Cognizant say the acquisition will augment their digital engineering and core modernisation capabilities.

Cognizant today announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire Contino, a privately-held technology consulting firm. Contino specialises in helping clients accelerate their digital transformation by leveraging enterprise DevOps methodologies. Headquartered in London, Contino has approximately 350 employees worldwide with operations in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia.

Clients have included more than 100 of the world’s leading brands such as Adidas, Allianz, Barclays, Dow Jones, JetStar, Lloyds Bank, Morgan Stanley, National Australia Bank, and Vodafone, among others.

Contino was co-founded by Matt Farmer and Benjamin Wootton, who serve as chief executive officer and chief technology officer, respectively. Contino was recognized in 2018 and 2019 as a ‘LinkedIn Top Startup’ in the UK.

Matt Farmer, co-founder and CEO of Contino, said: “Joining Cognizant enables us to expand and scale our offerings globally, build on our tremendous success, and provide an even richer portfolio of cloud strategy and engineering capabilities.

“We are thrilled to be joining an organisation that shares our rich expertise in cloud technologies, DevOps, digital engineering, and data analytics. Our focus has always been on supporting the enterprise and their transformation using the ‘Squad Model.’

“With this approach, we support our enterprise clients at every step, from engineering through to communicating the benefits of their journey, all for ultimate success.”

Brian Humphries, CEO of Cognizant, said: “We look forward to welcoming Contino’s talented team to Cognizant. The DevOps approach to cloud migration, core modernisation and cloud security is reshaping how enterprises in all industries are building their infrastructures.

“This new set of holistic cloud capabilities from Contino will enable us to offer and more readily deploy transformative cloud-based solutions.”

The transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2019, subject to satisfaction of closing conditions, including regulatory approvals. Financial details were not disclosed.

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Come and watch big hitting companies take over the judging panel and collect their awards, such as: Boots, Banco Santander, Sony Computer, Third Bridge, Aviva, The Bank of America, Accenture and Shroders, Aviva, Godel Tech, Cognizant, Tata Consultancy Services, Openreach, Sogeti, Tech Mahindra, Sapient and QA Mentor.

For the opportunity to participate in the spectacular ceremony on the 21 November 2017, which will be busier than ever with a 19% increase in attendees, book your table soon, as there is LIMITED SPACES LEFT. 

Why enter?

Entering The European Software Testing Awards is an opportunity for the market to be acknowledged and praised for their on-going efforts. With such recognition comes self-belief, enhanced awareness, the breeding of success, the attraction of fresh and bright talent, as well as bringing high levels of exposure and acclaim for individuals, teams, and organisations.

Who should enter?

The European Software Testing Awards is open to all individuals and companies aligned with software testing and quality assurance, irrespective of a business or project size. However, all entries must have an affiliation to Europe – for example if you are an Indian-based business, provided your project was on behalf of a European business or was conducted in Europe, then your entry will be accepted.

Where and when?

A magnificent 19th-century market building designed by Sir Horace Jones and entirely renovated in 1988 by acclaimed architect Richard Rogers. In the heart of the City, next to the Tower of London and facing the Thames, Old Billingsgate is within easy access of London Bridge Station.

The post COMING UP: The European Software Testing Awards appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The glittering awards gala was launched for the first year, and what a success it was, recognising exceptional efforts of individuals and teams when undergoing digital transformation projects.

The famous British voice-over for the X-Factor, Britain’s Got Talent and Family Fortunes, Peter Dickson, fantastically hosted the event, before being accompanied on stage by members from the Judging Panel: Paula Cope, Global Head of QA at TRICAP; Shamim Marzai, CTO at Mumsnet; Keith Watson, Director of DevOps iHCM ADP; James Betteley, Consultant at Contino; Sudeep Chatterjee, Global Head of QA and Testing at Lombard Risk and Amparo Marin de la Barcena, Certification Governance Director at Banco Santander.

2017 Winners

The first award of the evening was for the Best DevOps Automation Project, which was awarded to Barclays.

Cognizant were then awarded for having the Best DevOps Cloud Project.

The Best DevOps Manager of the Year winner was Mark Howell from Lloyds Banking Group.

The team at Lloyds Banking Group were honored with the DevOps Team of the Year award.

The next award on the night recognised Lloyds Banking Group as having the Automic Best Use of DevOps Technology.

The sixth award was awarded to Banco Santander, who took home Best Overall DevOps Project (Finance Sector).

NHS Digital took home the award for Best Overall DevOps Project (Public Sector). 

Infosys was awarded Best Overall DevOps Project (Entertainment/Media Sector).

Judges felt that Accenture was deserving of the Best Overall DevOps Project (Communication Sector).

The Best Overall DevOps Project (Retail Sector) was awarded to Infosys.

Barclays was happily awarded for Most Successful Cultural Transformation.

DevOps Industry Awards sponsor, CA Technologies, was awarded Leading DevOps Vendor.

