You’re listening to QATalks, a podcast for IT executives leading digital transformation within their organizations. In this show, we hear from leaders leveraging the latest technologies like AI, IoT & machine learning, as they navigate the changing tech landscape to position their organizations for the future. Let’s get into the show. 

Travis: Welcome back to another episode of QA Talks and I’m super excited this week because we have Rahul Avasthy from Abbott and we have Cigniti speaker. Welcome to the show you two.  

Rahul: Thank you Travis. It’s an honor to be here.  

Cigniti speaker: Thank you, Travis, glad to be here.  

Travis: I want to start with you Rahul, would you mind briefly giving us a quick background of what you do and what you’re up to and then we’ll dive into some of the practices of DesignOps and Design Systems that we’re going to go into today.   

Rahul: Thank you for the opportunity. I lead digital transformation and experience at Abbott. It is one of the fortune’s top 50 most admired companies. I am personally interested with my team on irreversible process transformation by helping reduce Oracle–i design and development waste and my team does a lot of breakthroughs, digital Innovations and specifically in the era of experience. There’s a lot of work that our team does in terms of DesignOps, experience design, design systems, technology, business model design, so that there could be a lot of success from a customer point of view. We are very obsessed with the customer-centered experiences. I personally take a lot of pride in problem solving and I think with the team and a fantastic industry peers I’m connected with, there’s a lot of opportunity we drove on in design thinking and service design, so that we can develop growth and experience as in strategy and also scale that for the enterprise. In the past, I have had cybersecurity and media background. I started my career with MTV – the music television and then I led a couple of agencies, few of the Asia’s largest where I was heading accounts for PepsiCo and Unilever. With some of the fabulous brands, I could get time to work with them and few of the brands from the telecom side as well. It’s been an interesting journey from media agency to healthcare, but I think the fundamentals of digital is what I’m still enjoying.   

Travis: I am also a former media person and really resonate with the fact that you came from that life too. So, appreciate that.  

Travis: I can also resonate with that as well as I am Delaware born and know a lot about the Philly area. Great to hear! Appreciate you both for that background and I think I want to get this episode started with you Rahul. You strongly evangelize the practice of DesignOps and you’ve shared in your background that you believe that design systems have a true potential to transform on how organizations conceptualize, think, create, design, build, test and launch digital assets consistently at scale. So, my first question is, what are some of the things that organizations should keep in mind while creating an efficient design system?  

Rahul: Thank you Travis. I think that’s a good question and maybe that’s the interest of a large audience as well because the design system is a really hot topic. A lot of people are talking, discussing, experimenting, and proceeding learning a lot as well. So, let me share a few of my personal experiences.  

From my perspective, I think the design system, the way I look at, is an investment in the future of experience, especially how those experiences which are built get scaled within a complex enterprise. It is also the future of the team or a brand or a product and the ability of an enterprise on how they can move nimbly in a rapidly evolving market. I believe design systems help you succeed in the long run. It does help you save a ton of time and waste. Now this time and waste which is saved is not only from a design or designer perspective. You also save that waste in terms from the dev side of it, from a QA side of it. And you do that over time across projects, across multiple teams. Also, I think it simplifies the way enterprises and startups can build new digital assets, how you build that momentum which further helps you build your minimum viable or even viable products. So, the design system does act like the core. And I think it’s okay to say that a design system is like a brand recipe for success because I’ve seen, and I’m pressing the wall with it every day, with my team is, it’s always changing, growing and it becomes smarter as everyone works together and tries to continually kind of build it.  

And take it in a positive light, a lot of people talk about style guides and design systems, a lot of people still get confused about that but I will say style guide is a respected way which has evolved and matured over previous generations and does help as an artifact of a design process. But as you asked, what are these some things that all should keep in mind. I will say the design system is a culture change because it’s living itself, it’s a funded product which has a defined experience strategy for the organization. It helps framework your execution roadmaps, gives you backlog, helps you service design and experience ecosystem at scale for a brand, even for a large enterprise. So, yeah, there’s a lot of good key points in terms from a design system.  

