Testing-as-a-Service - Maximize value and reduce risks

In today’s Insights we’re focusing on Testing-as-a-Service.

Many system integrators and consultancies offer testing services and a few offer these services in a “by-the-drink” model known as Testing-as-a-Service (Taas). This is primarily a contractual model, but it’s important to understand a few things when evaluating whether it would be successful for you and your organization.

Forecasting demand is critical to the success of any TaaS program. All programs will allow for some variability, but understanding the impacts of significant swings of demand is critical to structuring a successful contract. The maturity level of your vendor management, governance, change management, and reporting will all play key roles in making these engagements successful.

Measure, measure, and then measure again—Defining the right mix of KPIs and quality metrics is critical to the success of your organization and to your TaaS partner. Most TaaS providers will have a set of dashboards already defined, but it’s important to take the time to detail how each metric is defined, the exception handling governance, remediation paths, and potential financial impacts (penalties as well as over performance) for each criteria. Focus on the metrics that drive your ROI first!

Well understood roles and responsibilities—A roles and responsibilities matrix is always leveraged in any managed services contract, but I’ve seen these fall apart once engagements are fully deployed. In order to avoid any surprises, like big change orders, the teams should walk through as many scenarios as possible around the scope and pay particular attention to the exceptions and “outliers.” God is most certainly in the details.

Ownership and transportability—Many organizations are familiar with “as-a-service” engagements, but in the case of testing, it is absolutely critical that you have a clear understanding of ownership for all assets, knowledge repositories, data sets, methodologies, and even right-to-hire agreements. This is an important protection against vendor lock-in.

Future-proofing your relationship—Consumption-based contracts vary in length from one year to up to five. A lot can change in your organization during this time. Your business will change. New products and services or geographies will be introduced. You may have acquisitions and divestitures. Technologies, and the corporate adoption of those technologies, will change, and the way that work is delivered will absolutely evolve.

It’s important to discuss these items during contracting and understand how important shifts could potentially impact your relationship with your vendor. You can’t plan for every scenario, but understanding how strategic shifts may impact the contract is important in order to avoid expensive or change prohibitive in the future.

If you’d like to learn a bit more about the variety of testing strategies and  services we offer, you can visit CTG’s testing page at https://www.ctg.com/solutions/testing-solutions/

I hope that this edition was interesting, informative, and helps you all drive more value from your testing programs.