Driving QE for Blockchain
This year Tech Mahindra’s Digital Assurance Services team participated in STARCanada 2019 conference, organized in Toronto from 20-25th October 2019. Here are some insights by Anjali Chhabra, who was part of the team that represented the Digital Assurance Services and Quality Engineering practice of Tech Mahindra Americas. She was also the speaker for the session on Blockchain Testing, sharing some key takeaways from this remarkable conference.
Unlike the magnum of STARWest and STAREast, STARCanada was a close group conference with the participation of 300 QE practitioners involving many influencers from the Telecom/BFSI industry “One aspect that I noticed is the transformation towards Quality Engineering aligned with Continuous Testing was at the forefront of all discussions - a lot of key transformation strategies around Automation, API Testing/service level automation, traditional ALM integration with agile tools, etc. were discussed even in the sessions as well as most of the networking discussions” said Anjali.
Tech Mahindra’s booth witnessed traction due to live demos that the expert team provided about some of our accelerators around progressive automation, Test Data Management, and Automated Test Design areas.
Testing for Blockchain
Our session around Blockchain Testing was well appreciated. We deliberately decided to highlight this topic as there was already enough coverage around automation, Agile, API Testing, etc. We wanted to pick up a topic that is not being actively discussed as of now, but we strongly believe that the QE industry needs to brace up for the impact of Blockchain on QE strategies, tools, and skills for professionals.
Blockchain is based on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), and one of the key use cases everyone can relate to is cryptocurrency. While it is evident that Blockchain adoption is not as rapid as we anticipated due to challenges related to scalability, interoperability, lack of clarity within the industry on regulatory and governance aspects, etc. however, one of the biggest hurdles that we see is the overall less awareness of the technology within the enterprises and less enthusiasm for use-case identification and business case creation for adoption in general. Questions around security, energy consumption for the consensus mechanism, etc. are also awaiting some clarity and advancements to clear worries around adoption.
Having said all that, there is a strong potential for the eventual benefit of greater transparency and enhanced traceability for transactions along with time, and the cost savings will push for adoption in the supply chain, Digital Identity Management, the Healthcare industry, Energy Industry, and so on.
Tech M’s Digital Assurance Services team is testing strategies and accelerators for Blockchain
Our topic of discussion covered aspects of Quality Engineering, which will play an instrumental role while testing for Blockchain based functional use cases. Areas around integration testing, smart contract testing, performance, security, test environment set-up to replicate end-to-end DLT, onboarding governance, and basic quality checks for participants in Blockchain (which will form the core of Blockchain Testing Strategy) were discussed during our session. It was interesting to hear from the audiences how the session helped them get a better understanding of Blockchain technology itself, while not many of their organizations are discussing adoption yet.
Many participants later came and discussed with us how amazed they were to see that Tech Mahindra’s Digital Assurances Services and Quality Engineering team has a strong Point of View on Testing for Blockchain and how we have already mapped some of our automation accelerators around Smart Contract Testing and Integration Testing, Performance, Security for the same.
All in all, STARCanada 2019 was an enriching experience while we are aggressively increasing our footprint in many Canadian enterprises for Quality Engineering and Digital Assurance services!
