Author: Admin

Healthcare and Education are the two vital and cornerstone disciplines in today’s modern society. Being able to meet the increasing needs of the ultimate consumer, be it a patient or student is challenging. These niche experts all over the globe are investing their time, energy and talent to come up with a solution, which is sophisticated, collaborative, comprehensive, robust and foolproof.

Out of all the many technologies like VR, AR, and etc, now being applied to healthcare delivery and easy learning process of students, Augmented Virtual Reality (AVR) is one of the most exciting. The ability of AVR to seamlessly blend with the direct sensory experience of the real world with all its power and potential of digital information technology is ground-breaking and thought-provoking at the same time.

The intent of this technology is not only to meet the rising expectation but also to lower the costs that are skyrocketing in the near future.

Let’s delve into the benefits of each sector with the integration of AVR –

The Impact of AVR in the Healthcare Industry

Here are the top three ways that AVR is helping to transform the face of the healthcare industry to meet the rising challenges:

1. Enhanced Access

Meeting the demand of several billion people without a doctor to go around is a challenge for sure. Long queues, availability of the doctor, traveling time of the patient- are few of the notable things in this area. Telemedicine is a boon to rescue us from all these barriers and consult a doctor with ease through the smart devices, over the distance.

Augmented Virtual Reality plays a key role in guaranteeing the quality of such consultations. The Proximie app has integrated AVR to carry out the surgical procedure over distance, with a specialist using this app can be guided by his/her colleague in real time. This improves access to surgery without any limitation. The DocOnline is one such app, which enables patients to consult the doctors from the comfort of their home.

2. Patient Empowerment

The treatment and medication go completely into vain unless the patient understands his own condition. Empowering patients is one of the laborious tasks that are on the table of every doctor. An intriguing trend in healthcare is the development of applications using AVR, which can empower the patients to proactively take care and assess their health.

The EyeDecide app is one such perfect example, which demonstrates the structure of eyeball with the AVR 3D anatomical visualization tools. This app provides visual simulations of different eye conditions, wherein the users can match the simulation to any distortion they are experiencing in their own vision. The app also showcases the list of ophthalmologists in their area to consult.

3. Robust Diagnosis and Assessments

AVR is extremely a helpful tool in catering to the needs of the medical professionals and assistants effectively. This technology also helps to identify the disease and the level of infection with the 3D visualizations of internal organs. AccuVein is a tool developed with AVR technology, which helps practitioners to locate the veins for cannulation.

Electronic Medical Records (EMR) directly displayed on the smart device of the doctor, when a patient consults for treatment is the future of AVR in healthcare.

The Impact of AVR in the Education Industry

According to a study, the student engagement ratio in schools, study centers and etc., is dropping year by year. To overcome this, many schools are inculcating AVR into their teaching methodologies instead of the traditional mode of teaching.

Every one of us knows that we remember when we see rather than listening, this is what AVR is all about- the Visual Concept Teaching. Children of this generation get distracted by the smart devices easily in no time. AVR is leveraging this addiction for good and is engaging students.

Top 3 reasons Why AVR Apps Are ‘A Must’ For the Students of this generation:

1. Seamless Explanation of Complex Concepts

There is no doubt that the students can better understand the concepts when taught in real-time. This also enhances the student engagement ratio and also helps the student to focus well and learn quickly with 3-dimensional model representations, as a picture is worth a thousand words.

2. No Special tools are Required

AVR does not require any expensive hardware like VR. The robust AVR technologies are intended to be available to most of the targeted users with no or limited costs. Today, almost 95% of people own a smartphone, which can be used for constructive learning. Parents & teachers don’t have to pay an extra penny for this interactive learning.

3. Accessible and Infinite Learning

The AVR apps help to educate users from anywhere and anytime, replacing the boring and conventional way of classroom teaching. These apps are also universally applicable to any level of education and training, be it the activity-based games for pre-primary or technical courses for professionals. AVR is not limited to just one case.

Bugs 3D, Mathalive, AugThat, Aurasma are few of the many education AVR apps that are trending these days.

Both in the healthcare and education sectors, the adoption of technology to pace up with the rising needs is necessary, and AVR is the best and finest way, which is capable of transforming the landscape of these sectors with its vivid, potent, and powerful methodologies and integrations.

