Transforming Mobile Testing with Tricentis Device Cloud – Mav Turner, Tricentis

This is Textron tv. Hey, everyone, welcome back here to Techstrong tv. I'm happy to be joined again by my friend Mav Turner.

Mav is the c t O for the DevOps business line over at Tricentis. And of course, if, if you watch Tech Shark TV at all on a regular basis, you know, uh, Tricentis is one of our go-to partners. They, they partner with us on the DevOps Unbound video series, which is both a, uh, biweekly video show, about 45 minutes, where we really dive deep into DevOps, as well as like every month, month and a half, we do a live round table of it as well, which is pretty cool.

We get the audience with a live audience, so check that out. DevOps Unbound. But we're not here to talk DevOps Unbound today.

Mav had some exciting news to share with us from tricentis. Hey, Mav, welcome to Text Trunk tv. Thanks, Alan.

Thanks for having me again, and, uh, great to, great to be here talking with you and, uh, with your audience. We have a lot of exciting stuff, uh, coming on at Tricentis, and so appreciate the, uh, the chance to share that out. Uh, for tho, for those of your viewers that may not be familiar, Tricentis, you know, test automation is, is where we started, but we've been building a business that does so much more and trying to connect and help that overall quality engineering story.

So whether you're, you know, writing code as part of some early stage startup, or you're a mature organization with a lot of complexity in your environment, uh, Tricentis has a solution to improve the quality of your, not only the process, but also the output and helping teams work together and, and accelerate their, their time to market and, uh, you know, increase speed, increase quality, and, uh, that's, that's what we're about. Absolutely. And Mavin, you wouldn't mind, you know, I introduced you to C T O DevOps business.

Of course, DevOps is a major part of Transcend this's is business model. And, uh, as is now we're gonna talk about mobile as well, but why don't we talk a little bit about your role there at C T O. What do you, what do you, you know, day to day, what are you doing?

Yeah, no, that's a great question. Uh, you know, it changes every day it seems like. So, um, in general, my, my main responsibility is I lead the r and d team, which is product managers, UX designers, researchers, developers, testers, operations teams, security folks.

How do we, how do we get the, build the right products, get in the market, um, enable our customers to be successful, right? Get out of their way as far as helping them achieve their objectives. So I'm leading those teams, um, which means that we're enhancing existing products, we're building new products, you know, on the, the build buy partner spectrum.

We've always got something going on in each of those dimensions, which is, you know, one of the things that's exciting to talk about today. Um, and in addition to that, so I, I lead that, we call it the DevOps business and, and, you know, portfolio. And a lot of people say, what is that?

Doesn't make any sense. Um, but really the, the goal there is to, to convey if you're using more modern software development practices, um, and you're trying to get to a continuous delivery model, um, how can we create tools for, for those teams that are being successful? Um, in addition to some of the, the other parts of our business that are typically are much larger, much more complex organizations that are looking for enterprise end-to-end testing and performance engineering and test management at scale.

Um, that's the kind of our core business unit that, that most people are familiar with, uh, Tricentis. And those, those teams are on a similar journey, right? They're trying to, um, accelerate their, their testing, trying to get a good understanding of what happens when, when they, when scale, when they get scale across, um, tens of thousands of users, hundreds of thousands of users, what happens to the application under test in those environments.

Um, you know, all, all those, those challenges. So everybody's a little bit different, and I kind of bounce around different parts of the organization, but, uh, but it keeps it fun. So one day I'll be on a call with a company with 50 people, and the next I'll talk to a Fortune five business.

And so it's really great to get that different perspective. And the challenges are actually, interestingly, fairly similar in a lot. They're more similar than, than dissimilar.

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And it, you know what, it sounds like you're having fun, and that's the most important thing, man.

So yeah, keep doing what you're doing. Av Let, let's jump into today's, uh, topic though. And that is, I, I mentioned before, mobile's becoming a huge part, not only of the Tricentis story, but in the testing and DevOps and application world in general, right?

I, I think we crossed the Rubicon some time ago where a majority of of the users are on mobile devices versus laptops, or heaven forbid, desktops, right? Um, yeah, We, we've been talking about the industry for a while, but it's, uh, you know, one of the interesting things that happened during Covid was even though people were at their house and home, we saw a massive shift in mobile traffic. All of our users, uh, customers have told us this, um, just because the convenience and just, it's, it's always there, right?

It's, you're just always on it. So, Agreed. Agreed.