If I have to drill down and one key thing that you would have to remember, would be something called a single source of truth. Because, by nature, a design system helps make decisions faster. And as I said earlier, it helps you reduce waste in the entire delivery track. It also helps the designers to spend more time in developing workflows and promotes exploring a lot of concepts, doing a lot of testing in the same amount of time with the same resources. And it also helps articulating as well as implementing consistency across all the modules within the entire enterprise. And that’s why I say the single source of truth. That criteria would be another key point that all should remember.  

The last point I would say is, you know, it’s all about scale. So, design systems do help you build scalable frameworks of repeatable, reusable components, which you have heard about this topic called system thinking, right? So, which combined as a system thinking, they really help you provide that kind of source of truth, and it does help you across a spectrum from your brand to UX/UI to visual design to your code.  

So, from establishing your brand guidelines, to moving your usability standards, to typography tone, copy, voice, iconography colors, to your code level, where you build native components, do CSS, a lot of things are there. So that’s again a key part is, you know part from a single source of truth apart from it being a bland recipe from success and apart from being an investment in the future. It does also help you scale all of that. So, this knowledge is completely transferable, it is always evolving and there’s a lot, right? I can keep talking about the design system over and over but what I think is an interesting culture change and I see a lot of organizations adopting it. We ourselves are deep into design systems and it is a very amazing learning curve for all of us.  

Travis: Well, thanks so much for that response. My next question is, how can an enterprise leverage DesignOps to make its digital transformation efforts customer-centric?  

Rahul: There are lot of details in that. Basically, there’s a lot of confusion about what DesignOps is. And I have DesignOps in my profile, a lot of people confuse that by DevOps, which is okay. Let me try to simplify this. So DesignOps lot of people see it as a buzz word, it’s not. So DesignOps is an approach to design, and this approach is definitely inspired by the culture of devops. So, at a fundamental level, DesignOps is not about introducing new models or process in the enterprise. As you asked, it’s about digital transformation efforts, I always say, transformation has to be irreversible. It’s like a caterpillar, turns into a butterfly and cannot go back.  

If you are working on a project or a process change, which after that change is done, you’re going back to the previous ways of working, it is not a transformation. It is just a shiny tool implementation or something else. DesignOps is not about introducing those new models, or the process in the enterprise just for the sake of it. But it’s more about orchestrating design thinking, lean ways of working the user centered design models or UCV models. And with other best practices of Industries with the modern technology, because these modern technologies which we have access to right now for design by using a lot of machine learning and AI, a lot of automation which could be done, they did not exist before. So, with use of this modern technology, a lot of value could be created and also delivered.  

Also, I would say that DesignOps enterprise is more than a belief system, which does take the strength from the foundation or what designops enterprise is all about. It is also important in the entire transformation process is how do you empower the enterprise or an organization with the right culture, right process and not just that, but with the ecosystem to support the design driven process, and the data-driven decision-making. And these two combined together gives you that agility and speed so that you can conceptualize and deliver great products. And these are super, super critical.  

You know, there’s a lot of talks about outcomes and outputs. I was reading a nice article within Harvard business review that said very nicely that outcomes are the benefit your customers receive from what you make and it starts with truly understanding what your customer need, their challenges not yours, their issues, their priorities by having the empathy walking in their shoes, in their neighborhoods business and culture. While outputs are more like revenue and profit which enables us to find the outcomes. But without outcomes, there is no need for output.  

The same way, I would say DesignOps enables those outcomes, which really helped us to find and kind of enable the precise outputs which would be needed for a project or for our program around that. And this is very important and doing this Travis, I think this helps ensuring the iterative cycle and it also focuses more on the quality of customer experience than just delivering things on time and on a budget, I mean, of course don’t get me wrong, those are important.  

But again, the quality of the customer experience is the key. And how is that all done? A lot of time I have seen in DesignOps, there’s a lot of work that you work across, which is called hypothesis driven design, which is, how can you use that to be measured as an input for design and decision-making process. And I think all these things put together again, I would reiterate, your culture process ecosystem, the team working together, which helps you both design driven process and data-driven decision making. I think these helps in that key transformation process which everyone looks at.  

So, again, it is about the irreversible change, it is about understanding, what it can do. It is also about understanding what it cannot do. You know, I would end that with a nice saying about strategy. Out of time, it’s already well said that the root of the problem is the failure to distinguish between operational effectiveness and the strategy, things you’re not supposed to do, and I think DesignOps really helps you make that distinction and help you enable both strategy and also how can you do your operational effectiveness.  

