Interview with Sal Allegra on IT Quality Assurance

With offshore firms offering testing teams in the thousands, I was intrigued what customers thought of Questcon’s test center right here in N. Carolina.

So I asked to interview Sal Allegra, IT manager at ISO, a member of the Verisk Analytics family of companies, about the work Questcon has done for them. Sal manages their quality assurance, change, and software configuration management activities.

Describe the business and application environment you are responsible for quality around.

ISO provides its customers a wide range of actuarial, underwriting, and claims information around property/casualty insurance. As is common in this industry, we have lots of custom-built solutions on a mixed bag of hardware platforms. We are in the process of transitioning many to Java on a Z Linux environment.

While the application complexity and data volumes are not out of the ordinary, with Verisk having recently gone public, we obviously will have an additional responsibility for hygiene related to our applications.

How mature would you say your QA environment is?

In flux is probably a good way to describe it. We have decided to take advantage of an enterprise license around IBM’s Rational Suite. The hope is it will provide some level of consistency and common repository across regression testing, performance benchmarking, and defect tracking steps.

One of the reasons to engage Questcon was to do an assessment of our current state and the maturity of our regression environment. Questcon reported our level of automation in that area was somewhat below industry benchmarks and proceeded to help us create a framework to significantly increase the automation.

Can you describe the test automation framework?

To me, a well designed framework makes you less testing-tool dependent and greatly insulates you from human vagaries of testing. Questcon did a quick assessment on our environment using 28 variables, and then conducted a proof of concept using a series of regression test cases.

They created a keyword-driven framework that helped standardize the code creation process and allowed us to leverage common utilities and function libraries. We anticipate we are now creating our regression scripts much faster. One of the added benefits was they helped reconcile separate scripts, one for acceptance and one for production to allow for shared efficiencies.

Were you hesitant to utilize Questcon’s remote center in Greensboro, NC?

They did the assessment and framework development on-site. That was really high-quality work. Once that was done they could have done the detailed development just about anywhere. The beauty of a well-defined framework is you can use junior resources right here in the U.S. and get competitive pricing without needing to look for offshore economies.

The big “aha” for me was Questcon did not just jump in and execute, but helped us rethink. Also, they have a vendor-neutral approach to testing tools, so their mindset is not rote or skewed towards a certain solution set.