 Hi, this is your host, Sopil Bhartiya, and welcome to another episode of TFR Newsroom. And today we have with us, Mav Turner, city of DevOps business at Tri-Centus. Mav, it's great to have you on the show. Thanks for having me. And today we are going to talk about Tri-Centus test automation, which, if I'm not wrong, was released this week. So, but before we talk about this product or project, I want to talk a bit about the company itself. Talk a bit about what is your focus area? Our focus area in general is improving quality in the software delivery process. And so that touches a lot of different areas. And there's a lot of fun things that we get to do there, a lot of projects we connect to and integrate with because ultimately you can't deliver software unless you're in a connected ecosystem. And so we're constantly trying to improve what that quality engineering journey looks like for our customers. And, you know, we serve customers from the global 5,000 to small startups. And each of them are in a different stage of their life cycle as far as the maturity of their processes and what they're trying to accomplish. And we really are trying to just overall help the industry improve the quality in which they can deliver and build, deliver, deploy software. Since we're talking about now, build, deliver, deploy software, talk a bit about because we kind of, of course, live in a dev ops world. But the fact is that there are still soft silos within companies, you know, there are also there are different areas of expertise. So even if we like to call it DevSecOps, there are security people, you know, they're networking folks who understand networking, they're storage folks who understand storage, so they're always specialized area. So talk a bit about what are you seeing the reality in the industry that you do know the pain points and that's when, you know, you try to address some of those pain points for your customers and clients. That's a great question because again, because of the breadth of customers that we work with, we have large companies that are trying to do agile transformation that are still moving from a waterfall world to a more agile delivery process. And on the other end of the spectrum, we have customers that are on the bleeding edge from a process perspective of DevSecOps and working together as teams in these new, more modern architectures and trying to say, how do we make sure that our application is working when the infrastructure underneath it is changing, right? And our security requirements are changing and the infrastructure layer is owned by us or not owned by us or the ops team is embedded with us or it's separate. And so we see pretty much every possible combination that exists out there and how teams are operating. And we think that that creates a real opportunity and really that's what we're trying to do is create tooling that can easily be used across these different personas so that these teams can work together, whatever the definition of team is for that stage of that company and depending on the maturity and their priorities. And one thing we talked a lot about and I'll probably talk later in the context of the specific product is regression testing versus progression testing and different companies depending on the industries that they're in, the maturity of that organization have a stronger bias towards, let's make sure that our regression testing is super tight and that our release processes are no bugs because we can't afford failure all the way to the other side, which is say, look, we want to value progression, the move fast and break things crowd, right? We're okay, we can accept some failure or we can build that into our systems and we can accept some of that loss. And so that's a massive spread of goals and business objectives that we're trying to help different companies be successful with. And sometimes we have specialized functions like the security team or the operations team or the development team or the performance engineering team, right? That's another thing, depending on the application, you may have specialists that are focused on how do we scale and ensure this application can sustain the load that we're gonna put under it and how does the application respond in those environments? What are the operational impacts as we scale up this load, right? Is it horizontally scalable? So we understand the cost model. All those things come into the story that we're a part of that we enjoy working with customers on. Excellent, and that kind of creates a nice segue to my next question, which is about the announcement of Tresentes test automation. So talk a bit about why you felt this is the time to release this and also what problems that we just talked about is this product solving. For sure, so it's super exciting. We've been working on this for a long time and so it's great when you've been working on something to get it out to market and to release it. So super fun to talk about. Basically, what we're seeing is we're still seeing a lot of organizations struggle with how could they can ensure quality in the process and how they can bring the entire team, whatever the definition of the team is, like as I just mentioned, into that quality process. And one of the things that we felt like was important to do that was to deliver a cloud native end-to-end SaaS-based test automation that allows for these teams to work together for test creation, orchestration, execution, at whatever stage of the software delivery lifecycle that the customer is in. And so when we look at the Tresentes kind of history, a lot of