Many of the start-ups are up on their job to design and develop an AVR app, which is novel & unique. The World Brush app, GAP’s the DressingRoom App, The JigSpace app and etc are few of them.

Kastech, a renowned name in the arena of Augmented Virtual Reality(AVR), VR, and AR is profoundly catering to the needs of HealthCare, Education, Retail & Manufacturing industry, with its innovative and scalable AVR applications, is honored and proud to co-sponsor the World’s Largest Technology Summit-World Quality Summit 19′.

Interested in business consultation, project scoping or learning more about Kastech’s AVR solutions? Reach us at info@kastechssg.com or +1 (832) 651-4843.

Hi Suresh, we love the idea. Can you tell us how it all started?

Kastech was started in 2008 with the vision of making a mark in the IT industry offering the next generation technologies to our customers to enhance the ease of business and lower TCO with higher ROI. Our vision as an organization is to have a look out for next-gen tech and across geographies which sets an example to all our employees and people associated with Kastech as well. In order to provide a high ROI to our customers, Kastech has built 18 different products of our own.

What services is Kastech offering these days?

The wide variety of services that Kastech offers as of now are:

ERP implementations (Oracle, PeopleSoft, SAP, Salesforce, Workday)
Managed Services
Cloud Hosting
Mobile Apps/Web Applications
Augmented and Virtual Reality
Cyber Security
DW/BI & Advanced Analytics
AI, ML & IOT

Tell us about KasTech’s main areas of focus?

KASTECH provides value-based information technology services, across Enterprise to Custom Application and Specialized Services of Testing, Analytics, and CRM. The major focus of KasTech is on ERP, Web Applications, Products & Services.

Who do you think are your competitors and how are you better than them?

Our competitors are enterprise IT MNC companies since Kastech offers a wide variety of services and products that the IT MNC companies provide. The advantage with Kastech is our overheads are very minimal and Kastech invests back in building the products and practices. This way we are able to provide the services at very cost-effective prices with a high quality of delivery.

What areas are the ones that are the most problematic in your competitors, the same areas where you want to exceed?

Quality
Commitment
Lower TCO

What’s next for the company and the product?

Revolutionizing the Education system using Augmented and Virtual Reality Technologies.

What are your clients saying about you? Are they happy with the service?

They are absolutely happy with our services and we are increasing our footprint at every client that we have been working with. Our clients themselves offer more business to us by referrals as Kastech invests very less in the Sales teams.

If possible, could you share what kind of projects and how your employees will be involved in such projects?

ERP Implementation & Support projects are one example and we believe in giving ownership and responsibility to our employees to be able to run with the projects independently. We have weekly status calls across all the customers we provide services for with our employees and have monthly steering committee meetings with our clients to understand the health of our relationships and customer satisfaction.

What are your plans for the future?

Investing heavily into next-generation technologies to provide cutting edge technologies and services in Health Care, Education, Government, Oil & Gas.

The need to stay profitable and to grow revenue has led enterprises to ensure that they stay on top of quality, performance, and availability of their mission-critical systems and applications. Performance is no longer a choice; it directly affects revenue through customer experience and operational efficiencies.

“Performance 2.0 is about enabling performance across people, systems, and processes”, says Shashank Srivastava, Head of Global Marketing and Product Management at Cavisson Systems Inc. “Over the years we’ve innovated with our customers and have seen them demanding more than the conventional performance testing and monitoring that was typically available to them. Being visionaries, the quest was to offer the best possible user experience. And, that’s been our mission ever since – to offer exceptional user experience”, quoted Shashank.

Typically, companies have been doing performance testing, monitoring, and diagnostics of their systems and applications with a minimum of 3 to even 5 or 6 different tools, yet not being able to address certain issues that crop up during production.

The challenges are many. To ensure these tools work in an integrated environment is one but to ensure they are able to share and correlate data across all these tools has always been a major concern. Enterprises end up creating a dashboard of dashboards on top of these tools just to have a consolidated view but are still not able to drill down to the root cause. The result is overlapping features and functionalities yet having a database, network, and application teams clueless about the root cause of the user/customer struggle.

