Infrastructure Testing: The Ultimate “Shift Left”
Organizations worldwide are continually required to make significant investments in upgrading, re-engineering, and protecting their IT infrastructure. However, unlike application software development, many companies lack a structured quality assurance approach for infrastructure testing. Creating an infrastructure quality practice is an answer, but it's not without its challenges. However, if your company is interested in avoiding headline-grabbing outages, rooted in deployment problems with infrastructure—server, network, storage, middleware, telephony, hardware, IT security, cloud, virtual, and Data Center Ops—then come to this session. Carl Delmolino and Hitesh Patel explain how to identify and address infrastructure testing opportunities, how to build a diversely skilled infrastructure test team, and how to apply familiar SDLC testing process rigor to enterprise-level infrastructure change. When addressed effectively, infrastructure testing is risk mitigation at the far end of “left,” reduces organizational technical risk, and helps ensure higher system availability for employees and customers, alike.
Carl Delmolino is the director of quality assurance within the infrastructure technology division of Travelers Insurance. Before going off the rails to build an infrastructure testing practice, Carl spent more than twenty years in application software testing, leading BA, QA, and automated test teams in the personal and commercial areas at Travelers. As the creator of a test automation community of practice and a past chairperson of Traveler's Quality Assurance Roundtable, Carl is a proponent of enterprise QA collaboration.
Hitesh Patel is a group project manager at Infosys Ltd. and co-leads the Infrastructure quality assurance team with Carl. Hitesh has experience in various QA roles in his eighteen years in planning, executing, and delivering on-time, end-to-end testing solutions. He is passionate about quality and providing innovative QA solutions for the challenges faced by testing teams.