Tesena Labs

Introduction

As a means to keep up with the constant and accelerated rate of innovation and change in both IT and software testing, we decided to set-up Tesena Labs. We interviewed Tesena’s CEO Phil Royston about this initiative. So read on to find out what Tesena Labs is all about and what benefits will it bring.

What are Tesena Labs?

It’s an environment where we explore progressive ideas and trends in software testing using a self-organized, iterative approach. At the highest level we group these ideas and trends into “capabilities”, for example integration testing, test automation and performance testing. Within those we create so called “products” where we experiment with specific tools and/or methods that both we and our clients want to know more about.

What are we currently working on within Tesena Labs?

We are currently working on improving our capabilities in 5 areas, with 8 product teams and a couple more we will initiate soon. The products we are working on are quite diverse. For example:

• We are working on frameworks for visual testing (we are developing our own library for Robot Framework), performance testing and testing of mobile applications using open-source tools
• We are looking at hot new trends, such as self-healing test and autonomous testing
• We are looking into methods and tools for testing technologies where adoption is accelerating, such as Voice Assistants
• We are not forgetting the ‘classics’, and so we are working to improve our knowledge and skills in integration testing, using containers and advanced testing analysis techniques

How can Teseners benefit from Tesena Labs?

There have always been two constant challenges for us in Tesena from the beginning. One is keeping our knowledge and skills up to date so we can best advise and support our clients with solutions to their testing problems. The other is having a distributed team, which is now also a mostly remote team. For me personally Tesena Labs gives us a great way to address both challenges. By getting involved in a product team that interests us we can take a mental break from client projects and have the opportunity to spend some time every week to:

• Develop both ourselves and software testing as a domain in a hands-on practical way
• Work with other Tesena colleagues (“Teseners”) on innovative activities

If you would like to be part of it, join us!

How can our clients benefit from Tesena Labs?

To say it bluntly, helping our clients solve their software testing problem is our mission. In Tesena Labs we try to create or extend our testing knowledge and skills, looking both at methods and tools. This can be beneficial for our clients in several ways:

• It is challenging to keep track of the latest innovations in the IT and testing world. To identify the most relevant trends you also need to see which ones have a real market demand
• Tesena Labs is tracking both trends and demands. We can then bring this information to our clients saving them from having to do it
• Tesena Labs is also preparing us for these new challenges. That means that when a client comes to us with a problem, we can react faster to help provide a proven solution

Overall, this approach should save our clients time, energy and money not just from trying to keep up with what’s happening, but also reduce the cost of failure from their own initial experimentation. We will have already done the painful groundwork for them.

What is the product evaluation process?

We try to avoid costly mistakes from investing heavily into trends that are irrelevant to our clients or working on bad solutions or solutions that no-one needs. Therefore, we are constantly trying to get feedback to see if there is a real interest in what we are working on. We get this feedback through blog posts, webinars, public workshops and demonstrations for clients. This feedback loop is an integral part of the Tesena Labs process.

In the future, we would like to go a step further and open Tesena Labs directly to our clients' teams and offer them the opportunity to work together with us on solve their specific testing problems. This would be an ideal way for Tesena to further fulfill its mission to developing the software testing world.