Travis: Those insights are extremely helpful because from what it sounds like, and I love that analogy by the way, if you’re really doing transformation that you are doing something that’s irreversible, and a caterpillar cannot be turned back into a caterpillar after its evolved in transforming into a butterfly. And I think that analogy is something with me. And I think we’ll sit well with a lot of other executives as they think about what to look for and what not to look for.  

Rahul: Yeah, absolutely. I mean you wouldn’t believe the amount of cold emails and the articles I read and things around that, that everything is about digital transformation. I think that’s why the word has become a buzzword because it’s a good SEO keyword. But I think it’s been abused to be used as everything is digital transformation. You know going to from technology changes, a digital transformation doing this one particular thing is a digital transformation, that is where it fails. Even if there is a possibility that you could see that this butterfly could become a caterpillar tomorrow, that’s again, a different kind of project and not something where you transform are reversible, it has to be irreversible, period.  

Travis: Cigniti speaker, you have anything to add on this topic before we move on to the next one.  

Cigniti speaker: I agree with Rahul. The whole design aspect is so important even in the context of some of the quality engineering activities that we do as an organization. So, lot of talk around the shift left, basically, doing a lot of quality related activities, early on in the life cycle. So that way you are building quality into the product, as opposed to, you know, getting the quality after testing it later on. In that context, teams also take an extreme amount of diligence needed in reviewing the designs from a testing point of view as well. So, to make sure that they are a complete, correct, consistent, and most importantly, the systems that are being built, we are actually including the aspect of testability, right within the design stage.  

Travis: So, it’s about making sure you build right from the beginning and that you don’t incur errors later.  

Cigniti speaker: It’s better to prevent than actually do the cure.  

Travis: Perfect, thanks so much for that Cigniti speaker! So Rahul, my next question here is as we think about how enterprises measure some of this, what are some of the key metrics or KPIs that enterprises should use to evaluate the progress on the customer centric design front of their digital journeys? 

Rahul: I love KPI and ROI questions, I think without that, it is just all theory. And it’s very complex to figure out what KPI could work. Because for example, a KPI for a company, which is a product based, which is very much revenue focused ,every time you sell something, is different versus a product where you want to increase the adoption, because it creates a network effect, they can have different KPIs. But let me give you a formula that I personally use. It is how can you define KPI especially across DesignOps or Design system, and, you could use this framework in different places of course, that will depend upon the projects, and the programs and initiatives involved.  

So, look at this, in five point.  

Number one is, what are the things which you can do, which you can increase, or call a liberation. So, what can you or where can you impact that momentum, increase, or where can you accelerate things? Number one is clearly speed to the market. So, for example, if you have to create an MVP or previously to the market or creating any MVP was X, now, what is it. How much time it takes for onboarding new resources because as you scale up Travis, you know, I’ve seen that more and more people join. And as more and more people joined. things become more and more complex. So, if your knowledge transfer, if you want boarding speed doesn’t catch up, you are not able to scale that momentum. So, it is DesignOps and design system freestyle.  

How you can increase the reusability, how you can increase SEO, how you can increase accessibility, people who have, who are living with disabilities, everything that you’re doing, is it also giving incremental value to them. Also, how can you increase the knowledge sharing and there’s some technical one within, you know, the Design Systems and DesignOps, for example, we want to increase the use of CSS classes. So, there is less code, but more use of classes and it’s kind of a technical but that’s how you can assess that, you know, what you’re doing is correct. So, the first one is what you can do to increase the momentum.  

Second one is what you can do to reduce, or where can you have the reduction. And a lot of things, which will come in. The reduction is, how do you measure waste. How do you measure how you have reduced your delivery timelines? How you measure that? How have you reduced your brand exceptions? Lot of times just because something is done, and people were not aware about certain bland exceptions and things have to go live, there has to be exceptions created. But if you are following a consistent guideline with your, the correct DesignOps process, you would reduce the amount of those exceptions which will not percolate overall.  

