IT Services: Quality Engineering

Cigniti

Foreword 1
Background 1
Revenue Summary 3
Key Offerings 3
Continuous Testing 3
AI-based Analytics 4
AI-Based Automation 5
Application Migration to the Cloud Testing 6
RPA 7
ERP, SAP, and Enterprise Application Testing 8
UX Testing 8
Application Security Testing 10
Connected Device Testing 12
Adjacent Services 12
Delivery Capabilities 13
Target Markets 14
Strategy 17
Strengths & Challenges 18
Outlook 19
Cigniti: IT Services: Quality Engineering

Foreword

This profile examines high-potential testing services offerings, including widely accepted ones (e.g.,
continuous testing), those that still have room for growth (e.g., ERP and enterprise application testing),
high-growth offerings (e.g., application migration to the cloud), and enabling technologies (e.g., AI-based
analytics and AI-based automation). The quality engineering (QE) offerings covered are:

• Continuous testing

• AI-based analytics

• AI-based automation

• Application migration to the cloud testing

• RPA for functional testing

• ERP/enterprise application testing

• UX testing across usability, compatibility, accessibility, and content

• Application security testing

• Connected device testing.

Background

Cigniti is headquartered in Hyderabad and had calendar year 2022 revenues of $170m and $206m in FY23
(up 22%), the year ending March 31, 2023. At the end of FY23, Cigniti had 4k employees. It services ~230
active clients, including 50 Fortune 500 members, for which it aspires to be the sole strategic testing
partner—Cigniti believes it already is for a third of its top 50 accounts. Cigniti’s top 20 clients accounted
for ~50% of revenues.

QA Portfolio
Cigniti continues to invest in its service portfolio, e.g., continuous testing, AI-based analytics and
automation, and overall moving toward QE, driving more specialized and technical capabilities. An example
of such a QE and automation push is container-based parallel execution to speed up functional test
execution. Another example is test script maintenance/self-healing.
Cigniti emphasizes the concept of hyperautomation, looking at automating manual QA activities, driving
QA process standardization, and addressing the “soft” part of QA with OCM (consulting and training). It
also looks at data quality (for AI projects) and measuring tester productivity (especially in the context of
agile testing). The company emphasizes the capabilities of its Advisory and Transformation Services (ATS)
consulting unit to transform clients’ QA units and drive OCM as standalone projects or part of larger
managed service contracts. The company has developed a hyperautomation blueprint to technically define
the most commonly found automation use cases and identify which tools to deploy with clients.

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Cigniti consistently enhances its BlueSwan IP suite. The company recently added two new IPs to BlueSwan:
iNSta and InCight. With iNSta, Cigniti has designed a scriptless automation framework, which it provides at
little cost compared to COTS and includes as part of its fixed bids. iNSta integrates with Selenium. Cigniti
has designed it to be usable by non-automation engineers. With InCight, Cigniti monitors CX on mobile
apps and websites/web applications.
Also, Cigniti has expanded its QA service portfolio to next-gen digital offerings such as cloud migration, IoT
applications, 5G, blockchain, and AI (including ML).

Digital and ER&D Services

Cigniti is no longer a testing pure-play, although it still derives 80% of its revenues from it. In the past five
years, the company has expanded from its testing niche to offer agile consulting and development services
and RPA-based business process automation. UiPath remains its primary partner in RPA.
In May 2022, Cigniti resumed acquisitions after a ten-year pause: it took over Aparaa Digital/RoundSqr.
RoundSqr was a small firm with FY22 revenues of ~$3m and almost 100 employees, yet its acquisition was
strategic for Cigniti. RoundSqr brought precious data engineering, analytics, AI services, and web and
mobile application development (including architecture design and API development) capabilities. It also
had an IP, Zastra, a computer vision model for object detection, image classification, and semantic
segmentation. Zastra will accelerate Cigniti in computer vision, an area of AI with potential in QA, especially
in visual testing (as part of UX testing) and RCA.
Finally, Cigniti has also entered the engineering and R&D services world, initially targeting product
engineering testing, with a tier one toy manufacturer as an early client.
During the COVID pandemic, Cigniti shifted its commercial focus from transport and hospitality to financial
services, insurance, retail, ISVs, and overall product companies. The company is now also targeting pharma
and MedTech.

