Spotlight

An independent testing entity

Maveric has established itself as one of the top three independent software testing firms in the country. By Nivedan Prakash

Maveric Systems, an independent software testing firm, is a pioneer in outsourced software testing. The company’s domain expertise, project management and multi-locational test delivery facilities have helped it bag clients ranging from end-user companies to software product organizations and solution integrators.

“Software testing, lately, has garnered unequivocal attention from all interested parties, namely the end-user institutions, the solution and service providers and finally the testing service providers. It had also broken away from being a constituent of the development lifecycle into a separate stream by itself. This encouraged us to start an independent testing firm to cater to the fast-growing niche in an already crowded IT services space by offering a differentiated service,” said V N Mahesh, Executive Director, Maveric Systems.

The foundation

Founded by the core management team of Ranga Reddy, N N Subramaniam, P Venkatesh and V N Mahesh, Maveric Systems began its journey in 2000 with a strong and dedicated focus in the banking, financial services and insurance verticals. Over the years, the company has grown from having one center in India to having three in Chennai, Mumbai and Bangalore in India as well as subsidiaries in the US, UK and UAE.

“Among the various verticals that we focus on, banking and financial services forms the largest component. Maveric has accumulated expertise across various components in banking and capital markets,” commented Mahesh.

With an employee strength of about 500, Maveric’s revenues stand at around Rs 46 crore, maintaining a growth rate of over 70% for the past three years. The company has most of its clients in the BFSI segment. “The BFSI industry is the biggest spender on IT globally and it is also the vertical that offers the maximum scope to build international credits. Maveric believes in offering IP led services. We are looking at deepening our focus within the BSFI sector and developing domain ingrained testing tools in investment banking and insurance,” added Mahesh.

Maveric has different contracts with its clients with the delivery models varying between onsite and offshore. For more than 60% of its clients, the company delivers part of its testing engagements from offshore.

The company has been successful in shifting clients from the resource augmentation model to a business partner model in testing. It has also evolved alternate models for onsite-offsite software test outsourcing and mitigating the associated risks by using a phased approach. The kind of services offered by the company includes Functional Testing, Performance Testing, and Automation Testing.

It has also developed proprietary domain frameworks that help in reducing design times and ensure optimal test coverage. It brings end-to-end software testing capabilities to client engagements, ranging from defining a test strategy, test planning, execution, defect management, closure and documentation. Maveric’s testing processes are certified to be in accordance with ISO 9001:2000 standards.

Test design tool

Maveric has its own proprietary, domain-centric test design tool, called Testac, which empowers testing teams with automated generation of test cases for end-to-end as well as regression testing requirements. It helps achieve better quality test design on a constant basis, significantly compresses timelines, ensures comprehensive coverage, minimizes duplication of tests, and provides cases in an user friendly executable form with a run plan, expected results and control reports.

Testac makes extensive use of state-based and transition-based notations to capture the various elements of the business model as relevant for test generation. Powerful algorithms that encompass boundary value analysis, equivalence partitioning, graphical analysis, rule of N and orthogonal array (pairwise testing) are applied on the model to come up with optimum number of abstract tests. These abstract tests then get concertized by automated generation of relevant test data, mapping of the scenarios to the application under test and sequencing together into executable scenarios.

With a strong foundation in Model-Based Testing, Testac encapsulates business knowledge on processes and rules using proprietary frameworks enabling the company to deliver significantly enhanced productivity and coverage to clients. “It’s the first domain-centric design tool suite that will revolutionize the time and accuracy factors in the retail-banking segment. Testac brings a rigor to test design phase, focusing on what to test and how much to test,” said Mahesh.

Maveric’s mission

Maveric is the only IT services firm in India that sponsors a custom-designed two-year Post-Graduate Program in Software Testing, focused on creating its own brand of software testing professionals. This program has been run since 2004, in collaboration with the Loyola Institute of Business Administration in Chennai. It is also the only testing services company in India to have ISEB (British Computer Society) accreditation for competency building capability in testing.

The company has plans to set up an Automation Center of Excellence (CoE) for enhancing test reusability and improving productivity through automation. “The automation CoE will focus on evaluating best of breed automation tools across the lifecycle and create robust automation frameworks to deliver reusable and maintainable automation solutions,” said Mahesh.

Besides this, it is working on scaling up its testing practice in insurance over the next 12 months.

nivedan.prakash@expressindia.com