Quality Kiosk adds Micro Focus Silk to its quality management methodologies to support a wide range of technologies for its clients.
"Using Silk has been a major advantage in our work for this customer. We work on extensive testing projects for this client and not a single application has had to be rolled back after it has gone live."
MANEESH JHAWAR
CEO
Quality Kiosk
Software/Programming Services
India
As the applications that Quality Kiosk tests for banking clients become more customer-focused and web-based, they increase in complexity. Meeting the quality management demands of its clients led Quality Kiosk to adopt robust, adaptable and innovative testing tools.
When Quality Kiosk was first established in 2000, third-party testing was at an early stage. The founders noticed a gap between quality required and quality delivered by outsourced companies and set up Quality Kiosk to bridge the gap. Since that time, Quality Kiosk has grown to become a leading player in the software testing industry in India and is the chosen testing partner for some of the largest and most prestigious organizations in India, the Middle East and U.S. Today, the company delivers services to over 120 companies including 24 of the Fortune 500 and is the testing partner for most of the leading banks and insurance companies in India.
With its singular focus on quality assurance (QA), Quality Kiosk had won an enviable reputation for proactively identifying strategic and tactical ways to improve a client’s QA efficiency, reduce operational cost and increase test coverage and risk mitigation. To help advance both its business and the services it offers to clients, Quality Kiosk uses some of the world’s leading testing tools—including Micro Focus Silk Test™ and Silk Performer™.
The increased demands for customer-focused applications from Quality Kiosk’s sizeable banking and insurance client base added to the quality challenges faced by QA teams. Before the web and other enabling technologies were adopted, most banking transactions were carried out in bank branches with the bank clerk covering any application errors. That safety net was removed as it became possible for customers to deal with their banks directly. As a result, any application errors became much more urgent and potentially far more damaging to the bank in terms of customer satisfaction and reputation. Offering the right methodologies and tools to assure quality across these new technologies led Quality Kiosk to identify the right testing software for its purposes. As Maneesh Jhawar, one of Quality Kiosk’s founders and now CEO, explains, “We initially used Silk products in one or two instances to test certain applications for customers. Confidence quickly grew and we recognized that the value offered by Silk was really good. The Silk products have now become one of the key parts of our quality solutions.”
Among the advantages of using Silk tools, Jhawar says the company values the wide range of technology that Silk supports, “Our customers use a wide range of technologies, and it’s not always possible to train all our teams on all technologies. Because Silk supports a lot of different platforms, we can deliver maximum coverage using Silk.” One bank in the Middle East was looking for a core banking replacement. The environment was, according to Jhawar, “very complicated. We had to test 20 systems together along with the core banking system. We used Silk products to test all sorts of different technologies and protocols.” Using Silk Performer actually increased scalability with each round of testing. As Jhawar explains, “By the time we ran the final test, we were achieving three times the transactions per hour we managed the first time we did the test.”
The comprehensive automated testing capabilities of the Silk tools add considerable value to the methodologies that Quality Kiosk brings to its customer engagements. For Jhawar this is especially important. He says, “We have not come across a performance testing situation, for example, that Silk Performer doesn’t support. Quality Kiosk’s methodology includes carrying out several rounds of testing before a certification round, and then, finally, the application goes into production. Customers always see a scalability improvement between the first round and go-live. This has helped Quality Kiosk save the customers valuable resources. “Some clients have been able to reduce hardware costs as a result of optimization, going from four servers to one and reducing the total cost of ownership,” says Jhawar.
Lower hardware cost is not the only TCO benefit that Quality Kiosk can pass on to its clients. Simplicity in the licensing from Micro Focus is greatly valued by Quality Kiosk. “The licensing is very straightforward and simple to understand,” explains Jhawar.
“As a business,” Jhawar continues, “we look at the value we deliver from two angles: What did the customer achieve, and what did it cost to achieve this? By using Silk we have been able to achieve the quality and performance we need.”
The confidence that Quality Kiosk has in its methodologies and tools is best illustrated by the Center of Excellence that the company has established. This enables customers to see the tools in action first-hand. For example, customers can see how Silk tools can be used to test mobile applications. “By bringing customers into the center of excellence, we not only demonstrate the prototypes and the capabilities of the tools in different environments, we combine these with our own best practices,” Jhawar says. “For example, how to manage defect tracking and managing test projects using dashboards.”
For a company that bases its reputation on delivering testing excellence to its client base, Quality Kiosk integrates proven best practices with leading QA tooling to deliver complete, end-to-end quality solutions. As a result of its use of Silk Test and Silk Performer, Quality Kiosk ensures that it remains at the forefront of testing, and its clients deliver the very best user experience to their customers.