How can you reduce your technical size CSS file size, or use of the components which are not used at all? How can you reduce knowledge silos? How can you reduce the time to create something? How can you reduce the cost for iterated process? Maybe how could you reduce shadow IT because I can speak a lot on that. How can you reduce the time to first prototype? You know, it is very important, you need to build something, the team can get together, but how long it takes for the first prototype or rapid prototype to hit your leadership inbox and where they can really play with it, click on it and then see how it would look and feel and how it would work and more than how to look and feel how those designs would work for the end user.  

So how do you reduce possibly discrepancy. So, there’s a lot of things that you can help reduce, and that could be a part of a KPI, but you should not pick all of them. You have to be very, very razor-sharp and razor focus on what you need to do. For example, if you’re doing a design system, increase in adoption of components and reusable should be your number one KPI, right? But if it’s a different kind of projects, it could be totally different. So, what you can improve, what you can reduce.  

The third one is where can you bring convergence. So, you need to create the right governance. You need to create the right frameworks. You need to have the shared ownership. I would say you need your design and dev to work together with something we call design dev handoffs, you need to have a common vocabulary. If a certain page or a feature Atomic component is being referred to something, it is not referred to something else by the developer side of it. So how can designers, developer, and QA, all converge and have a common vocabulary? How you can increase the use of a common tool chain, which has integrated API’s, which can do a lot of other things as well. So, what you can increase, what you can reduce, where you can converge, but also important is last two are where you can diverge, and where you can iterate.  

So, where you can diverge, is, you need to have a personalization. Not everything should be built on for all kind of experience. How can you diverse making experiences for different kind of niche segmentation, and all that, you’re doing how it can help to do that. How can you do many-to-many with that kind of personalization. How can you diverse the responsiveness. How can you create experiences from an Apple Watch to an Apple TV or to an Android TV? How can you create a tiered structure? So, even in the governance, where you converse, but windy governance, you need to diverse to give that room a lot of experimentation. For example, bigger process could be like a solid ship but you need to create a lot of speed boats out of your ship to go and do some work and come back, and then you decide which one you want to dock and which one you want to ignore it as junk.  

And, the last one is what you can iterate. Yeah. How can you iterate your always updated documentation, you’re connected workflows, your process Improvement? How can you update your design dev handoffs? So some of them could be mutually exclusive but a lot of them are exclusive of each other and if you can focus on what you can increase, what you can reduce, where can you converge, where can you diverge? And what you can iterate. I think these five pillars will give you enough KPIs or key Matrix at least for you to think about whatever you’re doing on your customer centric design process or when you’re crafting end-to-end digital journeys on what they are. And I think those are very key moments possibly which are important. Sorry for a long answer. Usually a KPI should be a crisp, clear, short answer. But I just want to give you more nuggets between what can come between these five keepers.  

Travis: I love it. So, we’ve got increase, decrease converge, diverge and iterate. Thanks so much for that. And Cigniti speaker, do you have anything to add?  

Cigniti speaker: No, I think Rahul covered it all. Nothing this time.  

Travis: Perfect! My next question for you, Rahul is, how does the atomic design methodology apply in the development of IT systems and what are some of the tangible benefits of adopting this?  

Rahul: Oh, that’s fantastic question. Thank you for asking that because Atomic design is so core to the future of systems and clinking of those system thinking. So Atomic design methodology was actually based upon Brad Frost for work in 2016 and it’s like a mental model which allows designers and developers to completely rethink and reimagine how they can assemble the user interfaces in their Design Systems. And you can break down Atomic design into five key things.  