people know us from our Tosca product. And so we were able to take that core IP that we've built up over the last decade to put that in a different form factor and bring it to a different part of the market than has traditionally been able to leverage these tools. And by doing so, we hope to be able to improve the quality of all product teams, frankly, no matter where they're at from a maturity or scale perspective, so that they can really quickly get into the product. They don't have to deploy anything. They can get into the product, create their test end-to-end and again, leveraging that Tosca IP that we've built up over so much time and then orchestrate and execute these tests to ensure that the applications, whether those are homegrown applications, packaged applications, whatever type of application they are, but that their works is expected and that those teams can move quick and develop, have this as part of their CI CD pipeline so that they're not being stopped by kind of a manual test process that prevents them from releasing often. So that's kind of what we're trying to do, write these enterprise applications and collaboration across the QA teams, the development team, the operation team, the business stakeholders, bring all that together and an easy to consume dashboard with great visibility to help the businesses go faster. I also want to talk about something which is happening right now in the industry, which is economic downturn layouts are happening. I mean, we don't want to go into the whole layoff and cost cutting thing because during pandemic, companies would like, hey, just throw 50 developers at the problem and they will solve it. So a lot of hiring was going on so now the market is kind of maturing and also there was also a gap in supply and demand of skilled folks. So now smaller companies cannot even afford because all the big companies will suck up all the talent there. So that is a totally different topic but the thing is that teams are like kind of shrinking or people are looking at, I don't look at it exactly as cost cutting but as becoming more cost efficient. So talk a bit also about how does this help teams or organizations become more cost efficient so that the teams are more productive versus wasting a lot of time on things which are like mundane or unnecessary. You're right, that is a whole topic. It's very interesting, very pertinent topic but I'll try not to go too far down the rabbit hole there. The reality is it's about change, right? Teams are changing whether that's teams are shrinking, being reallocated to different projects but at no point is the business saying, therefore let's lower our quality bar. Therefore it's okay for us to fail more, right? And so that to me is the key here is that, whether you're saying do more with less or it's this change and that's we're having a solution in market and we started building this before the economic macro change but even now it's even more important than ever because you'll have new teams, new people get brought into new environment and not know what they need to do, how can they add value, how can they ensure quality is increasing during these particularly challenging times and that's why the usability is so important. This SaaS form factor if I can use the term is so important because there's so much change and even now, like you said, if we take aside the cuts and staffing or the moving, the reality is different projects are being reprioritized, things that were top priority six months ago are no longer the main priority and so how do we ensure that as these shifts are occurring and people are being brought onto new projects that they can really quickly add value, right? Whether that's by leveraging a product like this or by doing some of the exploratory testing that is always gonna be important and never goes away no matter how much tooling you have is always a key part of it but to me that's the real aspect here is that there's a lot of change, prioritization of projects, reallocation of resources and making sure that you have the right set of tooling to survive through that change is actually the heart of this whole agile conversation, right? Being able to value the people over the process, being able to jump in really quickly move forward versus some of the things where we say, hey, we've got a five year project and we can build these expertise, I actually don't think that that's gonna be, I think that's gonna be less and less common as we continue. So I think that aspect of change, COVID was a big instigator of that and I think we're just seeing that continued acceleration and we're just all feeling it in a much more in-depth way than maybe we have envisioned that we would. First of all, thanks for taking that question out. One more thing that happened in the pandemic was that a lot of companies who did not have their digital presence or online presence, even I remember even the local store where I used to go and buy Indian groceries, they closed and they started offering online orders and they delivered. So a lot of companies, they quickly moved to their accelerated digital transformation journey and also they were looking at, once again, due to lack of enough talent people, they were looking at low code and no code kind of solutions as well where they did not have to initially invest. So talk a bit about, since as you said, folks have been working on this even before this whole economic thing happened. So talk a bit about all the other changes that are happening in the industry with low code and no code. How does this fit in there and how it helps develop