From the very start, Cavisson has been focused on addressing real-world business challenges, and it continues to evolve its products with customer needs. “Over time, we’ve created an end-to-end, full stack offering in the performance engineering space, which no other company offers today. There are two sets of offerings, one for Testing and the other for Monitoring and Diagnostics,” says Anil Kumar, Founder, and CTO of Cavisson Systems.

Cavisson focused its technological advancements and innovations around customer experience, as well as business parameters that directly impact revenue and operating costs. “This immediately resonates with customers. We ensured that quality and performance is in the DNA of any system or application right from the dev or pre-pod environment,” Anil adds.

Using Cavisson’s advanced cross-discipline simulation techniques, customers are able to performance test their applications with real production-like scenarios and repeatable results to ensure maximum performance once the application goes live. Cavisson pioneered this concept and named it InternetTrueTM technology. Cavisson also offers a fast, single-click root-cause analysis whenever there’s an issue in production. This is achieved by the combination of a proprietary big data engine that captures data from all parts of the enterprise and several high-performance computing algorithms that perform complex computations on the data in real-time. “This is in turn combined with optimized machine learning algorithms for analyzing trends to do anomaly detection. We call this our Key DataTM technology”, says Anil.

Cavisson’s performance testing suite helps organizations create performance tests that are reflective of real-life situations. It provides a real-life measure of customer experience via highly realistic simulations of the load model and several significant parameters that impact this experience, including traffic behavior, exact production transactions, network and bandwidth parameters, and user behavioral patterns such as click-aways and reloads when response times are slow. Cavisson is the only solution provider in the world today offering a comprehensive end-to-end monitoring and diagnostics solution ensuring a 360-degree view of the enterprise including but not limited to the client-side / browser, network, applications, systems, databases, and other components, as well as log patterns.

Cavisson built an unparalleled, highly innovative solution currently used by several Fortune 100 customers worldwide. “We believe that our InternetTrueTM and Key DataTM technologies are the future of performance engineering. And, that’s the reason why forward-thinking enterprises have chosen Cavisson as their enterprise strategy for performance engineering!”, says Anil.

What is it like being the ‘Director of Marketing’ at Cavisson Systems Inc.?

I joined Cavisson as their first marketing employee. Like any traditional tech-startup, Cavisson was an engineering organization and my charter is to transform it into a marketing and sales driven organization. I have all the luxury to innovate and experiment, except time and hence I have to ask my team to follow a fail-fast approach as we compete and operate in an extremely demanding marketplace.

Tell us about the various products and services offered?

Cavisson products can be categorized into two segments – 1. Performance Testing and 2. Monitoring and diagnostics. Performance testing suite comprises of performance testing and capacity analysis solution along with service virtualization and network virtualization solution. Performance testing solution (NetStorm) is a suite of offering in itself and brings capabilities for load testing, real-device testing, real-browser user testing, along with test suite automation, for the web, mobile as well as desktop or thick client applications. Idea is to enable organizations to reproduce issues early in the application lifecycle that is likely to impact revenue and fix them. On the other side, monitoring and diagnostics suite comprises of customer experience monitoring platform, a comprehensive application performance and network monitoring solution and a powerful log monitoring and analysis solution. Cavisson monitoring and diagnostics solution is extremely unique as it’s the only solution currently that offers end-to-end performance monitoring and diagnostics. End-to-end monitoring can be applied to the test environment also.

Backed by 20 years of experience in the field of marketing, tell us about your journey so far?

The journey has been eventful so far. Have worked with startups as well as more than a billion dollar in revenue organizations and hence had a pleasure of working with some of the smartest people in the business. I have been blessed to have the best mentors along the journey as well as great coworkers to make my job at work thoroughly enjoyable. As they say, time flies when you are having fun, and literally never felt it’s been more than 2 decades already.

Describe a project you previously worked on which you found the most challenging?

Every assignment was challenging but let me talk about the recent one. Performance domain was new to me and it required deep knowledge, whereas I was coming from a middleware and integration technology background. The need was to hit the ground running and within 3 months into my job I was wearing multiple hats – marketing, product management, and tech pubs. The good thing was that I was working closely with Anil Kumar, the founder, and CTO, as well as Neeraj Jain, VP Engineering, who introduced and provided details of the technology side to get me up to the speed. The challenge was to create a self-sustaining infrastructure and set processes in place along with putting together a team of brilliant minds to drive global marketing, product management, sales and pre-sales functions. Here I am after 3 years managing all of it with help of a stellar 30 people team. Now, the challenge is to take it to next level.