So go ahead, man. I'm gonna let you tell this story. Sure, yeah.

Okay. So, so as, as you said, Alan, you know, mobile has just become more and more important and critical in everybody's business. And some businesses it's their entire business, right?

And some, it's, Hey, we've got users. They're shifting between the, the desktop app, they're from the browser to the mobile device. Some of those mobile devices are native apps.

Some of them are, you know, flutter, react so that the developer can build once, deploy twice. Um, some of them are just bounced around between a tablet and the phone and a, and a desktop. So that becomes really challenging for a, a, a development team, right?

To, to make sure that that experience remains consistent, consistent. The user doesn't have any issues as they, they, they transition between these different technologies. And for Tricentis, as you said, it's one of the big planks in our strategy as we look forward.

Um, there, there's, I, I won't get into the bigger picture today 'cause I really wanna talk about mobile, but of our three key pillars of our business mobile is, is one of them. And, and underlying that is this new release that we just had, uh, which is our release of Tricentis Device Cloud. Um, you may hear people throw out the acronym, T D c I try to use the full name so everybody knows what I'm talking about, but you know, our industry's full of acronyms.

But tricentis device cloud is, is essentially a real physical mobile, cloud mobile device, cloud, uh, mobile device grid is another word. You know, all these different ways to describe it, such that when you're in your functional automation, whether that's tosca, whether that's Testim, you build out your test and you wanna run that against a real device. Now, we all have devices at our desktop, we can plug it locally.

Um, and that's, that's great for early stage development. But as you scale out and you realize that you need to have coverage for, you know, iOS and Android, and you need to be able to be testing between a different physical hardware version, you need to be testing across different software versions. Um, all of a sudden the lab requirements in order to really ensure you have high quality, get crazy, and it becomes very expensive to maintain them.

And you gotta use all the different tricks. Um, you know, we, we have issues with batteries. If you haven't plugged in all the time, the device is gonna, you know, the battery's gonna expand and, you know, destroy the device.

Uh, you get a hundred devices together in a lab environment all connecting to the local wireless or cellular network or wifi network, and now all of a sudden you've got massive congestion. So all these, these issues, those are just kind of the easy ones for everybody to understand. Uh, make it really hard for, for a development team, a product team, to have the right infrastructure to get real testing on their devices.

And that's just the, it doesn't work, just the functional component. Most people struggle to have proper functional coverage for their automation. Um, that doesn't even cover well, what about the performance characteristics?

What do I need to understand about the user experience as they go through this? All the analytics about your application's performance and how that varies by hardware platform, by, by software version, you know, all those dependencies are really important. And just to wrap a big bow around it, one of the things that's particularly challenging with mobile is when you're building mobile, it's not like you own the entire infrastructure and you can ship it, which like you can with most apps, right?

A lot of our teams ship every day. They can ship to production, they can ship to our SaaS app, that's awesome. With mobile, I make my update, and then I submit it to the application process to get approved and reviewed.

If I'm going to, to, you know, to Apple, I might get kicked back. I might have to wait a while before that application goes live. So when we talk about, you know, common theme in our industry about the cost of a bug and how, you know, or the earlier you can fix it, the less it costs.

With mobile, that's very, um, even more challenging because if you have an issue, there's just artificial timeline that you have to wait on this external provider that you really can't control. And so being able to detect these and have, you know, every, uh, commit, have a functional run, and every release be tested internally to where you have that high quality standard before you even submit your app for review is super critical and can have a major business impact. So, uh, anyways, I've been, I rambled on for a bit, but I'm really excited about it.

And So, no, no, I think, I don't think you were rambling at all. I, I think it's, it's an important thing that we, we, we need to understand now, I gotta use the P word here, okay. Platform.

Yeah. Uh, I saw the look on your face easy. Um, but would you consider this a, a full, is it a full fledge platform?

Is it want to be a full fledge platform one day? How, how would you describe that? Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's a good question and, uh, I appreciate the, uh, the word choice in, in framing your question.

So, uh, that platform word gets tossed around all sorts of places. So, so I'll, I'll, I'll describe it as I can without using the, the, the word maybe. So what we're trying to do at s Tricentis is to make it as easy as possible for people to build automation across any of the, the target systems, browsers, desktops, tablets, devices, and just, you just change the target.

You run it, you don't have to rerecord all of this te these tests depending on the specific, you know, application system under test. So when we think about platform, we think about the mobile services that are important to enable customers to be successful in this quality journey. And so, so I wouldn't say that T D C is a platform as Tricentis device Cloud as a platform.