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Revenue Summary

Cigniti had, in FY23, the year ending March 31, 2023, revenues of $206m, up from $168m in FY22.
Cigniti’s FY23 revenue breakdown by geography was:

• North America: 84%

• The EU and the U.K.: 8%

• RoW: 8%.
Cigniti’s FY23 revenue breakdown by sector was:

• BFSI: 22%

• Retail: 23%

• Life science & healthcare: 12%

• Energy & utilities: 3%

• Travel & hospitality: 15%

• ISVs: 12%

• Other: 13%.

Key Offerings

Continuous Testing
Cigniti continues to invest in its continuous testing offering. The company has added consulting capabilities
in the past two years, primarily around agile and automation assessments. Cigniti relies mainly on its
consulting arm, ATS, to address new clients to achieve this shift-left approach. Cigniti takes a strategic and
technical approach for existing clients and will run innovation workshops to identify white spaces in the
client’s continuous testing strategy and capabilities. Cigniti relies on Praxia, a methodology for assessing
test processes, practices, software tools, skills, and risks.
The company also looks to bring further automation to continuous testing, initially around security and
performance testing. Exhibit 1 provides an overview of Cigniti’s continuous testing offerings.

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Exhibit 1: Cigniti’s Continuous Testing Offering

Phase Services

• Process advisory and consulting

• Agile transformation
Enterprise transformation • DevOps enablement
• Training and coaching
• Continuous delivery pipeline setup
• Set up in-sprint automation
Automation engineering • AI-based automation
• RPA-based automation
• Load and stress testing
• Continuous production monitoring
Performance engineering
• Operational acceptance testing
• Chaos engineering
• Security assurance program
DevSecOps • Automated security scans of code, applications, and networks
• Application self-protection
• Test environment provisioning
IT infrastructure services • Configuration management
• Test data management

BlueSwan as a Service • Predictive analytics.

Source: NelsonHall and Cigniti

Cigniti has its Velocita IP to support its continuous testing offering. Velocita includes:

• Accelerators around web services, performance testing, and application monitoring, as well as vertical-
specific accelerators and cross-browser testing

• Test case repositories (SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle, Guidewire, and Salesforce).

Cigniti has the capabilities of Velocita to identify which test environments (e.g., SauceLabs) are available.
Complementing Velocita, the company has Verita, a DevOps dashboard with drill-down capabilities. It takes
data from various sources, including Selenium, MF ALM, JIRA, Dynatrace, appOrbit, Eclipse, and
TortoiseSVN. KPIs include release readiness and lead. It is role-based. In the past 18 months, Cigniti has
invested in AI use cases such as defect prediction. Verita is Cigniti’s most popular IP within BlueSwan.

AI-based Analytics
Shift-Left Approach
Cigniti promotes a shift-left approach to continuous testing projects to integrate all aspects of testing
activities, including functional, non-functional, API, test data and test environment, service virtualization,
and UAT scripts.

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Cigniti: IT Services: Quality Engineering

To achieve this shift-left approach, Cigniti relies on its consulting arm, ATS, to address new clients. For
existing clients, Cigniti takes a strategic and technical approach and runs innovation workshops to identify
white spaces in the client’s continuous testing strategy and capabilities.
AI Use Cases
Cigniti is also promoting the usage of AI use cases as part of continuous testing.
Examples of live AI-based functional use cases include:

• Defect and ITSM ticket and incident categorization based on ML and supervised learning. Once the AI
has categorized the defect, it will then suggest a potential root cause

• Sentiment analysis, see the CESA (Sentiment Analyzer) subsection in UX Testing

• Code change impact analysis and identification of test cases to be run along with UAT ones. Cigniti
relies on an AI model to identify code hierarchy and map it to test cases (which it manually tags)

• Report2Resolve: to rerun test scripts when false positives have been identified. The false positives are
determined based on supervised learning

• Security. See the AI-based examples in the Application Security Testing subsection.

AI-Based Automation
Cigniti wants to develop its AI-based automation. Cigniti has worked, since 2020, on its iNSta product to
make test automation more accessible, thanks to AI, and scale up automation within clients. Also, the
company intends to bridge developers, functional testers, and specialized QA specialists and remove the
tool fragmentation challenge. The company highlights that some tools are scriptless or script-based, but
few operate in both worlds. Cigniti wants explicitly to help client reuse their existing investments in terms
of licenses and test artifacts and in terms of:

• Existing client test engineer skills, e.g., programming language capability in Java or Python

• Using the cloud for running at scale.