How is digitalization impacting the marketing domain?

I can only talk about the software and IT industry. Very quickly, it’s helped marketers to stay focused, focus on target audience, tighten the messaging, improve ROI in terms of conversions, But, the biggest impact is that it has made competition fair for smaller companies and startups as well. Even the organizations with lesser marketing dollars can have significant visibility and impact provided their vision, strategy and execution are right.

Tell us something about Performance 2.0 and the factors that are currently shaping up enterprise performance engineering landscape?

Performance 2.0 is about the shift in performance engineering landscape. The shift is because of the changing technology dynamics because of the two biggest drivers within the industry: 1. Impact on revenue and profitability, and 2. Competition. Performance 2.0 is driven by these parameters and focuses on performance across all business domains: people, systems, and processes. Performance 2.0 helps organizations to focus on user performance (customer or user experience), systems, network, and application component performance, as well as business performance and allow them to analyze the impact of performance on business.

What do you think it takes to be an effective business leader in the face of this rapidly changing environment?

Have a clear vision. Hire the right people to do the job. Trust your team and empower them with what it takes to make them successful in their jobs and career.

Too Many options

Yes, this space is more crowded than ever before. It’s easy to get lost with most tools talking about “fancy” capabilities but failing to get the basics right. Success rate from test automation still remains way below expectations. It is important that a tool is capable of handling the complexities of a modern application landscape and at the same time, help you build sustainable and low maintenance automation.

Here is a simple framework you can use to help you maximize value of your time and focus on critical aspects you expect from tool.

Narrow your list down

Sometimes when doing comparisons, it’s easier to strike out some options based on obvious factors and work with a shorter list. It helps maximize your time on trial and evaluation and really ensure it works for your business and app landscape.

• Easy to get mislead by traditional “record and play”. It’s marketed and comes across as magically fast, this technology is decade older. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig J. The link to blog goes into more details of why record & play just doesn’t work in real world.
• Stay away from tools whose core expertise is not automation, like model-based testing tools that “integrate” with automation tools. Or tools that started out as desktop application testing tool and added capability for web and api.
• If the automation tool does not offer core functionality such as managing automation assets, reporting and tracking, and service automation – don’t waste your time. And don’t get into the “integration” trap. Core functionality should be native and easy to achieve in a simple manner. Breaking the core lifecycle of automation into multiple tools only brings inefficiencies.
• Codeless automation tools can be challenging. Moving all the test logic into some invisible executable is not really helping the purpose. Tools that drive test logic from excel spreadsheet suffer from obvious shortcomings.
• Stay away from the tools that claim do everything under the sky. For example, performance testing is better handled by a specialist tool.

Capability assessment framework

This framework will help you score on capabilities that are critical to making automation fast and sustainable. To start with just a simple Yes/No checklist could go long way to ensure a 360° evaluation. The capabilities are divided into technical-functional, accessibility, adoption and the ROI to do benefit analysis.

Technical & Functional

• Business process focused
• Automated test design
• Reusability / Modularity – Need of custom frameworks
• Robust element identification
• Seamless Data driven testing
• Test asset management & inbuilt traceability
• Change Impact management & Automated Change management
• Execution tracking and cycle management
• Service and API automation

Accessibility

• Ease of use for the broader test and project teams
• Centralized access to test automation assets
• Ability to execute tests and analyze results at a functional level
• Ability to set up governance

Adoption

• Easy to adopt
• Need of specific programming skills and resource dependency
• Vendor locking
• Hidden costs (like execution agents, add-on modules, protocols, accelerators costs, maintenance and support add-on costs..)

ROI

What are the key components to analyze ROI? There are many things here, but I am only listing the ones that are the usual suspects. They are very basic, but these are critical to automation that can give you returns on your investment.

• Need for framework development
• Element setup
• Data definitions
• Runtime & executions
• Change Management

Get the most from your trial and evaluation

It’s tough with our day jobs to give time and energy to evaluating a new tool. Here are some quick tips to help you thru the process:

• Don’t get caught up by exception use cases. Consider what serves 80% of or your Automation needs
• Carefully observe the learning curve
• Emulate situations for future change adaption and maintenance
• Consider how easy/difficult will it be to move away if needed in future
• Review pricing model for hidden add-on costs. You want to make sure ink does not cost more than printer!