Number one is an atom. It’s like the most basic functioning component, which you cannot break it down so that it stops becoming meaningful. For example, a button right, is an atom, of course, you can say a button is text plus a box, plus a color, but then all those three things are meaningless till the time, you combine them. So, it’s a small first breakdown of an element after which it will stop being meaningful. So, button is an atom, or maybe a search icon is an atom or text input field is an atom, or a level, so, if you have a text input field called email and on top of it, it says email as a text label, so that’s an atom. So, this is the core block and think of it like a Lego block. So, these atoms are the tiniest element of that Lego block. So you start with Atoms and then you come with molecules, this is where it’s like chemistry class but it’s really interesting and how Brad Foss transported. So, it’s like atoms and atoms coming together. So, these are kind of simple group of components that come together as a function. So now they start becoming utility and they come together as a function. For example, a search bar or a header. So, a search bar has an input function, has a search icon saves. This is search and when you click on it, something happens, so that entire thing becomes a molecule. And then you have organisms, which is Atoms plus molecules plus atoms plus molecules and N number of combinations. So now where you are seeing your Lego blocks are making a fireman or your Lego blocks are making a hospital, right. Or it’s kind of making an aircraft. At least it is making an aircraft cockpit. So, this is more complex elements that are coming together as a group of molecules or atoms. For example, a footer or header bar of an allegation is all coming together as an organism. People also call it components. So, before what happened was, people started at design or people started at wireframes but what this Atomic design does is the step number four and five are then wireframes and pages. So, it starts basically kind of ends where the previous mental framework started that. Alright, we need to work on a design option.  

Let’s start putting some low-quality wireframes. So what it does is, it tries to standardize the most building basic blocks and by the use of system thinking, if those things are structured well, anything you build on top of it will still follow the same family. For example, if you look at any Google site, look above their product, it could be a Gmail, it could be a Google Keep, which is the note taking tool or it could be a calendar or even Chrome browser on the Google search itself. You know it’s from Google family because it’s all coming from the same building blocks. There’s a certain way Google treats its buttons, its navigations, its colors, the way colors interact, it animates, and that’s a beauty of that. And then it is followed by your wireframes or templates, which is Page level design, which helps you figure out a structure so, like a homepage or think of a cockpit of a Lego block without any color. It is just kind of a skeleton that at least, you know, you’re making an F-16 or a passenger plane. And then you come with Pages, which is then you put the real color, real content, pictures, the right fonts, so things really come into life. So Atomic design is, fantastic and to your question, how does it really apply in the development of IT systems. I would say, Number one, it really helps foster the collaboration. A lot of time what would happen was the designer would build their things in silos and then when developers have to come in code, they have to figure out, well, we have a new search element, or we have a new navigation. Now, again, basically the design outcome would work the same, but it’s just the way it is treated was so different because it was somebody’s stylistic choice. What this does is it focuses on how the Design works and also helps you cater to some stylistic choices and how the design looks. So, you have flexibility not taking out the creativity but it’s really helping reduce both the design and their ways because a lot of time you don’t need a new search experience when it’s already created and well tested just by a previous project. So, a lot of these things comes together so that is one it really helps foster the collaboration within the IT system. 

I think second one is I say this a lot is called moments that matter. So, when you’re looking at any customer journey, you will love this Travis and maybe Cigniti speaker, is no company have and this is my personal saying, no one has enough resources or capital or funding at that moment to just build everything perfectly. Every company has a real nugget of knowledge that needs to focus on moments that matter. For example, Uber right, one of the moments that matter in Uber is that particular moment when you are in a different country, maybe in a different city, you are previously were taking a new taxi and then the payment method was different, maybe you’re in a different country, they have a different currency, you are figuring out the chain. You may not even need to read know how to treat the currency or you don’t know how the Tipping culture possibly is, and you’re trying to figure out a lot of questions every time taking a taxi. The moment that matters is, when somebody is exiting a cab, what happens in that precise moment in the overall customer journey. And I think Uber fixed that completely because your trip ends, you open the door and just walk out, and everything could be figured out later.  

Just by creating many such moments that matter, it completely changes the way your design works. And if your elements are not built atomic, it is very difficult to have the right resource and in budget every time to put all the energy on designing carefully, designing the moment that matter, because if you miss that opportunity for something else, you really miss the opportunity to differentiate your product and really making a mark. So, having the right lego blocks, helps you create everything and investing resources in the moments that matter. And I think that’s a complete Game Changer in terms of how Culture shift is happening within IT. And I think how millennials are now building products with the golden generation as well.  

Travis: Creating moments that matter, that’s so important. So overall thanks so much, you know, for that, that context, you know, on the family and the atomic design in laying out these five steps of, you know, the atom, the molecules, the organisms, the wireframes or template, you got that. I think that framework is going to be so helpful.  

