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Keeping Business Stay Relevant with BDD

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Budramane, SVP- IT,  SutherlandA Leader with experience in managing offshore delivery centre and vertical delivery with a team size of 3000+ people & $250m P&L, Vadeesh Budramane has 26+ years of experience focused on global delivery, innovation & IP creation, and end-to-end operations in top tier software companies of which 13+ years were in senior leadership positions.

Customer Experience has become the key driver for businesses and new strategies are constantly evolving to enhance the customer experience. Associated with this is the intense need to create & deploy innovative softwares quickly at the least cost­ software that delivers incremental yet visible business value. DevOPs is thus becoming core to IT organizations, to allow for dynamic changes to be released to production in shorter cycles, securely and reliably, through automation of processes; it extends agility from software developments to operations. It establishes a perfect balance between two competing priorities innovation in software development and consistency in the way services are delivered thus eliminating waste and improving efficiency. It binds people together and makes development & operational team work seamlessly with no one throwing things across the fence. With agility and lean processes at its core, and with every
incremental change being released in shorter cycles, it helps team to hypothesize, and validate or invalidate the same in shorter cycles. Should the hypothesis be invalidated then the experience serves as an improvement opportunity. Thus, it fosters an environment for growth.

Behaviour Driven Development

To get there, IT organizations must go for transformation for Agility for Continuous Integration and more importantly, Continuous Delivery (CI/CD). Also, you need people who are techno functional-SMEs who can optimize processes, teams who are well versed with Behaviour Driven Development (BDD), developers who can write production grade code the first time itself. The skill requirement is more and more technofunctional as one is expected to drive business outcomes. On top of these one needs people with stable power and flexibility to adapt the changing situations. Also, one will need people who depend on their ability to influence others. It's no more about freezing the require-ments upfront but about flexibility to adapt to changing priorities.

Technical Aspects of Behaviour Driven Development

From a technical perspective, robotics process automation, cognitive computing, machine learning & artificial intelligence form the foundation skills. That said, the requirement itself is not in the normative range; it's not about technical skills alone but about domain and process as well. For example, Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) is not a technical skill and it cannot be attached to a tool. So, it calls for greater focus on selection process and even more focus on reskilling, continuous learning & development. One also needs to draw parallels between existing skills and how they could be scaled for future. For example, underlying approach is the same for GUI test automation and robotic process automation for data entry. There needs to be a constant focus on assessment of skills against requirement and bench marking.

This requires budget and it is worth the investment keeping business stay relevant and will see happier customers and satisfied employees.