With iNSta, Cigniti has designed a "scriptless" platform that relies on AI. The features of iNSta include the
following:

• Test design/Intelligent Recorder and test script maintenance/self-healing: recording actions using NLP
and creating test scripts. iNSta’s Intelligent Recorder will create test scripts on the fly when a user goes
through a transaction in an enterprise application. It will identify UI objects and build an object library
to maintain test scripts. Intelligent Recorder will scan the UI for each release and identify changes in
the UI. The company continues to add incremental enhancements; should Intelligent Recorder fail to
recognize that an object has changed, it will use computer vision to compare screen images of two
different releases, identify the objects that have changed, and amend its object library. This is an area
where the RoundSqr acquisition has helped

• VM/container-based execution: With this offering, Cigniti wants to address development organizations
operating in agile/DevOps with requirements for short testing timelines. It also targets applications
that require extensive use of AI, such as test script maintenance, which typically slows down test
execution. Also, Cigniti relies on the monitoring of computing resources for provisioning more
computing power

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Cigniti: IT Services: Quality Engineering

• Test reporting/false positive analyzer. The AI will rely on each positive to analyze images and videos
and understand the root cause, e.g., a synchronization issue

• Test suite optimization

• Visual validation for image comparison and analysis.

Cigniti also complements iNSta with automated test script creation, using NLP technology to translate
English-written test cases from Excel and ALM into test scripts. Cigniti has created a dictionary and will
customize dictionaries for its clients. The company finds that its English-language translation AI model
brings more benefits than the Gherkin language, as BDD requirements are done by testing specialists, not
business users. Nevertheless, Cigniti is also integrating its BDD framework in iNSta. The Intelligent Recorder
and the NLP translation are interoperable, and users can go back and forth between the two approaches.
Cigniti also intends to host iNSta on the cloud and sell it as a PaaS tool to promote its adoption. In the
meantime, it will expand the Intelligent Recorder to SaaS applications (e.g., Salesforce), mainframe
applications, and APIs.

Application Migration to the Cloud Testing

Cigniti has witnessed an acceleration in the migration of applications to the cloud since the pandemic. This
cloud migration has driven QA activity for both enterprises and ISV clients. As a result, the company has
invested in its cloud migration testing offering through its cloud migration assurance platform (CLAP).
CLAP has several goals: understand business requirements, identify the migration technicalities, assess
infrastructure compatibilities, and identify application workloads and data usage. Cigniti starts CLAP with
an online questionnaire to understand the business context of the applications being migrated. Based on
the context, CLAP will recommend the modules to use.
Exhibit 2 displays the modules of CLAP.

Exhibit 2: Cigniti’s Cloud Assurance Platform (CLAP) Modules

Module Details

Cloud Workload Analyzer (CWLA) Analyzes telemetry data from APM and DevOps tools for performance testing

Validates data quality transformation, data integrity, completeness, and

Data Assurance Auditor (DAA)
metadata
Scans cloud infrastructure configurations for vulnerability and provides
Cloud Config Auditor (CCA)
remediations
Infrastructure Cloud Auto Scans cloud infrastructure components such as OS, databases, networks,
Scanner (ICLAP) servers, and storage against specifications
Reliability Engineering Studio Conducts chaos engineering by injecting faults in the application and monitors
(REST) the resiliency of applications

Verita A dashboard.

Source: NelsonHall and Cigniti

Cigniti markets CLAP as a SaaS product.

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Cigniti has identified six use cases for IT infrastructure testing:

• Deployment of servers/cloud infrastructure and cloud services, e.g., APIs, database, and other
middleware

• Configuration testing, e.g., testing configuration files for a specific component/service

• Integration testing, e.g., to validate the combination of several infrastructure elements (such as an
application server with a database server)

• Upgrades, updates, and patching of the IT infrastructure

• Network and connectivity

• Security and compliance, e.g., firewall compatibility testing and verification of security traffic
restrictions to instances.
Cigniti has developed an IT infrastructure testing framework that includes IAC tools. The framework will
provision IT infrastructures relying on Terraform IAC scripts. It will test these scripts using static code
analysis and unit testing.

