QA Mentor
Revolutionizing QA and Testing through Robotic Process Automation

The emergence of new technologies and processes has spurred a transformation in Quality Assurance (QA) and software testing over the last decade. The demand for high-velocity deployments and shorter time-to-market is forcing organizations to adopt an agile and automated QA and software testing strategy, all for achieving one goal—ensure rapid releases without compromising quality. As automation takes a critical role in digital transformation, enterprises increasingly adopt process automation to reduce operational costs while improving efficiency and accuracy. RPA then is driving a new era of enterprise automation by transforming QA and the software testing arena.

QA Mentor, a New York, NY-based premier provider of unique and cost-effective QA and software testing services and solutions, comes to the fore to address such companies' needs. By leveraging robotic process automation, the company increases the efficiency and effectiveness of testing while ensuring quality. Founded in 2010 with an aim to assist organizations in improving their QA functions, QA Mentor today boasts a vast arsenal of 300 offshore and onshore resources that work around the clock to support all time zones. In a conversation with CIO Applications’ editorial team, Ruslan Desyatnikov, Founder and CEO of QA Mentor, discusses their robotic process automation capabilities at length.

Could you provide our readers with a brief overview of QA Mentor?

Established in 2010, QA Mentor is an independent software testing and quality assurance company. We are CMMI Level 3 certified and have obtained several appraisals, including ISO 27001:2013, ISO 9001:2015, and ISO 20000-1. As a QA and testing company, QA Mentor offers 32 different quality assurance and testing services to our diverse clientele. More recently, we have decided to augment our solutions by leveraging robotic process automation. To expand our automation services, we have acquired a company in India, Step One Step Ahead, which specializes in robotics process automation. With that, we can utilize various robotics tools in the market, including UI path, to provide unique services to our clients and augment their existing capabilities. QA Mentor serves a diverse clientele, including finance, insurance, telecom, technology, and more, and supports over 400 clients in 28 different countries; typically, our clients outsource their testing and QA-related projects to us. Over 90 per cent of our employees are located in six different countries worldwide, and a significant part of our operations are done in Ukraine and India.

Could you walk us through some of the challenges QA Mentor addresses for its clients?

Accelerating time to market and ensuring top-quality output is at the top of our client’s agenda, and everyone wants to adopt an agile delivery model to reduce turnaround time on testing.

With that, companies aim to speed up their new releases. As a testing company, we execute their test cases or build new test cases to accommodate new functionalities and execute them. We offer on-demand and scalable solutions that enable us to execute thousands of test cases in record time, and we achieve this by deploying our multiple resources.
If a client wants to execute regression test cases quickly, we utilize our automation capabilities and automate those manual test cases. With that, we enable our clients to run the testing any time they require. We deploy new codes and automate manual test cases effectively to ensure seamless operation without any breaks.

QA Mentor also helps its clients to secure their applications by leveraging penetration testing practices. In addition to security, performance enhancement is a consideration for many organizations. For that reason, QA Mentor helps companies improve their performance by identifying the roadblocks in the applications using various performance testing solutions.

How do you identify the client’s problems and help them mitigate the same?

When a client approaches us with a specific need, we try to understand their quality challenges. Subsequently, we offer our solutions to our customers on a free trial basis for two weeks. We understand the client better during this free trial and get to know how they operate within the software developed life cycle and review their processes and procedures. We then demonstrate our capabilities by building test cases and automating them. Additionally, we also conduct a compatibility test to understand the client's applications' security and performance status. We perform a dry run to avoid any possible failure and help them fix errors. Such an approach builds trust and confidence in our clients.

Could you narrate an instance that highlights your clients' benefits after utilizing your testing services?

We have many success stories around UiPath, a robotic process automation software platform. Although the tool focuses on robotics process automation, it can perform traditional automation tasks as well. One of the advantages of using UiPath for RPM is that it does not require any programming to operate and build a script. Anyone, even those with no prior coding experience, can start building scripts very effectively and efficiently on UiPath.

In one instance, one of our clients that worked in the banking sector wanted to transform their traditional automation scripts, which they built in UFT (Unified Functional Testing). We successfully migrated their 1200 test cases to UiPath, which enabled them to troubleshoot the test cases easily. With that, the client was able to reduce their turn-around-time significantly and increased productivity by 70 percent. The developer who worked on UFT built just three test cases a day; meanwhile, we built five to seven test cases.

What does the future hold for QA Mentor?

We have shown consistent growth rates in the previous years, with a yearly growth rate of 35 percent. Although the pandemic impacted the entire business landscape, we onboarded new clients and brought additional resources. Moving ahead, we plan to continue to grow our business at the same rate or even higher by expanding our operations to new regions. We are planning to expand our business to Dubai and the other Asia Pacific regions. Alongside, we will continue to augment our capabilities by investing in IoT, blockchain, AI, and ML.

As the finance and insurance industry is trying to replace manual processes with automation, we foresee considerable opportunities in this sector. QA Mentor has successfully helped many finance companies automate some of their laborious and time-consuming tasks performed manually. Our technological prowess allows us to build multiple robots capable of working on various tasks in parallel.