state? Because it's not just about, it's just once again, go back to the point of no, less work in the pipeline means they can do more things. It's funny, as you were saying that literally last night I was ordering from my neighborhood restaurant which added online ordering during the pandemic and there was a button that said do not add this to the production. You could see that it's clearly the money wasn't familiar with the product usage and that's fine, right? Where everybody's trying, everything is changing really fast and there's no code solutions, whether it's a restaurant creating an online ordering system or it's an internal team that's building some business application are enabling us to move faster and really the goal is that not that we're replacing developers or replacing testers. That's always the catchy headline, right? We don't need developers anymore or we don't need testers anymore that's not the reality at all. The reality is we wanna make sure that we're building fast. It's the same reason that we use frameworks, right? Or libraries when we're building applications from a development perspective not because you couldn't possibly build it all from scratch but there's no need to. And that allows you to focus that creation on something that doesn't exist. And that's something I talk to my teams about a lot. So I know that you could probably rebuild this charting library or this other component but if we can build off of what's already there now we can focus on what doesn't exist and what's really unique in the industry. And so it's about putting that creative development and testing skill sets on the things that move our businesses forward and leveraging those skills to move as quickly as possible. And that's where a lot of this no code from my perspective, no code, low code really pervade value in the industry is you can use those resources that are those development time and resources to go build the thing that doesn't exist and create the new thing and you can go really quickly with the low code solutions. Now, there's still challenges there that we can talk about as much as you want, of course, but that's to me is the true vision and the value of those low code, no code solutions in the industry. Now let's look at the commercial aspect of it. Talk a bit about the availability of this TTA how folks can access it or how well integrated it is with other tri-centres product and services. Yeah, sure. You could go to the website today, go to tri-centres.com, go to the product page, start a trial, it's all SaaS, it's very easy to get up and running quickly. You know, that's the great thing there and really users can just get their hands on and start using it. If you're familiar with other tri-centres products such as TOSCO, for example, it should feel very familiar in a lot of ways. If you're not, we've really focused on our onboarding process to make it easy for you to get in, understand the value, how to start creating you as first test, how to really quickly get value out of it. So that was really the goal here was to again make this even more broadly consumable than what we've been able to in the past. And so hopefully your viewers here would be able to really quickly go to the website, start a trial and really get a sense for what it does. I think now I have, I mean, of course, this is a topic where you and I can sit for hours, but I think basically we have a good understanding of this product, project, company, and also some market dynamics. Is there anything else that you feel we should be talking about or you think that we have covered some basis today? The last thing I guess I'll add is, this question comes up all the time. So I think it's important to add about manual testers. Oh, because these tests, and it's a little bit connected to your previous question, does manual testing go away? Does it, and to me, what I would say is, if you're a manual tester today, if you're an organization that has that, the goal is that that manual testing evolves out of what I've seen a lot of people do, which is important from the follow this workflow or follow this process to more of the exploratory. So depending if you're a tester today and you're trying to decide where do you want your career to go, there's two very good paths. One is test automation, right? There's a lot of products and frameworks and things to learn. And obviously that's where we play a lot, but there's also this exploratory testing concept can help you become a better tester, independent of the stack and the tooling that you're using. And so I think if your heart is in that kind of quality world and you really want to evolve, but you're a manual tester today and you don't know if necessarily the, all the tooling and frameworks are the most exciting part, there is still this exploratory testing thing that will always exist. And it's really about how do we make sure that we're up-leveling all of the different skill sets. And so I'll just a little shout out there to the manual testers and some options for them as they think through where they want their careers and skills to develop. Matt, thank you so much for taking the time out today and of course talk about this test automation suite. Also, the insight that you shared about where the industry is heading and the importance of automation as well as manual testing. So I really appreciate those insights and as usual, I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you. Sounds great, thank you for the time today and look forward to talking in the future. There's a lot of great questions and great topics to discuss.