Finally…

If I had to really pick the Top-5 things, here are critical ones that you shouldn’t compromise on:

1. Ability to automate UI and API simply and in same flow.
2. A tool that could potentially handle the complexities of today’s technology stack and robust element handling without any custom framework and programming overhead
3. Something that can keep up with the continuous nature of changes and where maintenance doesn’t kill the ROI and outcome is more sustainable
4. Don’t get locked into automation assets that would be proprietary to specific tool
5. An automation tool that’s simple to adopt and has test management, reporting and CI integrations built in.

If you are thinking about going with or sticking to selenium, this is a comprehensive summary of how you can potentially leverage all the power of selenium without any of its framework and programming overheads

Do check out how accelQ scores and compares and sign up for trial to experience the difference.

Let’s take a real-life scenario from one of our banking customers. Their web banking application has an upcoming release which has a combination of bug fixes, enhancements, and certain API changes. Since it’s a fairly mature application, it has a repository of test assets with approximately 1000 manual test cases and 200 automation scripts. These assets are part of an ALM tool repository. These test assets in the past were tied to requirements, managed in a separate tool, however, during the years and multiple releases, the requirements traceability does not exist anymore.

Test planning is kicked off, and it’s time to figure out what Test Cases are impacted in manual and automation assets. And remember in reality these test assets do not trace to Requirements.

I’m positive this situation will sound familiar to you. Change Impact is a completely manual process today which is time-consuming and error-prone. Not to mention, test cases that are not relevant, never get deleted to avoid the risk. This has a snowball effect and your test case repository is ever expanding, giving you a false perception of quality. The higher count of test case does not relate to better coverage or higher quality. In reality, Test case count with the manual process of Change Management is misleading, and most of the effort in “maintaining” this repository is going down the drain.

Normally Test suites are manually created based on this change impact analysis. In most cases we over-test, just to be sure we lower our risk.

Adopting true Agility would mean bringing efficiency and automating this critical change management process.

Enter the era of accelQ Universe with Change-Bots

accelQ approaches this uniquely at both test case scenario level as well as at automation script level. I talk about script level change management in another post. accelQ’s App universe concept bakes in the modularity and creates test scenarios that directly relate to components of application and business process. The relationships between these components are a real and direct representation of the application, its business rules and the end-to-end flow including API calls. This referential integrity is the core of bringing automation to the change management process. accelQ’s change bots are able to do real-time path analysis for any business process change to exactly nail down what scenarios are impacted. Not just that, the exact step within each impacted test case is identified reducing the change management effort by 40%. And you can propagate this business process change across all your test assets knowing exactly the impact, allowing you to change logic with precision.

The fourth industrial revolution is here and we are on the cusp of the technological revolution that will change how we live, work, and communicate. The change brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution has been impacting many sectors. Not leaving a stone unturned, the impact has spearheaded in reshaping government, education, healthcare, and commerce.

The technological advancements over the years have ushered in new-age players who act as game-changers continuously challenging and disrupting the traditional methods. These emerging technological trends stand as the “Fantastic Four” in today’s digitally equipped world and they are artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, Blockchain technology, and Bigdata.

Artificial Intelligence

One would not be surprised to know that Artificial Intelligence is deployed all around us today. Yes, the AI boom is happening very quickly all around the world and it is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. This is because of the progress it has made in certain fields which have resulted in the adoption of artificially intelligent offerings. AI is now used in hearing aids to filter out ambient noise and navigation apps to guide you through the city traffic. It helps doctors in diagnosing diseases, detecting tumors, recommends treatment plans and interprets electrocardiograms. AI will continue to scale into different verticals from manufacturing to education, retail to health care in the years to come. Previously, what was considered as the next big challenge for AI is now considered a generic software. All hail AI.

