We recently announced our $45 million venture funding round. One of our major goals with the fundraise was to bring in world-class leaders who would help us further our dream of building a best-in-class test orchestration platform.

We are now elated to announce the appointment of Sripriya Kalyanasundaram as Global Leader-Partnerships at LambdaTest.

Sripriya Kalyanasundaram is an industry veteran and has been a core part of the evolution in this space. She believes that in this digital era, customer experience is the front and center and to ensure that businesses have to architect the right testing methodologies and more importantly, have access to the right testing environment early in the product lifecycle.

We sat down (virtually) with Sripriya to understand her professional journey, her eternal love for testing and the vision for her role at LambdaTest.

Early Days

At the turn of the millennium, Sripriya was handed a very crucial task at Cognizant, where she was an early employee. The task — a multinational conglomerate had come up with a defect-ridden product to test vendors. The goal was to find all the defects and report back within the deadline of two weeks.

While the other vendors were busy logging in defects from day one, Sripriya and her team were busy strategizing on how to automate the tasks. Sripriya knew that this wasn’t a sprint but a marathon. At the end of the deadline, Sripriya and her team reported fundamental issues and the defects under each category, whereas the others had just reported the defects without going to the rootcauses.

The end result — Impressed client. Contract awarded to Cognizant.

And, that was her first big takeaway in testing — it is all about efficiency and strategizing. It isn’t just about finding the bugs.

Love for testing

According to Sripriya, she is a bridge. But, between who or what?

That’s where it gets interesting.

She believes that testers/testing is a bridge between technical folks aka developers and the end users. Connecting the tech to non-tech in a way. Being a tester means understanding both these worlds deeply and caring about the end experience.

“What do you like about Apple? It is the overall experience, be it their phones or their offline store. It is all about the experience. Even if it is premium, people don’t mind paying for it. The end goal of testing is all about creating the experience for the end-users. It is where I see a big opportunity for LambdaTest,” said Sripriya.

Harking back to ‘bridge’. Being a tester is also about being the bridge for communication.

Having been a part of the ecosystem for almost three decades, she understands how crucial communication is when it comes to testing. What was at one point face-to-face communication or email threads, has now evolved into integrations with a variety of tools to ensure the right communication. She loves how testers are at the centre of all the action thanks to the constant communication between different worlds. It is what keeps her going.

“(As a tester) You have to be taking tough calls and really standing up and being expressive. It doesn’t matter what role you play in the testing team, you have to be very expressive and articulate otherwise, you will be of no use to the team,” said Sripriya.

What’s next in the world of testing?

According to Sripriya, two major movements will redefine the future of this space:

• Quality over quantity

• Democratization of testing

A common thread that will connect both these big shifts will be test orchestration.

In Sripriya’s vision, testing will soon undergo massive transformation to enable literally everyone to test while simultaneously bringing experts to the forefront. To give a parallel, it is like the classic ‘General physician vs Specialists’ debate.

Test platforms will do the heavylifting so that the ‘general physicians’ can do a lot more, but also make the lives of the ‘specialists’ easier by providing all the required plug and play services for them to build on top of.

Garnish this with the much-needed speed of execution, data and intelligence, and voila, you have quite the heady ‘orchestration’ concoction to look forward to.

Sripriya also adds that businesses will start to focus more on real-time issues. Businesses will move to shift-left testing as having access and knowledge about the vulnerabilities early in the life-cycle wil play a huge role in the GTM strategy.

“Faster to the market with higher quality is a sureshot success to winning,” said Sripriya.

Plans and Vision for LambdaTest

As Sripriya moves into her new role, she will lead all partnerships and also collaborate closely with the go-to-market and customer-facing teams.

“LambdaTest will soon not just be a platform provider, but will also provide industry-contextualized package solutions to its customers,” said Sripriya.

According to Sripriya, businesses today are trying really hard to cater to their ever-increasing testing needs. There is a huge need for an intelligent platform that can do the heavylifting and let businesses concentrate on their core rather than breaking their heads over testing.

To put it simply, her goal is to make LambdaTest the de-facto test orchestration platform for enterprises.

Welcome aboard, Sripriya! We can’t wait to learn from and grow with you!