Rahul: Actually they do, these are very much designed jargons but yeah, I think that’s where everybody is working together in the industries across designing Dev and that’s where the new cultures like the holding are how we can simplify things for everyone. So, it doesn’t become silos of knowledge, but kind of a group hug every time you work with project.  

Travis: Yeah, totally makes sense. Cigniti speaker, I want to shift over to you for a few questions here. What are the things that I found interesting in your background is that you’ve helped many enterprise level organizations with quality engineering? So, I’d love if you could tell us, you know how quality engineering help them deliver a high standard of customer experience? 

Cigniti speaker: Absolutely. So, if you look at it, the enterprises want to separate, you know, testing and development to get objectivity and to remove that conflict of interest. And more importantly, the testing and quality engineering itself is a topic on its own with its own methods, processes, tools. Which means that certain amount of core expertise is needed for somebody to do a great job at testing. And think of it like this, if you’re asking developers to do their own testing, it’s like asking a fox to watch them their house. And you don’t want to do that. And so, what we’re seeing is that a lot of organizations for these reasons are separating it out the software testing and the development component of the work. Especially in the context of the digital enterprises, the kind of applications that are being built, especially mobile, IoT, analytics. AI/ML based applications, blockchain and all these concepts. Some of the things the way that we use to test no more are applicable. So, what it requires is that you should be able to do both, shift Left and shift right. Meaning that having the ability to basically review the documents from a testing standpoint and ability to find those defects without a single line of code being written is extremely important. And also, that with most of these digital Technologies, the release velocity is really exponential, and the organizations are releasing multiple versions and in a short span of time. What it also means is that you need a strategy for doing the testing and production which was a complete no, no. I would say a few years before, but now that is extremely critical because of the necessity to be able to release code into production and being able to monitor how the latest code changes into the production are performing on the production systems. So, in this context, what we have done as a company is also that we actually have built some IP and also processes, especially in the context of measuring the customer experience. And we actually have built a tool called sentiment analyzer, that actually tracks all the data that is especially used by the consumer tech apps and we have the ability to gather data from multiple social media platforms and basically analyze the data to check what makes sense and use that to use all of the user feedback to be able to deliver a much better version. You know, in the future, those are some of the things that we’re doing as an organization, Travis.  

Travis: Thank you so much for that.  

Rahul: I’m just thinking that’s a lot of things. And yeah, I was just curious. How do you do differently than the other organization Cigniti speaker?  

Cigniti speaker: Yeah, that’s a great question. I would say one thing is that, As a company the way that we differentiate is that, from the inception of the company we just did not want to be another services company that can bring some great talent pool but also a company that has got some intrinsic value because we have built the IP and the IP is our core differentiator. And also that if you really look at it as a company that we actually, right now many of the leaders in their industry verticals, for example, take Airlines or take Retail or take Healthcare or Transportation, two or three of these top 10 companies are depending on Cigniti to drive their overall testing transformation. So, we being a leader in this testing, industry are able to help companies that are leaders in their own space. So that is actually has really becoming the core value proposition for us.  

Travis: Speaking of Health Care Cigniti speaker, over the years, I know you worked with a lot of healthcare organizations to navigate their digital transformations. But could you highlight maybe one or two that stand out for you briefly?  

Cigniti speaker: So as a company that as we speak right now, we are working with several pharma companies and we also work with a lot of medical devices companies, especially in the context of diabetes and cardiovascular and those fields. We’re also working with the provider space and the entire spectrum. And actually, we are amazed by the amount of technology that is being used, especially in the medical devices space, especially those of wearable medical devices and where you are really fusing multiple technologies to offer better healthcare like IoT and cloud and data analytics, I mean, if you look at a medical device, it’s basically all these medical devices companies are leveraging, the power of these technologies. And where we come into picture is that we actually are responsible and taking the responsibility of doing the end-to-end testing for these medical devices all the way from the software that is being embedded into the device and the device itself and also any communication that happens between the device and the data where it is being stored in the Public Cloud. So, we sort of are helping a lot of companies in putting together, the overall comprehensive, test strategy for something like this because we are talking about medical devices which means we are talking about human lives. So, it is very important that that actually a comprehensive test strategy is needed. Especially since we are involved both in class 1 and Class 2 medical devices and also especially in the context of healthcare the performance and security are also paramount along with protecting the information privacy of the patients. So those are some of the aspects that we are helping world class leading enterprises, Travis.  