The IoT

The Internet of Things is here to change the world and is no more hype. IoT which has been the best definition of “connected world” of ours, has made it easier to track, analyze and bring out new inventions like never before. The applications of it almost everywhere starting with a smartwatch that you own to the autonomous car. It may be mentioned that recently, an unmanned Audi A7 drove for more than 550 miles between San Francisco and Las Vegas. The brain for the drive was NVIDIA processors! By 2020, Gartner Research suggests that 20% of the vehicles on our roads would be giving off information to a central database via some kind of wireless connection. Sierra Wireless is already in function for manufacturers like Toyota, Volvo, Tesla, BMW, and Ford.

Blockchain Technology

“An incorruptible digital ledger of economic transactions that can be programmed to record not just financial transactions but virtually everything of value.” The blockchain is the current vibe that is accelerating a breakthrough in the applications. With its reliance on public key encryption, blockchain has a much stronger defense mechanism than other approaches. The globe has already witnessed an extensive adoption of the disruptive technology for an uplifting competitive advantage. According to a World Economic Forum Survey conducted two years ago, it was predicted that 10% of global GDP would be stored with blockchain technology by 2027. The blockchain technology, also described as the “internet of value”, has caught many by surprise by the ending of 2017 and became the emerging distributed ledger technology. The innovation in the decentralized ecosystem which has the potential to automate not just key processes but entire industries is not just limited to cryptocurrency.

Big Data

The term “Big Data” is currently the buzzword that has been gaining much hype in the recent years. Organizations and brands in almost every industry are using big data to break new ground. Data is the most valued asset today and organizations rely more on the data to keep their business momentum accelerated. Starting with the basic information like the products available in the market, the demand, pricing, success rate, organizations depend majorly on the right data for business decisions. Big data is the backbone of groundbreaking scientific and medical research, bringing the ability to analyze and study at a rate never before available. And it impacts how we live each day.

The world is increasingly becoming more and more demanding, especially when it comes to Technology where immense competition is not only thirsty of innovations but also brutally greedy when it comes to Return on Investments (ROI).

All the visionaries at top benches of organizations are constantly looking for innovative solutions for their customers. The techies and coders across the spheres are thus finding it hard to cope with increasing the pressure of devising ground-breaking solutions that are not only cost-effective, scalable but also reusable across business lines.

Pyramid Consulting Solutions is no-where far when it comes to building reusable solutions. As part of its Technology Forum initiative, ‘Reusable Components’ were launched in February 2019, for Pyramid Software Delivery Team.

This is a unique platform where innovative Pyramidions have shared frameworks, code base and libraries with all the associated documentation, instructions and test cases, that will enable and promote the culture of both contributing as well as adopting re-usable components in cutting edge technologies like .NET, Angular, JAVA to name a few. This will not only save a lot of time and effort in usual day-to-day coding but will also acquaint the technology staff with flexible and pioneering ‘ready to use’ solutions that can be used directly or with minimal tweaking.

The obvious benefits of building such standardized components viz:

Reusability: Adoption of an already developed, thoroughly tested and the documented module brings Efficiency in Delivery Time and Delivery Quality;

Standardization: Usage of standardized & approved components across projects ensure adherence to Quality Standards across the organization;

Innovation: These Reusable components provide a (code) baseline which can be either used as-is or could be enhanced up to any level to achieve desired results;

Knowledge – Widespread usage and understanding of Reusable components paves way for dissemination of knowledge across individuals, teams, and verticals within the organization;

shall not only help to reach closer to organization’s technology goals but shall also imbibe a sense of collaboration and forward thinking, while designing or adopting a readymade solution.
These reusable components are thoroughly tested, are well documented that includes both open sources as well as Pyramid’s proprietary stand-alone modules that are maintained and upgraded regularly to catch up with current market trends in terms of technology and demand.

Well defined guidelines have been laid down for both adapters as well as developers of these Reusable components to adhere to industry and organization standards. Some of the prominent Reusable components that have already taken shape and are available for use include- data upload and display into the grid, caching of frequently used data to avoid network roundtrip from database and user authentication from LDAP with group consideration.
Not to mention, this is just the start of a long inventive learning curve that will get its pace going, with participation and contribution from everyone associated with technology world.

Author Bio:

Mayank Singh is Operations Lead in Pyramid IT Consulting, NOIDA.
He is an engineering graduate and holds master’s degree in Management with over 11 years of industry experience and contributes to blogs and articles to the community.