Every blog should have a purpose and the audience gravitates towards the content when they identify with the purpose themselves. This post is my attempt to outline the raison d'être of my blog.

A lot of you may have been following my earlier blog at testingreflections.com here : http://www.testingreflections.com/blog/76

That one was a technology focused Performance Testing blog. This time, I intend to paint on a larger canvas.

For those who came in late, a little something about myself:

I have spent over 13 years in the software testing industry, working for top consulting firms in India, the US and Europe. This has seen me work in different geographies like the US, the Netherlands, France, Germany, the UK, Japan and India.

Specifically, over the last 5 and half years, I had the opportunity to build a testing service practice at one of the largest European consultancy firms. A practice that was focused on offering testing services to the financial industry - namely, large banks, insurance companies, capital markets firms etc.

It's been a roller coaster ride, with my work spanning everything from hiring good technologists, creating the business case for top management, advising and consulting with top client CIOs  to managing projects and selling services. Of course in the inital couple of years, I pretty much did everything from waiting on tables to cooking the food (metaphorically speaking!).

Some of the most interesting work in the last couple of years had had me running a Services Innovations team focused on creating testing services for the financial industry. It has had quite an impact to our bottom lines, since the Test Assessment service offering that I designed had opened doors to some $24 million worth of new business for the company.

This blog is to share the experience of creating a testing services practice, setting up Testing Centres of Excellence (TCoE) / Test Factories that leverage talents from multiple geographies, the hows and whys of creating business cases from a services viewpoint and some crystal ball gazing on my part.

I'm no Alvin Toffler, but I think the Software Testing profession is in flux influenced by technology changes, consolidations in the tool vendor space, the mushrooming of open source techniques, process models, tools and of course, newer business /regulatory pressures. It will be my endeavour to outline how this will influence our world.