RPA
Cigniti has expanded in the RPA space, targeting business process automation and working with several
partners, such as Automation Anywhere, UiPath, and Blue Prism. The company has ~15 RPA clients. It
highlights that RPA projects bring further business process expertise to Cigniti. The company has ~100 RPA-
certified engineers around UiPath and Automation Anywhere.
From an RPA testing perspective, the company has structured its portfolio into four categories:

• Discover and plan: analyze business processes, identify exception-handling requirements, and develop
a new plan

• Test bot design: Cigniti has developed an RPA bot testing framework, which is adapted to the needs of
clients in terms of business processes, business rules, algorithms, and data exception handling

• Test bot execution around business process testing, performance, and UAT

• Implementation playbook: the playbook captures user feedback, test support, and knowledge base
creation.
RPA Testing Framework
Cigniti has an RPA testing framework. The framework includes reporting and analytics, keyword detection,
and a control room sync (synchronizing RPA code between the test and production environments). The
framework integrates with API and data sources.
Along with its RPA testing framework, Cigniti has a document validation framework. The framework has
two objectives:

• Content validation: including signature & image verification, test alignment identification, overlaps,
mandatory/blank field identification, report data validation, phone number/form #, and date & time
format

• UI validation: pixel position, UI properties, missing UI, indexing, and test properties.

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The document content validation framework relies on computer vision and OCR technologies. It integrates
with Cigniti’s Verita dashboard. Cigniti has integrated the framework with continuous testing.
BDD Testing Framework
To complement its RPA testing framework, Cigniti initially developed a BDD testing framework for
generating UiPath Studio-based RPA business process testing scripts. The framework handles business
rules. It has analytics features.
Ciginti is expanding its BDD RPA testing framework, initially looking at the RPA scripts and automating
testing for UiPath tools. The tool will go through RPA logs and ensure the RPA test is passed.
RPA Bots
Cigniti has developed several UiPath-based bots, such as:

• Analyzer, for requirement change impact analysis

• Environment configurators

• Validators: test execution, visual, documents, and self-healing

• Itriager

• Predictor: release readiness

• Generator: test script and test data

• Predictor: defect, effort and cost, and risk.

ERP, SAP, and Enterprise Application Testing

Cigniti has, over the years, developed a library of ~6k test cases for several ERPs aligned by transaction and
module (in Velocita). The company invests in this space by hiring Oracle Financials, SAP, and Salesforce
functional experts. In the next step, Cigniti wants to create IP to automate progression testing, targeting
specific offerings such as S/4HANA implementation. It highlights that iNSta will play an important role.

UX Testing
Cigniti has structured its UX testing offerings around the following:

• CESA (Sentiment Analyzer). See the subsection Sentiment Analysis

• InCight, to analyze customer data in real time through monitoring the performance of IT
infrastructures

• Accessibility testing

• Cross-browser testing

• Responsive web design methodology.

Accessibility Testing
Cigniti has further focused on accessibility testing, working with an increased number of open-source tools
and COTS, (e.g., Lighthouse, a tool open-sourced by Google) to assess both the SEO and accessibility level
of a website.

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To complement this approach, Cigniti has also created an accelerator to assess a website/web items such
as title captions and tagging standard enforcement.
The company highlights it still needs to perform manual testing activities in the context of accessibility
testing, such as color contrast and conducting testing by vision-impaired testers.
Cigniti has integrated the tools as part of its DevOps platform.
The company invests in automating accessibility testing, highlighting ~60% of the tasks are now automated.
Cigniti is underscoring the demand for accessibility testing remains strong in geographies like the U.S.,
where regulatory compliance and potential lawsuits are driving client demand.
Cross-Browser Testing
Cigniti has positioned its cross-browser test accelerator within its UX testing offering. The accelerator helps
to execute Selenium test scripts across browser/OS combinations.
Responsive Web Design Testing Methodology
With its Responsible Web Design Testing (RWDT) methodology, Cigniti tests websites and apps across
devices on several parameters, including:

• Screen size

• Look and feel: e.g., layout, colors, font, and images

• Orientation

• Gestures: swipe, scroll, pinch, and swing.

Services provided include visual testing, navigation testing (e.g., login), user condition testing (e.g.,
incoming calls, pop-ups), and browser/O.S. coverage.
Sentiment Analysis
In 2016, Cigniti launched its CESA. CESA collects data from app stores (Apple Store and Google Play) and
provides the following for each comment in the app store (and potentially from Twitter, Facebook, and
forum reviews):

• Identification of keywords relevant to the client’s industry, e.g., for an airline carrier, keywords related
to boarding experience, baggage, customer services, price/costs, bookings, and flight attendants

• Identification of attributes, e.g., bugs, uninstalls, issues around privacy, issues around usage, user
experience, functionality, service quality, combability, and performance

• Determination of the emotional level of each message (positive, neutral, or negative)

• Analysis of data provided by tools such as Adobe Analytics and Google Analytics and linking those with
outcomes resulting from the sentiment analysis.
Once it has analyzed each comment, SA provides dashboards at the aggregate level with drill-down
capability.
Cigniti recently updated its sentiment analysis IUP, CESA, within UX testing: it now looks beyond data in
app stores and social media. The company now covers production data for its sentiment analysis service,
providing a view of client usage of applications/web applications/websites and mobile apps. It also takes
data from ITSM tools (e.g., ServiceNow).