I wouldn't say mobile as a platform. I view them more as services that connect in with the larger tricentis story. The other reason I was smiling, Alan, is um, when I talked earlier about the three key themes across the Tricentis product strategy, mobile being one of them, the other one is platform.

Um, so, Okay, Um, we've, we have a lot of products. We've done a lot of acquisitions over the years and, and, you know, we'll continue to grow by building products, buying by partnering all these different dimensions. And, um, but one of the things that we have not done well historically is bringing these capabilities together in a way that makes it easy for customers to access all of these capabilities.

And so, so I'm a little hesitant to use the P word, uh, because we've been talking about it for a long time, but to be perfectly frank, we haven't made good enough progress there. And, and a lot of our customer experiences and customer journeys are really isolated into these separate products. And so when we build this capability, the reason it's available both in, you know, Tosca and in Testim, is because we're creating shareable services that can get consumed by these other products.

And so it's a platform service, uh, but but in itself is not a platform. And when we think about what we're doing with our larger portfolio, again, on, on the core side with our test management, with Q test, with neo Load and our performance engineering and with capabilities and with our test automation, uh, portfolio, there's several products we have in our functional test automation right now. Those are still lots of islands and silos, and there we are bringing those together in a common SaaS platform in a way that customers can more easily consume these different services.

And mobile is one of the things that I think we have done well in the more near, uh, recent term about making these services available to different consumers and different workflows and different products. Um, and so we, I think we have done done a fairly, fairly good job there about with mobile, because, you know, we're, we're talking about tricentis device cloud today, these real physical devices that are available. But prior to that, we've, you know, earlier this year launched a lot of capabilities around mobile test automation in general, right?

So this is this, this announcement and also, uh, about a, uh, you know, a thir, uh, early July, I forget the exact date, but early July, we, we announced the acquisition of a company, um, Waldo, which is a, um, it's, it's the other side of it. So today we're talking about tricy device cloud, real physical devices. Waldo does an amazing job.

And the reason we were interested in them of taking your emulator and simulators and having a virtual grid. And so when you think about this, you think about A, the cost of a physical device, and b, the the speed at which you can kind of run test, you're a little limited on the hardware side. Um, there's, there's times when I, when an emulator or simulator is, is sufficient, and we're trying to make it easier for people to take these virtual grid and these physical grid and again, run it fully integrated into your, your pipeline and then at different times use target, the physical versus the real.

And I don't, I mean, we can, we can get in that more if you wanna understand, but my point is tricentis investment here is, you know, we're building products, we're buying, um, technology, we're partnering with other vendors to bring some other advanced capabilities to market quickly, uh, because it's such a key theme for us when we look at our overall strategy. And so a lot, and this is a lot more to come, uh, is, is actually, uh, the other key message there. Yeah, I, I, you know, listening to you, I, I can't help but think that, right, that there's a lot more to come here.

You've, you've put some foundational building blocks now in place, the acquisition development organic, and now, now we'll see how they gel and play out going forward. But for people right now who say, Hey, this sounds like something, you know, I sent this device cloud, I wanna go check it out. What, what's the flight path here?

How, where do they go? How do they engage? Absolutely.

com, you can start a trial immediately, um, in the product again, of either test or Tosca. If you don't know what those words even mean, um, then you can, you, on our website, you'll see mobile, you'll see the, uh, Tricentis device cloud, and you can start a trial directly in the product. Um, if you're an existing customer, then I would recommend you going, you know, your existing product route if you're just kind of trying to learn more.

com has a lot of great, um, links. Um, I'm sure, uh, we can share with you some other more direct ones, uh, for your customers, uh, for your viewers, if they want to watch a webinar, if they wanted to get started with a trial, uh, you know, wherever where everybody wants to do, right? They wanna learn some more, we've got some great content on the site on webinars.

com, start trial day, start, start playing with it. I love it. Mav, I want to thank you for coming on and, and telling us about this tri, the new Tricentis device cloud.

And, um, I encourage everyone to go check it out. And it sounds like we, we will have reason to talk going forward as we continue to along this mobile journey. And tricentis is, is is going down.

Maybe even we'll put it on DevOps Unbound one day. We'll see how that goes. That'd be great.

Thanks Alan. I appreciate the time. Alrightyy Mav Turner, c t o DevOps business for t Tricentis here telling us about T tricentis Device Cloud.

Go check it out. We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back here on, uh, tech Drunk tv.