QA Infotech – Putting Quality First

Based in Noida, QA Infotech is expanding leaps and bounds since its inception in 2003. After having experienced growth from less than five employees to more than 350 to date, now QA InfoTech owns 3 offices in the Noida region including one in a Special Economic Zone. Cell IT spoke with Mukesh Sharma, Founder & CEO, QA Infotech on the company's current focus and its future plans.

Q) What is the big focus for QA InfoTech?

Ans: HR has been one of the major focus of QA InfoTech. Being in the services industry, QA InfoTech is completely devoted in providing quality service to its customers but apart from that we also acknowledge the fact that our workforce is our most important asset. We have a strong culture of sharing information and working together in a non- hierarchical structure complying with the fact that people are most productive with jobs when they are given opportunity to give their inputs and ideas freely without any fear of criticism or lack of support. Thus, we have tried our level best to create a stress free environment where the work done by each team can reach its full potential.

To make the work place more desirable and interesting, different activities like Cultural day, Annual day, team outings, Table Tennis Tournaments, Cricket Matches, out station trips- like rafting trip etc. are conducted. Interactive and competitive activities are frequently organized to promote an exuberant environment.

Q) How is the company looking to better establish its presence in India?

Ans: The company has been expanding leaps and bounds since its inception in 2003. The company has seen tremendous growth from less than five employees to more than 350 to date. Conceived in 2003 and starting its operations from a rented accommodation in 2004, now QA InfoTech owns 3 offices in the Noida region including one in a Special Economic Zone. It has Five established centres of excellence in India and U.S. We will further explore the opportunities & update with the developments.

Q) What kind of trends do you foresee in the Quality Assurance and Testing arena?

Ans: We see ‘cloud computing’ garnering a lot of interest these days, and in light of this we have created Virtual machine Library with the required OS/Browser combinations for running the tests. This has eliminated the need of keeping multiple dedicated machines with OS/Browser combinations and also saves a lot of lab space.

The use of all these technological trends helps us reduce the cost, space, and resources drastically. And this has endowed us with the advantage of being considered market leaders among 3rd party testing companies in highest offshoring, resulting in lower project cost. 

Test Automation is another area where we have a keen focus. The drive to be the best provider has led us to explore more and more options of test automation through which we could serve our clients better. These automated test harnesses use open source tools and technologies which can be used to considerably reduce the time taken to perform certain routine testing tasks such as: test case creation, test case management, compatibility testing, result reporting etc.

Q) What is the profile of your customer base in India?

Ans: We have started looking inwards to the growing domestic market. However so far we have not been able to tap local opportunities to a large extent. Doing business in a domestic market has its inherent issues and we have realized that the road to home isn’t easy. Though the government has been making favorable policies to encourage companies like us, we are still exploring to sail through the initial hurdles before diving completely.

Q) How do you look at the competition and how are you different from your competing products and solutions?

Ans: The competition has been quite rigorous as in-house software testing is very much popular in the market. The keystones of the company’s success are its commitment towards quality, ability to empathize with the customers, its people and remarkable foresightedness. The vision can be a personal or an organizational one but there has to be a balance between organizational goals and resource satisfaction.

Innovation is another cornerstone of success in the field of testing. The company has continually tried to evolve better ways of performing the routine testing jobs, automation testing, functional testing and manual testing tasks. “By developing tool independent automation frameworks and by advocating the use of open source tools, we have been able to serve our customers in a manner that helps keep up the trust and reliability factor.

Last but not least, one thing  that set the company apart from others is its emphasis on ‘execution’. Usually, the focus in ‘Quality and testing’ is more on ‘Processes’. On the contrary, QA InfoTech along with building its own processes and metrics believes in delivering by actual execution of jobs and processes. This is rare to find in the industry. And very few companies can match up to this kind of commitment.

Q) What kind of verticals are you targeting as a company?

Ans: QA InfoTech has been providing its services  across all verticals which includes BFSI, Retail, Education, Publishing, Cross Industry & Government. Education sector has been the major contributor as QAIT generates 70% of its total revenue from e-learning clients.

Nowadays, Mobile & VAS testing has become the important vertical for QAIT, we are the second player after Tech Mahindra to provide mobile & VAS testing services. India is major market for mobile handset & we are actively looking at this sector for QA InfoTech.

Q) Is it true that because of the slowdown in economy, companies are putting less emphasis on quality?

Ans: Today businesses are striving hard to increase productivity, reduce cycle times and deliver defect-free products, the product development team may not have considerable time for a comprehensive and impartial quality evaluation of the product/solution being developed.

In fact, many quality conscious organizations have warmed up to the idea of having an independent QA & Testing company to test their products/solutions and not take the risk of relying on the testing skills of the development vendor.  That is essentially what QA InfoTech offers. The organization will have peace of mind with regards to the quality of their product as the independent QA & testing vendor perform testing of the products/solution that are developed by the internal team/ development vendor. This saves the additional costs of point releases or patches that are based on customer reported defects for an organization. We feel autonomous QA & testing services provide customers an edge over the traditional approach.