, which was also covered during the seminar. Mr. Subramaniam outlined his plans including the course outlay and briefed us about the career path one would follow in testing.
Contributed by
Sujish Alexander,
2nd Year MBA |
