Building Successful Partnerships
How are product and services companies functioning today? There is a lot of competition in almost every domain with a heavy focus on intellectual property and a drive to release new feature sets and experiences to customers sooner than their competitors. But one welcoming aspect is that there also is a willingness to collaborate and build successful partnerships.
This sort of collaboration is referred to as co-opetition, which combines cooperation and competition. These partnerships are helping companies scale and deliver the fast turnarounds that customers have come to expect.
Some of these partnerships are founded on mergers and acquisitions, but a large chunk are still driven as pure play independent partnerships. These could be 1:1 partnerships, 1:many, or a many: many relationship often built on a carefully thought-out strategy.
When asked how Yahoo! would sustain itself in the marketplace especially when it is not in the mobile hardware, software, browser, or social network business, the CEO of Yahoo! commented that Yahoo!'s future is going to be largely driven by partnerships. Yahoo! works with players such as Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft, a clear example of a 1: many partnership helping a business keep pace in the current market.
How do you embrace this trend as a tester? Understanding the various facets of testing for these partnerships from angles such as functionality, performance, and security, and tying all these into a comprehensive integration test plan is very important.
Establishing the right level of communication with partnering companies and working with them to define a quality plan are a couple of the most challenging areas among other overall product development areas to consider.
The typical set of points to consider in testing is quite similar to how you would integrate and test for a merger and acquisition. A recent example is that of the Skype and Microsoft integration and how Skype will replace Messenger on March 15, 2013.
Although such a test plan can be largely leveraged as is, what is different in partnerships outside of a merger and acquisition is security and confidentiality. The two partnering companies might be competitors in specific areas but need to be transparent to the required levels in making the partnership a success. Good examples include the Microsoft and Yahoo! and the Yahoo! and Google relationships.
In such cases, the team has to be savvy enough to define the right level of communication to make the most of the partnership without compromising any intellectual property where confidentiality needs to be maintained.
Testers have an important role to play in such a communication charter. Testers are a prime interaction point with competitors—in areas of sharing test frameworks, test and live data, scripts, etc.—and serve as an important integration gateway between the two companies.
The testing discipline is only going to grow in prominence with such ongoing partnerships and integrations. So, let’s gear up as testers to build successful partnerships.