Last but not least, Automic took to the stage to present the final, overall award, which was awarded to the well deserved team, Barclays, for Most Successful Cultural Innovation.

About The DevOps Industry Awards

The DevOps Industry Awards celebrates the very best professionals and outstanding achievements in the DevOps community.

A full list of the finalists in each category can be found here.

31 Media, organisers of The DevOps Industry Awards, The European Software Testing Awards, The National Software Testing Conference, The Software Testing Conference NORTH and publishers of TEST Magazine, DevOps Online and Software Testing News would like to thank all attendees, their sponsors (CA Technologies and Automic) and Event Partner, Puppet, for their on-going support.

Click here to register your interest for Awards 2018

Written by Leah Alger

The post Winners announced at the DevOps Industry Awards 2017 appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

It is something of an achievement to make the final list in a competitive and growing field and the number of big hitting companies listed is a strong testament to their fine work.

The list has leading financial service companies Barclays, Lloyds Banking Group, Allianz Insurance and Banco Santander all included.

The Leading Vendor category is packed full on major firms: Aqua Security, CA Technologies, OpsGenie, Plutora, Puppet and Redgate Software.

The Best Use of DevOps Technology, sponsored by Automic, has an impressive array of companies, with data software company Actifio, two banks in Barclays and Lloyds, energy company Centrica, digital and technological specialists Cognizant, investment bank Nomura, software outsourcing company Qarea, and software testing specialists Tricentis all in the category final list.

Devops Online is looking forward to an amazing awards evening on 18 October at Marriot Grosvenor Square, London, and hope to see you there.

Book your table here: http://www.devopsindustryawards.com/attend/book-your-table/

The post Exclusive: DevOps Industry Awards finalists announced appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The fourth annual European Software Testing Awards 2016 took place on 16 November 2016 at the magnificent Old Billingsgate in central London. The Awards were hosted by TEST Magazine’s Editor Cecilia Rehn who was joined on stage by presenters from leading industry service providers Micro Focus, Amdocs and Worksoft, as well as several members of the Judging Panel.

2016 winners

The first award of the evening was the Testing Management Team of the Year, which was awarded to Lloyds Banking Group. The judges felt that the Group Operations Business Testing Services (GOTS) management team exceeded all expectations during their pivotal role in the planning and management of testing processes for the large UK based financial services group.

Tech Mahindra were awarded the Worksoft Testing Team of the Year for their ability to create and bring in a brand new testing team, and make it a success.

The Best User Experience (UX) Testing in a Project category winner was Harman Connected Services, for creating a world class betting and gaming experience with Ladbrokes and demonstrating exemplary UX work by testing/assessing the ease of use of Ladbrokes’ new multi-channel product.

The team at Virgin Media were honoured with the Amdocs Best Overall Testing Project – Communication award, thanks to their developed ‘Einstein’ solution that resolves service faults quickly for customers and slashed the number of call-outs to customers’ homes.

The next award on the night recognised Tech Mahindra as having the Most Innovative Project. Tech Mahindra’s entry successfully validated the non-functional aspects of an IoT (internet of things) platform.

Sony Interactive Entertainment Group took home the award for Best Overall Testing Project – Gaming. This entry presented a mapping tool that singularised test data to one location, so that it can be searched, filtered and displayed in an easily digestible way.

The seventh award was awarded to Tech Mahindra who took home Best Mobile Testing Project after the judges agreed this entry presented the best mobile testing solution, which was developed for a leading European retailer.

After demonstrating their expertise of test management, test automation, agile, performance testing, and most importantly, their move into DevOps, nFocus Testing were awarded with Leading Vendor. QA Mentor was recognised with a Special Commendation in this category.

Judges felt that Isabelle Magnusson from Ticketmaster was deserving of the Testing Manager of the Year award. Isabelle has shown great leadership skills, demonstrating Ticketmaster’s values in building their QA team.

The Best Test Automation Project – Non-Functional was awarded to Tech Mahindra for demonstrating the best use of non-functional automation in a software testing project.

Aaron Gibbon from BJSS was honoured with the award for Graduate Tester of the Year for his integral role in the testing of BJSS’ flagship NHS Spine 2 project, in which he single-handedly produced core test automation components on which the programme relies and which the NHS still continues to use.

Maveric Systems in partnership with Metro Bank was awarded the Best Test Automation Project – Functional for its use of functional automation in a software testing project. HARMAN Connected Services was awarded a Special Commendation in this category.

The Best Overall Testing Project – Finance was awarded to Brickendon Consulting for helping a large tier 1 investment bank roll out its new ecommerce platform across 30 different countries.

Marks and Spencer (M&S) picked up the award for the Best Overall Testing Project – Retail. The entry saw the successful initiation of the retailer’s ‘Distribution Centre 2’ program.

The judges awarded Cognizant Technology Solutions with Best Use of Technology in a Project, for the testing service provider’s design of a BDD-style testing framework with futuristic technologies like OCR and LUX sensors.

Home Office – Immigration IT Portfolio was recognised as this year’s Best Agile Project. Their testing project successfully demonstrated an agile approach to the judging panel.

