As software continues to eat the world, it’s important to recognize the impact of poor quality software devouring your business. Apple’s bold step of identifying 2018 as the year of software quality is a call for other organizations to do the same. How is yours meeting this software quality challenge? In this episode, we’ll Test Talk with Shailesh Rao, current COO of BrowserStack. Shailesh has previously worked with Google to help develop and scale their Cloud Platform, and also led groups at SAP and Salesforce. Get ready to discover the State of Software Quality in 2018 and why it’s more important than ever before.

About Shailesh Rao

Shailesh Rao is the Chief Operating Officer at BrowserStack, the industry’s leading infrastructure provider for browser and mobile app testing, where he leads the company’s global business operations as well as its North American headquarters in San Francisco. Prior to BrowserStack, Shailesh held multiple leadership roles at industry leaders like Google, SAP and Siebel Systems.

Quotes & Insights from this Test Talk

• You’ve got to you’ve got to manage that change you got to have the discipline. And if it’s a worthy goal. Which I think bug free software is, just like stress free life you’ve got to stick with it. There’s going to be ups and downs you’re going to slip and fall. You’re going to have you know failures just as you have victories but you’ve got to stick with it and you’ve got to create and make a habit out. So for some people that pill of choice is yoga or meditation. And for those of us in our in our corner of the world with testing, it might be Selenium or Appium, Jenkins or whatever it is. But no we have to we have to figure out how to make that work and I think it’s definitely a worthy goal. It’s definitely harder bottom line but it’s you know it’s definitely worth doing.
• Quality is a fundamental concept to do our lives through the way we interact with people and the way companies you know companies run. Software quality has obviously become come to the forefront I think driven by the fact that software has become so critical to every company success. It’s no longer nice to have. It’s pretty much one of the cornerstones of every company’s mere existence. I think just like financial strength in humans and talent and processes etc have become cornerstones. So I think we just see more of it in DevOps, But I definitely don’t think it’s applicable only to software. I think it stems from do you really believe in it as one of your guiding principles. Is one is one of your guiding principles as a business centered around quality? Quality in everything. In the people you hire, in the culture you create, and in the way, you run DevOps or use DevOps, Continuous Integration, Continues Delivery whatever the case may be to create incredibly awesome software. To me, I think it’s not an act, or it’s not just one thing to do it’s something you do every day its a habit.
• The way I look at it is that automated testing specifically and in general, maybe having higher quality software. To me, it’s a means to an end. Because all of these things, whether they use automated testing manual testing, don’t do any testing, how much DevOps do you do? How seamlessly is your pipeline? All of those things are a means to an end. And I think the overall initiative from a business perspective needs to be –what is your vision as a company. Is quality and the maintenance of quality and the pursuit of 100 percent quality, bug-free, whatever the case is that one of your guiding principles. I think that is something that businesses need to ask.
• I would estimate is probably 20 to 30 percent in terms of companies that are using automated testing. I’ve not seen anybody being you know 100 percent there in terms of me using it everywhere we should. There’s really nothing more we need to do. We’ve reached you know the peak as it were. I haven’t seen that. There’s definitely like any other population you can examine. There will be a range of people who are one end of the spectrum people who are on the other end and trying to you know maybe are in a position where they can teach others how to do it. I would estimate is 20 to 30 percent of places where automation testing would make sense. They’ve actually adopted. Now, why is that? Why have companies not done it? Have they do all of them agree that it needs to be done. I think in principle they do. Because again information asymmetry these days is going down between what one company knows and the other. Just with the Internet and everything the way information goes into the economy in today’s world I think most companies are aware that this is something that could be useful. This is something that we need to do. So I don’t think that there’s a lack of intent.
• The good news is that I see that number growing. I see people genuinely wanting to at least figure out if this is right for them. Not just as a fad but actually wanting to do this. Thanks to also a lot of engineers who have grown up in a world where open source framework is the norm the sort of testing frameworks were kind of default may be in their last jobs so they bring that practice with them and so fundamentally I think the DNA is changing. But like any change of that magnitude of that level of consequence, it’s great that it’s happening. But I think it’s going to take time and I think all of us in the industry it behooves us to make sure that we educate customers and we’re able to share practices.
• One piece of advice I think I take it back to where I started with around how this parallels to living a low-stress life. Or avoiding high stresses is to recognize that this is a change for everybody and it’s hard. Discipline is key to making sure that you understand, learn etc. and apply that discipline. And the last thing is don’t give up. I think achieving high software quality is a worthy goal. Stick with it and it will pay off in spades. High quality spreads I guess I should add.

Connect with Shailesh Rao

• Twitter: @browserstack
• Blog: browserstack.com/news
• Company: browserstack

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