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The company works with HeadSpin to enrich its data sources and collect information on parameters
influencing the UX, e.g., device battery consumption, CPU usage, and network usage.
Cigniti has broader ambitions in sentiment analytics and wants to analyze customer data in real time. With
InCight, the company is monitoring the performance of IT infrastructures. Cigniti aims to understand how
IT infrastructure performance is impacting the UX.
Cigniti has also developed a UX score prediction, based on past data across different parameters such as
uninstall easiness, crash propensity, and intuitiveness.
InCight also includes a dashboard that provides current health status across devices, networks, application
reliability and responsiveness, and engagement level.
Looking ahead:

• Cigniti has designed InCight to be interactive. For example, if InCight detects the customer using the
website has low bandwidth, it can trigger an order to transmit a low-resolution version

• Cigniti wants to expand InCight to the monitoring of networks. 5G technology will bring low-latency
networks, and the company wants to further report on how network conditions influence the UX

• Cigniti is considering expanding its approach to connected devices through its monitoring service. An
example is using medical devices and equipment

• Finally, Cigniti also wants to develop a benchmarking service, comparing the UX of a given company
with those of other companies in its industry.
InCight is a multi-tenant SaaS application. It has two clients. Cigniti sells it under a subscription model.

Application Security Testing

Cigniti created a security TCoE to provide a career path for its security engineers. The TCoE has ~45 security
testing experts. The TCoE has ~50 specialized accelerators and 15 members working on R&D. It markets its
application security testing capabilities under the DevSecOps name and structured its capabilities around
the following:

• Advisory & consulting: application architecture assessment, transformation, and scale-up support

• Security engineering: rollout and governance, remediation, implementation, and optimization

• DevSecOps as a service: Cigniti will automate the pipeline, identify tools, get ownership, and configure
them. The company promotes automation and change management as part of this offering. Its
portfolio includes:

− DAST and SAST vulnerability scanning as part of continuous testing. The company relies on SAST
and DAST tools to identify existing vulnerabilities and ethical hackers/pen-testing to find new ones

− A bot for automatically raising tickets once a vulnerability is found

− A dashboard with Verita

− Training sessions.

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Along with its core service portfolio, Cigniti has invested in AI use cases, e.g.,:

• Security false-positive analysis through NLP and assisted learning. A testing expert will train the system
to identify false security positives. Once it has completed the training of the system, Cigniti will run it
as part of the DevOps pipeline of activities

• Determining what parts of the applications should be covered and what security test cases are
required, including running the OWASP’s top ten.
Exhibit 3 provides an overview of Cigniti’s application security portfolio.

Exhibit 3: Cigniti’s Application Security Portfolio

Phase Services

• Derive security requirements from software functionalities

Security requirement
• Evaluate security and compliance guidance on requirements
identification
• Assess specific security requirements based on known risks
• Identify software attack service
• Analyze design vs. known security requirements
Security design review
• Deploy design review service for project teams
• Develop data flow diagrams
• Identify recommended security tools
• Apply security principles to design
Architecture security review
• Identify security design from the architecture
• Validate usage of tools and patterns
• Create review checklists from known security requirements
Security code review • Review high-risk code
• Utilize code analysis tool
• Conduct security testing at application and IT infrastructure levels
Security testing • Implement application security testing automation
• Conduct pen-testing
• Conduct black box testing
Development security review • Scan for vulnerabilities
• Conduct pen-testing
• Identify and fix configuration vulnerabilities
Release security review • Adhere to security policies and standards
• Get sign-off from stakeholders.

Source: NelsonHall and Cigniti

Key technology partners for DAST and SAST are Micro Focus and Veracode.
Looking ahead, Cigniti wants to accelerate its expansion in application security testing. The company is also
looking to create a SOC, working with partners in the U.S., U.K., and India.

