Accenture has launched a new platform for automated, analytics-driven software testing, after successfully completing pilots with 10 clients around the world. “The Accenture Touchless Testing Platform brings together open source, commercial and Accenture proprietary tools and algorithms to automate, touchless testing process for software – all guided by artificial intelligence and analytics, said Accenture.
The new platform allows testing teams to easily integrate tools from leading players such as Conformiq, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel Saffron, Sauce Labs, Tableau, Tricentis and Worksoft, along with key Accenture innovations, to bring new enterprise software solutions to market faster and with higher quality.
“Software testing today still struggles with over-engineering efforts that can result in anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of wasted time and effort,” said Kishore Durg, managing director and global testing lead for Accenture.
“With advances in analytics, artificial intelligence and data visualization, however, it’s now possible to not only find these areas of inefficiencies and eliminate them, but also to uncover business risks and opportunities that weren’t visible before. That is what the Accenture Touchless Testing Platform is designed to do,” he added.
Accenture said that one insurance company that piloted the platform discovered they could accelerate their pace of delivery by improving their test suite. Using the platform’s cognitive engine, Accenture identified up to 22 percent test cases as duplicates or similar that could be eliminated. By applying such insights into defect detection and analysis, test execution and retesting, the company can significantly improve the speed and quality of the software development and accelerate overall cycle time.
“Artificial intelligence is helping us rethink old approaches to testing and helping testers operate smarter and more efficiently. Applying analytics to massive amounts of production and test data is key to spotting trends, predicting failures, managing risk and continuously responding to customer feedback, all of which is critical to competitiveness,” said Bhaskar Ghosh, group chief executive, Accenture Technology Services.
The data visualization capabilities of the platform help testers make better use of volumes of data generated in a test cycle. This can help prioritise work based on quality heat maps, failure and usage patterns and test suite vitality. The platform also provides testers with early warnings on system anomalies, and real-time guided interventions.
The overall test design and execution process is guided by an industry-specific reusable testing repository comprising more than 76,000 test scenarios, scripts and conditions across 33 industries and 280 end-to-end business processes, said Accenture.
