Mastek Blog

Do you feel like you have all bases covered to make the organisational impact with your transformation programme? That it will be an easy tick in the box at the end of the project. You've got it all wrong then.

It’s no surprise then that over 80% of companies fail to some extent when delivering digital transformation.^[1]  In this blog post, I've captured insights on digital transformation risks from Prahlad Koti, the Managing Director of our UK business. These recommendations are relevant whether you are embarking on a new transformation programme, and equally, if you need help with an existing or failing project.

As with everything that stands in the path of the digital revolution, things are changing in the world of application support and maintenance. The days when an old colleague of mine could tell me that support was just something tacked onto the end of an exciting application development project are behind us.

Only recently, the UK’s Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, Jeremy Hunt, wrote a letter to colleagues appealing for ideas on how to fund the future of the NHS, and he appears to be open to radical and innovative ideas.

Following the success of our first internal Hackathon with Mastek, our key IT partner in June last year, we promised that we would run another one soon. Since it was a UK-based event, it was not available to our Mastek colleagues in Mumbai. Therefore, the concept of the first Together and Mastek Hackathon was born. This blog post captures my insights of the day without the use of too many techie terms along the way.

Will the dust ever settle on the data deceit of the century? Aka the violation of user data by Cambridge Analytica and lack of vigilance on the part of Facebook, which compromised the personal information of 50 million Facebook users. Only time will tell.

In recent years, we’ve had the pleasure of working with several local councils to support them in realising their digital ambitions. By translating ‘analogue’ council services into digital services, they’ve increased transparency and access to services while reducing costs. As satisfying as the involvement has been, we’re even more excited about what the future holds.

In my first blog in this series, I highlighted key business challenges that enterprises must address in order to maximise the value of test automation. (Read Blog 1 here). In this blog, I’ll share approaches to help respond to the business challenges around quality issues and the relevance of test automation in BDD (Behaviour Driven Development).

Let us look at the resolution to the challenges that we discussed in my earlier blog post.

Imagine, you purchased an all-expenses paid holiday of a lifetime to the Caribbean, as a surprise gift for your mother on her 60^th birthday. Sadly, it never ever reached her even though your trusted holiday provider dispatched the gift way ahead of time.

The recent software glitch in Eurocontrol’s air traffic system caused widespread flight delays. God forbid! It could have been a worse disaster. More importantly, this sorry situation could have been avoided with accurate quality checks.

As businesses focus on providing superior user experiences faster, QA and Testing functions must ensure that these applications are adhere to the highest quality standards and are attuned to user expectations across platforms, devices and locations.

“It doesn’t matter how good you are today; if you’re not better next month, you are no longer agile,” says Mike Cohn, one of the founders of the Scrum Alliance. Agile methodologies are increasingly finding their place in software projects worldwide.