The futureup closeWORLD QUALITY REPORT
15th Edition 2023-24

NORTH AMERICA
Tracking the disruptions shaping
the American quality landscapeAmbitious, relentless, powerful - as far as IT is concerned,
there is never a dull moment in the NA market. This year too,
we see interesting trends emerge in its Quality Engineering(QE) landscape.

Zooming out – the macro view
The pandemic’s significant impact has affected every
business, and we are not surprised by the slow growth
rates and reduction in customer spends this year. However,this trend has been the most visible in the consumer
products, retail, telecom, media, and services sectors.
Whereas manufacturing, life sciences, energy utilities, andchemicals seem to have witnessed significant growth in thesame period.
The uncertainties that followed the pandemic increased
cost pressure, driving organizations to look for ways to
cut costs, maximize value of their investments and ensurebusiness assurance. This could be why we started to see morebusinesses bring renewed focus on testing.
The way businesses function has also changed. Traditionallarge Delivery Center of Excellence (DCoE) constructs havegiven way to more agile pods and teams, emphasizing
collaboration between development and quality assurance.
The concept of nearshoring has gained traction, withorganizations exploring options to reduce costs while1

maintaining a similar time zone for their operations. Newer
operational models such as the Hybrid TCoE (Testing Centerof Excellence) or the Product-Centric model that integrates
automation with DevOps practices were introduced and are
now being actively used.
There has been a renewed interest in data and cloud, and avisible shift towards a DevOps culture that demands agile
provisioning processes. This has further fueled the adoptionof technologies like telemetry, migration to cloud, andautomation of processes.
Eventually, this reliance on data and cloud has made way
for the widespread adoption of the next big tech – AI(Artificial Intelligence).

Zooming in – what’s really holding
our attention?
While we saw AI taking giant leaps last year, this year
Gen AI has disrupted traditional business models, drivingorganizations to ideate, experiment, and further zoom in on
digital transformations. Currently it is seen as a low hanging
fruit, just ripe enough to be picked.
Organizations are eager to leverage Gen AI capabilities invarious business units, apart from the Financial Sector, which
has been exercising caution towards active adaptation of AI.
But testing efforts currently underway will make a compellingcase for AI in the coming years.
However, this exponential digital growth (be it cloud, data, AI)
exposed businesses to several security risks.
A key example of this is the Microsoft attack of 2021 which
was one of the largest cyberattacks in US history, affecting
over 30,000 US businesses. Or the one at Facebook thatcoincidentally also occurred the same year exposing 530
million users!
These incidents amplified the increasing prioritizing of
security testing to safeguard organizational systems andcustomer data and further boosted the growth of Site
Reliability Engineering (SRE). We expect SRE processes
and tools to gain further prominence in the coming year,
especially in the Financial Sector due to keen interest frominsurance companies.
In fact, Security Engineering is becoming a critical skill for
Quality Engineering, as security testing is being integrated
into the development lifecycle. We see how Performance
Engineering is now evolving into SRE, encompassing Chaos
Engineering and Observability.

Amidst these transformations, the hype that arose
around the Metaverse in 2022 diminished. Instead, we seeorganizations exploring Mixed Reality for training, auditing,claims processing, and other applications.
There has also been more awareness about sustainability.
Even though green engineering and sustainability initiatives
are not yet a dominant trend, organizations are engaging
in conversations to reduce their carbon footprint while
improving efficiency.
In a volatile global market like today’s, the burden on QE isever increasing. We are definitely intrigued to see how someof these trends will shape up in the coming year and what thefuture of QE will look like.

One hat, many roles
With all these changes at hand, the skill set profile of Quality
Engineers has transformed not just in NA, but globally. While“full-stack engineering” was a term that has been around fora while, it has become ‘real’ only now. Automation skills are
considered essential, with a shift towards software quality
engineering, which is a move away from manual testing.
Data skills and SAP (Systems, Applications, and Products)
expertise are in demand, reflecting the increasing importanceof data quality in the AI-driven world. We also see a lot of
focus on environments, especially around test environment
management, and functional testing in the QE space.
The convergence of hardware and software in industries
like automotive and telecommunications is blurring thelines between traditional quality engineering and productengineering. This shift necessitates a comprehensive
approach to testing and compliance.
Quality engineers are being seen as custodians of compliance,
especially in highly regulated industries such as life sciences.
The validation of systems and processes to meet industryspecific standards will become increasingly important.

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Sathish Natarajan
Group Vice President, Quality Engineering& Testing, Capgemini & Sogeti, Americas
Anand Moorthy
Vice President & Head of Quality Engineering& Testing, Financial Services, Capgemini

Survey Watch

84%

Organizations are actively using AIto optimize their testing processes

96%Organizations include cloud andinfrastructure testing as part of thedevelopment life cycle?

77%
78%

Organizations say that 21-40% of theirdigital core testing is automatedOrganizations say that it is very
important to test the impact of failure
events on applications running on cloud
especially using Chaos Engineering

Kirthy Chennaian
Vice President & Head of Quality Engineering& Testing, Capgemini Americas
Contact OpenText
If you desire more information about testing tools,
please contact:
Monica Garcia Manzanares
Global Campaign Manager, OpenTextr
mgarciamanza@opentext.com
I N A S S OCI AT ION WI T H :2