Travis: So you know, helping some of the top leaders across airlines, retail, healthcare, in addition to, you know, making sure that they can perform proper security and protection, protocols to protect the privacy of patients, and make sure that they can Infuse all of their systems, whether it be IoT, the cloud, data analytics processes, and that you’re providing that assurance all around everything that you provide for them. The last question for you Cigniti speaker, I know you kind of touched on this a few times earlier, but what specifically is unique about the way Cigniti helps organizations analyze and improve their customer experience?  

Cigniti speaker: Absolutely. I mean especially in the context of digital technology, there is a lot more focus on the end-user experience and making that whole experience much better and also seamless. So, what we’re doing is that as a company that we have developed intellectual property in multiple areas, we actually have a universal test automation framework that sort of spans across multiple technologies or tools and has the ability to work with multiple different tools in the enterprise ecosystem and also has as a very intuitive dashboard that has the ability of doing some predictive capabilities as well.  

And we also have developed an IP that actually is related to the quality engineering playbook. Meaning that the different teams within the enterprises are sort of using this playbook as a reference to be able to do testing in a way that it is standardized across the enterprise. Also, that we have developed some cool tools in the context of test data management, test environment management. And, we also have a developed framework to be able to check the non-functional aspects of the applications early in the life cycle itself.  

Those are some of the things that we bring to the table and if the strategy that we put together is very comprehensive with user experience in mind from day one as opposed to trying to test it at the fag end of the life cycle. And I think these are the matters that sort of helping us to assure enterprises that the user experience aspect is being thought out very early in the life cycle. And, that we are doing testing in a continuous manner that aspects out of validated along the life cycle.  

Travis: So, it’s a lot of developed IP areas in addition to helping them figure out things before. I love it. So, this has been such a great conversation, Cigniti speaker, and Rahul. Is there anything that you’d want to add, you know, or wrap up with, you know, before we close out?  

Rahul: I would just say, Cigniti speaker thank you for evangelizing UX as well. I mean it’s really good to see how technology and testing focused companies also evolving and getting user experience at the core. It always has been but the codes change. Now everybody’s talking about it. I think this is a very, very welcome change. So, thank you for that. And I think one last time to get that would be, that in the past decade of you would have heard the term called Full-stack developer. And everybody’s talking about that and both of you will relate a lot to it. I would say in this decade we would see a lot of phrase and a new word or full-stack designer, which will come because of DesignOps and Design Systems. And especially because of DesignOps because it typically involves DevOps engineers and full-stack developer here, same philosophy, core traits and they strive for greater agility and flexibility. And that is hinting a trend towards greater generalization of the skill set of technical professional. I would say, in the case of full stack designer, that person would grow into a cross-disciplinary professional. Maybe he, or she would be able to handle across interaction design, visual design, UI development, even prototyping. So, I think full-stack designers. Let’s see how this kind of evolves, but basically, the fundamentals will remain the same. The boundary between design, Dev and QA will reduce and blur and eventually will become like a common thread. So, it will be interesting to see how soon that happens, but it is absolutely certain that that is already happening.  

Cigniti speaker: Thank you Rahul for sparing your valuable time to be part of this initiative. And this is an initiative that put together to help the broader QA Community. I think, you know, you said a lot of people can benefit from it, thank you very much for that.  

Rahul: Thank you for your invitation and I appreciate the opportunity Cigniti speaker. Travis, you have been a fantastic host and again it was really good to see Cigniti speaker hear all the good stuff that the organization is doing and where you’re involved with us. Well, once again to both of you a warm thanks, and I wish you a good spring ahead.  

Travis: Thank you both so much, really appreciate and enjoyed having you both on QA talks today! 

Quality assurance is vital to the success of an organization’s digital transformation. Lack of control can quickly derail a company’s technological presence, costing thousands. At Cigniti, our resolution is to build a better world with better quality software. Renowned for the global quality thought leadership in the industry, we draw expertise from over a decade of test engineering experience across verticals. To learn how we do it, visit cigniti.com. 

You have been listening to QA Talks. To ensure that you never miss any episode, subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast player. Thank you so much for listening, until next time.