In any business, cost optimization gets the prime importance and every activity requiring investment needs to be justified for its value to the business. Software quality assurance and associated cost is directly proportional to each other. One needs to challenge such established facts and transform the existing business processes to achieve the optimum value for a business.

This paper connects together the complexity of testing under current rapidly changing business environment, people issues, need for appropriate automation and shares the results from a real project. The emphasis lies on planning and implementation of strategy where quick wins are targeted so as to prove the usability of the strategy. This is narrated as a story in order to make it more appealing to the community at large who deal with IT as managers but may not be a part of it.

Rakesh Upadhyay is a Masters in Financial Management and has over eighteen years techno-managerial experience in IT Industry spanning across program and project management, solution architecture and design, customer engagement and expectations management, pre-sales, business pipeline analysis, work stack planning and demand management, skill planning and development, service level management, dashboard and MIS reporting.

Satish Ankalikar is a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and has wide ranging experience in various capacities in IT and non IT fields. He is associated with TechMahindra for last 12 years and is into testing for almost 2 years. Currently his responsibilities are around component testing, automation and provide thought leadership to E2E testing teams in terms of automation strategy with a focus of reduction in cost of testing. He also works as a HR mentor to his business unit.

Ninad Kulkarni is Master of Engineering in Electronics and Telecommunications and holds Diploma in Management Studies and Managing Successful Programmes (MSP) accreditation from APMG-UK. He has diversified experience in IT and non-IT fields. Prior to joining TechMahindra he worked in the companies like Ralliwolf Limited, Crompton Greaves Limited and Aplab into R&D, Pilot Production and Testing & Measuring Instrumentation. He has been associated with TechMahindra for the last 12 years and has worked as Project, Delivery and Programme Manager on various assignments. He has got experience in Data warehousing and Business Intelligence in Telecom Domain. He has also been involved in pre-sales activities and solution design. His contribution to organizational activities like Quality Management and Training has been widely appreciated.