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Connected Device Testing

Cigniti has structured its services portfolio around:

• Advisory: strategy, planning, and readiness assessment

• IoT assurance

• Device and firmware functional testing

• Network and connectivity testing

• Data and integration testing

• Application testing

• Compatibility testing

• Interoperability and localization testing

• Performance, security, and compliance

• IoT as a service, where Cigniti will establish a lab.

Cigniti has developed medical device testing expertise.

Adjacent Services
Performance Engineering and Testing
Cigniti has adopted a TCoE structure for performance testing similar to its application security testing TCoE.
Cigniti has scaled up its performance testing capabilities in the past two years to help clients move their
applications to the cloud and address auto-scale challenges.
Cigniti aims, like in application security testing, for a shift-left approach, along with including performance
testing as part of continuous testing. It also drives shift-right, monitoring production with APM tools,
identifying production issues, and bringing them back to the application security teams.
The company has developed a series of checklists for conducting performance projects. Cigniti will conduct
several performance activities during the application life cycle.
Cigniti also uses its Verita dashboard to collect and share performance KPIs.
Cigniti has several partners in performance testing and monitoring. One of its key partners is HeadSpin,
which provides a cloud mobile device lab. HeadSpin collects production and performance data. Cigniti
analyzes this data through Verita dashboards about mobile devices and mobile app performance. The
compiled data helps derive best practices in developing mobile apps and web applications from a
performance perspective. Other key APM partners are Dynatrace and AppDynamics.

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Exhibit 4 provides an overview of Cigniti’s performance testing capabilities.

Exhibit 4: Cigniti’s Application Performance Portfolio

Phase Services

• Process consulting
• Requirement assessment and management
• Architecture consulting
Consulting
• Creation of CoE
• Tool consulting
• Training
• Load, stress, soak, spike, and failover testing
Performance testing
• Benchmarking
• Architecture and component-level analysis
• Requirement design and definition
• Front-end analysis
Performance engineering
• Code-level analysis
• Production readiness evaluation
• Reliability engineering
• APM
Production monitoring • End-user monitoring, real end-user monitoring, and synthetic monitoring
• Capacity planning.

Source: NelsonHall and Cigniti

Delivery Capabilities

Cigniti had a headcount of 4k at the end of FY23, including in:

• The U.S.: ~700, of which the majority work onsite with clients (on testing or client-facing activities)
across the U.S., and ~100 work in delivery centers in Irving, TX, and Philadelphia, PA

• EMEA: ~200, mainly in the U.K., and Johannesburg, South Africa. ~30 are onsite with clients

• India: Cigniti has ~3,000 personnel in its Hyderabad location, where it has TCoEs around BFSI, life
sciences and healthcare, travel and hospitality, energy and utilities, retail, performance, and mobility

• Other APAC, primarily ANZ: ~40.

Cigniti will open a nearshore center in Costa Rica, initially servicing a retail client. This center will be
operational by Q1 FY24.

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Target Markets

Recent client examples include:

A P&C Insurance Carrier

The client is a property & casualty insurance firm headquartered in North America. The company wanted
to adopt agile development and transformation. However, it lacked standardized testing processes, did
not have the right set of tools and needed to increase functional automation, and did not have the right
governance in place. The client suffered from several bottlenecks:

• A test case automation backlog with 3.8k test cases waiting to be transformed into test scripts due to
a lack of automation technical expertise and tool heterogeneity

• A two-to-three day delay for regression execution for a lack of available test data

• Limited test coverage resulting in defect leakage to production.

Cigniti helped with four initiatives:

• Process and governance:

− Assessing processes, production conducting defect root cause analysis, and defining reporting
metrics (and deploying its analytics IP, Verita)

− Defined QA strategies for E2E testing

− Set up a technical knowledge management portal and conducted training sessions

− Created a defect prediction model based on historical and production incident data

• Test automation:

− Deployed a BDD framework for API testing using Selenium, Ready API, SmartBear Test Complete,
and Protractor. Cigniti also deployed a test framework for a desktop Visual Basic application

− Conducted testing using 15k test cases

− Rolled out a test data management service

− Migrated to Gitlab from Bitbucket

− Introduced a code change impact analysis model

• Performance testing:

− Migrated scripts from LoadUI to JMeter

− Introduced new metrics, e.g., server logs and infrastructure utilization, for reporting purposes

− Created extreme situations scenarios, e.g., five consecutive days of 12 load hours

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• Accessibly testing:

− Tested applications against ADA guidelines

− Identified user navigation journeys

− Increased collaboration with the development team.