Gojko Adžić, Partner at Neuri Consulting LLP was selected by the judging panel to receive the Outstanding Achievement Award, for his hard work in the sector, in particular agile testing.

The final, overall award was awarded to Tech Mahindra for the entry they submitted for the Best Test Automation Project – Non-Functional category. Gregor Rechberger, Product Manager at Micro Focus, was on stage to present the Micro Focus European Software Testing Award to the Tech Mahindra team.

About The European Software Testing Awards

The European Software Testing Awards is an annual event held in Central London celebrating the very best in the software testing and QA industry.

A full list of the Finalists in each category can be found here.

The Headline Sponsor for The European Software Testing Awards 2016 is MICRO FOCUS, and category sponsors are AMDOCS and WORKSOFT. The Awards programme is also supported by TEST Magazine, Software Testing News and DevOps Online.

31 Media, organisers of The European Software Testing Awards, The National Software Testing Conference and publishers of TEST Magazine would like to thank its sponsors for their support.

Written by Cecilia Rehn.

The post The European Software Testing Awards 2016 winners announced during Gala Dinner appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Quite often though, organisations encounter significant challenges during the implementation of the concept; particularly in the areas of legacy systems. So what are the benefits of DevOps and what steps can organisations take to successfully work with it?

Why DevOps?

One of the challenges faced by enterprises, especially the large ones, is to improve communication and collaboration between IT and business teams. DevOps emphasises ‘people and culture’, and seeks to improve collaboration between operations and development teams by changing IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of lean and agile practices.

More specifically, DevOps addresses the existence of traditionally siloed team structures that are not able to scale to meet the varied needs of modern enterprises. It also addresses the philosophical disconnect between development, testing and operations teams, which results in poor communication, collaboration and integration. Moreover, it accelerates the deployment of digital technologies.

DevOps implementations use technology, especially automation tools that can make use of an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a lifecycle perspective. Therefore, IT organisations are now embracing DevOps practices to fasten the frequent software releases into software production. This accelerates the time to market for new products and services and improves the overall customer experience.

In fact, according to a Forrester survey, a new software development lifecycle (SDLC) is emerging as the result of the three main focal points of DevOps practices and its characteristics include faster release cycles. First of all, more than 24% of companies have daily and weekly software releases. Secondly, changing requirements and lack of coordination between groups as roughly 47% believe these disconnects were primary points of failure during a release review and finally, the emergence of DevOps with approximately 66% of CIOs having this on their IT agenda.

Fitting the pieces together with continuous testing

Continuous testing (CT) is the first step in the right direction when embarking on a DevOps journey. CT is a constant feedback mechanism that drives software delivery through the software development cycle with automated feedback. At each checkpoint there is an auto-trigger for the next process in the delivery chain if the feedback is to move forward. If the feedback is to not move forward, the process is immediately stopped and corrective measures are taken.

Establishing a continuous testing ecosystem involves the following steps:

• It has been common-practice for many testing organisations to store automation scripts in test management tools or a shared folder structure. However, an automation code base, just like an application code base, should reside in version control repository.
• The automation suite must be integrated with the build deployment tool to enable centralised execution and reporting.
• To enable faster feedback at each checkpoint, there is a need to classify the automation suite in multiple layers of tests. The most common types of these tests are:
  • Health check: this is an automated check to verify that services are up after deployment.
  • Smoke tests: this most critical set of automated tests ensures that system features are operational and no blocking defects occur.
  • Full scale regression test: the goal is to keep feedback time as short as possible through parallel execution of automated tests through multiple threads or machines.
  • Intelligent regression: if the execution time for overall regression test is significantly high, CT setup becomes less effective due to longer feedback cycles. In such a scenario, full regression execution can be shifted to overnight or during the weekend depending on its alignment with recurring build frequencies.
• Existing automation tests and migrating tests must be simplified to more open source tools to further enhances the effectiveness of a DevOps setup.
• In order to effectively use available resources and establish the ability to run the load tests on-demand without wasting time and resources, organisations should consider building a cloud infrastructure.

If any of these steps fail, the deployment process is halted and all the stakeholders in delivering software including developers, testers and operations staff are notified immediately to make sure any issues are corrected.

What is next?

The notion that traditional IT organisations cannot do DevOps without throwing away what they have built over a period time is a myth. Testing teams play a key role in overcoming the challenges of transitioning to DevOps by orchestrating a CT infrastructure and creating an early feedback loop. By successfully implementing CT as a first step, the dots of DevOps can be connected with development and operations to create automated build deployments, code coverage analysis, production monitoring and on-demand environment provisioning. All of which enables a full cycle of CT and continuous development (CD) to be established for teams to fail fast and recover more quickly.

Unlike any other tech movement, DevOps is not only driven by a passionate and enthusiastic tech crowd, but it has also resonated with the rest of the business, many parts of which are first-line recipients of IT’s latest digital products and services.

Edited for web by Cecilia Rehn.

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