SourceForge recently had a chat with Alan Jimenez, director of Qualibrate. As a QA advisor, he helped many organizations worldwide to increase their software quality. Since 2016 he is in charge of the SaaS platform that is reinventing the way IT teams deliver enterprise software into production.
Q: Good morning Alan, can you please tell us a bit more about your background and experience in the world of Quality Assurance?
Director of Qualibrate
A: My story begins as a child when, at a very early stage, I got an interest in technology that brought me to the software world. As soon as I graduated from college, I emigrated into the Quality Assurance (QA) space where I joined a company called FocusFrame, which was a highly respected organization. Since then, for the past 14 years, I have fulfilled a bunch of different QA consulting roles ranging from being a manual tester to become a QA advisor for large enterprises.
My journey has always been focused on helping customers on implementing QA best practices most efficiently and effectively, to cut risk while implementing changes throughout their software development lifecycle.
In 2010, I moved from Mexico to the Netherlands to join my current company IOVIO to continue my track helping more customers with their QA challenges. Part of IOVIO’s DNA is that we do not only advise customers how to organize their testing process with best practices but also advise them on adopting modern technologies to speed up application delivery while managing risk at the same time.
That is what ultimately brought us to the SaaS domain. We saw an opportunity in making the QA process even more accessible and efficient, and in 2016 we launched Qualibrate into the market, which I have the privilege of running and growing together with an amazing team until this day.
Q: With over 14 years of experience in the field, what do you think is the main challenge for QA teams today?
A: A lot of folks out there believe that QA begins and stops with testing. We see QA as a more holistic approach towards not only making sure your software is built as per specifications but software that people can make use of and can generate some business value from.
What this means is that QA should not only be the testing team’s responsibility but the entire software delivery team’s responsibility. We come to think of the term “Quality” as an inherent attribute of software delivery, not a result of it.
We invest a lot of our time with customers on cultivating that mindset into their IT and Business teams, as they all have to put skin in the game to make sure the results of the implementations are as desired, and that risk is managed end-to-end in the software lifecycle.
The good news is that there are a lot of practices out there that teams are already adopting, especially when embracing delivery paradigms such as DevOps, where speed and agility are no longer optional. Concepts such as TDD and BDD allow teams to implement shift-left strategies towards QA on their software initiatives, which is a good thing.
Last but not least, we see a common misconception around QA and test tooling. The tools are not the end, but the means to an end. We strongly believe that a solid QA process is about aligning people’s mindsets, the organization, and the processes; the tools are just enablers.
Q: And that’s how Qualibrate was born, I guess. What is the concept that’s making this solution unique?
A: You got it. Our first decision was to detach ourselves from the idea of building solely a test automation tool and pushed ourselves to think outside of the box.
We took the challenge of understanding how we can build a solution for teams to adopt quality across several stages of the software delivery process with the path of least resistance.
To illustrate a use case, let’s focus on the process documentation activity of the software lifecycle. Throughout our experience, we noticed that the business processes’ documentation was lagging. Not because it does not deliver value, but because it is an activity that requires high effort and highly skilled functional resources (which normally have limited time).
As a result, we see teams shying away from that activity, taking shortcuts to meet project timelines.
Our goal with Qualibrate was to enable those people to create documentation quickly and effectively, without requiring too much effort — this is how we started defining the concept of “automatic process documentation”.
What makes our solution unique, is that by documenting the process once with the right people, our platform will spit out the manual tests, automated tests, and training materials from the same source. In the past, we noticed customers adopted 3, sometimes even 4 different tools able to generate the same number of deliverables. How is that about efficiency?
Customers like Heineken, AkzoNobel, and KLM/AirFrance have been able to dramatically cut documentation efforts at least by 7x times and optimize QA testing resource utilization by at least 80%. This has allowed their delivery teams to focus on more value-added activities, as opposed to repetitive ones.
Qualibrate is a platform that helps teams manage the Quality Assurance process end-to-end, taking not only testing activities into account but also documentation and learning activities as well.
We also invested heavily in QA reporting and analytics, being able to tell a story to our users about their current situation from a QA perspective. Our Qualibrate analytics engine can answer questions such as: what is the status of my test cycle? How many test cases have failed last week? Do we have critical open defects today? What is the health of any given test cycle? How many scenarios are part of a process area? etc.
Q: So you, more than often, sit at the table with many different players within the organization? Who are they and how can they all benefit from your proposition?
A: The reality is that everyone in the organization will have at least an indirect benefit from having a solid QA foundation as part of the software delivery process. Who doesn’t care about Quality, is bound for failure. Especially nowadays that organizations in every industry are relying more and more on technology to run their business — quality is no longer an option, it is a must-have.
In practical terms, there are a few key stakeholders within an organization to help shape a quality mindset on the various teams responsible for implementing software. IT managers, project managers, business process experts, application managers, and the like, are people that we heavily depend on to successfully implement a successful QA process within their organizations. Their buy-in and engagement is crucial to secure success.
Q: What type of customers and industries do you serve?
A: Quality Assurance is an industry-agnostic discipline, and as such, we have been very fortunate to have helped customers in industries like Food & Beverage, Manufacturing, Travel & transportation, Financial Services, Technology, Chemicals, Fashion and Retail, Aviation & Military, and government organizations.
Our approach is well suited for large organizations like Calvin Klein, Textron, and the Dutch Ministry of Defense implementing complex enterprise applications on their business operations, but it’s not limited to those only. Small businesses and start-ups building their own software applications are certainly organizations that can benefit from our approach as well. Truth be told, we continuously test some portions of Qualibrate with Qualibrate — you know what they say; pray what you preach.
Q: What is Qualibrate aiming for, in the next 5 years?
A: Our ambition is to help our customers to become more agile in delivering their software and allow them to release changes as fast as possible without quality’s detriment.
What this means for us is that we continuously innovate by creating simple answers to complex problems, and transforming those into features that our users can easily use in our All-in-one Quality Assurance platform.
That being said, we are also believers in integration — we are an integration-first company. As such, we recognize other solutions in the DevOps/ALM space that do a far better job on other areas that we prefer to integrate with, as opposed to reinventing the wheel.
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