A Biotechnology Firm
The client is a biotechnology firm headquartered in the U.S. The company wanted to increase its testing
effectiveness and productivity and reduce defect leakage through process improvement and automation.
Cigniti helped with:

• Process standardization: targeting release planning, formalizing test case review and approval, and
establishing a quality gate

• DevOps: deploying tools, including Jenkins and Docker, and enabling unattended and scheduled
automation runs

• Test automation, including enhancing the test automation framework, migrating the text execution
tool from Provr to Cucumber, authoring and executing ~5.6k user stories, and achieving 60% test
coverage

• API testing: authoring and executing 500 test cases for MuleSoft, using Postman for inbound and
outbound data validation, developing an API test automation framework based on RestAssured, and
using Selenium for 150 test scripts

• Performance testing, evaluating tools and selecting JMeter and LoadRunner, establishing guidelines;
and executing performance

• ETL testing: developing an ETL automation framework using Query Surge, migrating the ETL
applications to Veeva, and developing ~800 test cases.

A Healthcare ISV
The client services surgical care providers across 2,900 facilities in North America with its software
products.
The healthcare ISV wanted to shorten its release cycles but suffered from several challenges:

• Lack of automation and heavy reliance on manual execution

• Lack of internal testing tool expertise

• Inadequate test coverage

• Regular changes in the UI and objects, driving test rework

• Mobile testing through compatibility testing.

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Cigniti helped to:

• Assess tools and recommend, among open-source tools, Protractor over Ranorex, assisting the client
to save on license and ISV maintenance fees

• Develop a test automation framework, based on Protractor, for the client’s software products and
developed E2E scenarios and test cases along with training the client’s testers

• Integrate the automation framework with Jenkins for pipeline scheduling

• Report at different levels for test specialists and test managers.

The engagement started in December 2016 and still runs, involving, at peak times, 40 personnel. Cigniti
created 5.4k test cases for eleven software products and 2k test scripts, helping identify ~800 high-priority
defects. Cigniti estimates it has increased mobile app automation coverage to ~85%.

A Network ISV
The client provides IP-based software products for voice, video, communication, messaging, and
multimedia.
The ISV suffered from challenges:

• It had a test framework that did not scale well enough for its needs

• It conducted mobile app testing by connecting physical mobile devices to its PC. Its mobile device
coverage was too low for its needs

• It suffered from a skills issue, with the maintenance of its test scripts requiring much expertise.
Cigniti helped to:

• Deploy a keyword-test automation framework using the Robot framework

• Provide access to a cloud mobile lab with ~20 devices.

The client reduced execution time from 40 to eight hours and increased the number of execution cycles
per week. It also saved costs by reducing script maintenance activities by running one script on iOS and
Android devices.

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Strategy

Across all services, Cigniti aspires to reach $1bn in revenues. The company will grow organically in QA/QE
and expand in digital services through a mix of organic growth and careful acquisitions. Cigniti aims to
derive ~60% of its revenues from QA/QE by FY28 and 40% from digital engineering services. It also aims to
derive 60% of its revenues from its top 30 accounts. Cigniti also wants to be a top ten preferred workplace
in its key geographies.
Cigniti has set its vision for FY28. The vision relies on several portfolio elements.
It will pursue further verticalization around:

• BFSI: legacy modernization and digital projects

• Retail: e-commerce application

• Transport, travel, and hospitality: E2E automation

• ISVs: software product

• Healthcare and life science: data compliance.

Across verticals, the company will specialize in:

• Cloud migration QA

• IoT, Internet of medical things (IoMT), and connected product QA

• Data/ETL testing

• 5G QA. Cigniti highlights that 5G brings higher bandwidth and less latency, creating new use cases. The
company wants to be ready when clients launch 5G use cases and test those. An example of a service
that Cigniti is about to launch is migration testing of a mobile app from 4G to 5G. The company is
partnering with Headspin and innovate5G. Also, Cigniti has expanded its software testing background
to NFV, including RAN, through a partner. Also, Cigniti has a 5G lab in the U.S. for accessing 5G networks
and mobile devices. The 5G QA offering will be part of InCight.
Also, Cigniti continues to develop into QA-adjacent services, e.g.,:

• DevOps and agile software development, expanding from continuous testing

• Cybersecurity, building on its application security testing

• RPA. The company finds many similarities between RPA and testing scripts.
Also, the RoundSqr acquisition accelerates its portfolio development, for instance, in AI model testing and
Explainable AI. Another area of AI usage is sentiment analysis in UX testing with InCight. For instance, Cigniti
wants the AI model to detect feedback tone. It also wants developers to use its AI-based usability model
to make informed decisions on functional and UX trade-offs, for instance, by assessing the impact of a new
mobile app functionality on memory, battery, and downloaded data.
Cigniti has created a digital center in its Hyderabad headquarters. The digital center hosts several activities,
such as usability research, IoT, and application security.

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A key priority for Cigniti is to sell specialized digital and DevOps testing services to its client base and benefit
from the momentum in digital spending overall. It is counting on its advisory services and several IPs, such
as Verita and CESA, to raise client interest. The priority also remains to focus on its BFSI clients.

Strengths & Challenges

Strengths
• Continuous testing: Cigniti has a comprehensive continuous service portfolio, including a reference
architecture that increasingly aggregates its IPs and tools

• Application migration to the cloud testing: Cigniti has a comprehensive offering, including a consulting
approach, and has aligned its portfolio of offerings and IPs under the CLAP brand. The company has
also articulated its IT infrastructure portfolio

• AI-based analytics: Cigniti has continued to develop its AI-based analytics use cases. The AI models
have expanded from functional testing to UX and application security testing

• AI-based automation: With iNSTa, Cigniti has a next-gen record-and-playback and an object-based
identification tool for making the maintenance of test scripts easier. Cigniti continues to invest in the
IP, with container-based parallel execution, and, in the medium term, using computer vision to identify
the root cause of defects automatically, going through screenshots

• RPA Cigniti has both a testing RPA framework and a BDD one for RPA tools

• UX testing: Cigniti has pockets of strengths in its UX testing offering. For instance, the company has
continued to develop its sentiment analysis tool, InCight, going well beyond NLP and word clustering.
The company is also creating a usability prediction index to help developers make informed decisions
about what mobile app functionality impacts the user’s device performance

• Application security testing: Cigniti is one of the few vendors with an offering that goes beyond tool
consulting and assessments, continuous testing/DevSecOps through vulnerability scanning, and a
dashboard to include several AI use cases. This is the start of the journey toward differentiation.

Challenges
• ERP/SAP/enterprise application testing: Cigniti’s offering relies on repositories of test cases. Given
Cigniti’s investment in AI and RoundSqr, NelsonHall thinks the company internally has the know-how
to automate progression testing

• Overall: Cigniti will need to shift some of its delivery, especially in Europe, onshore or nearshore.

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Outlook

In QA, Cigniti has refreshed its service portfolio in the past five years and caught up with major tier one
competitors. This demonstrates that the current disruption in QA with AI and next-gen digital technologies
favors the emergence of vendors with an automation and AI agenda. NelsonHall expects Cigniti to continue
its service portfolio automation and AI effort, as it is its primary differentiator. This AI and automation
effort will be instrumental in automating progression testing for enterprise applications such as SAP and
Salesforce.
Outside of QA, we expect Cigniti to push its service expansion. We think AI and data are a priority, as
highlighted by the RoundSqr acquisition. Outside of AI and data, we expect Cigniti to be selective, as the
company cannot be active in all areas of digital and IT services and ER&D. In line with this, Cigniti will
strengthen its software development capabilities with a medium-sized acquisition. Also, the company will
expand in UX/UI and front-office applications by acquiring a pure-play firm. The company has some agile
consulting capabilities and already has a presence in RPA, which complements well its AI effort. In the short
term, the company has enough in its service portfolio, we think.

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About The Author

Dominique Raviart is the IT Services Practice Director at NelsonHall, with
global responsibility for IT Services research programs.
Dominique covers IT Services research in the areas of Software Testing/QA,
Big Data and Analytics Services, Salesforce services, and IoT Services.
Dominique has been part of NelsonHall’s IT Services analyst team since
2007, providing comprehensive and insightful coverage of IT services
markets around the world. In particular, he is widely known for his extensive
knowledge and coverage of software testing, having examined recently
digital testing and DevOps/continuous testing. Dominique assists both buy-
side and vendor organizations in assessing opportunities and supplier
capability across IT service lines.
Dominique can be contacted at:

• Email: [Link]@[Link]

• Twitter: @DominiqueR_NH

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