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Re-envisioning Quality Testing Methods and Reskilling Workforce: ASocio-Technical Study of Automation Techniques in the Indian ITIndustryAuthor: Tanmay Joshi Date: 2020-07-10 Report no: IIIT/TH/2020/69 Advisor:Nimmi Rangaswamy AbstractThe Indian IT industry is being continuously disrupted by rapidly improving automation technologiesthat tend towards replacing repetitive IT support work and back-office tasks previously driven by humanactors. This increase in efficient automation-based technologies leverages software to carry out back-office tasks almost independently of human- where foreign organizations originally invested in. Thetrend of automating manual work practices in the industry has generated extreme debates over theirprojected influence on hiring patterns, employment strategies, job profiles, work practices, and the overalleconomy. Using a socio-technical framework, the thesis aims at investigating the manifold consequencesarising out of introducing automation techniques in the software Quality Testing (QT) segment of theIndian IT industry. Ethnographic methods were employed for the collection of qualitative researchdata, to identify key socio-economic factors influencing the decision to automate a testing environment.The resulting discourse has been viewed through an Information and Communications Technology forDevelopment (ICTD) lens, by primarily analyzing first-person responses of Quality Testers injectingvalue into the testing job profile and colligating these discourses with existing QT practices. Subsequently,the significance of designing improved QT work practices in combination with relevant skill-trainingstrategies has been detailed, to enable IT professionals to exploit their implicit knowledge, businessprocess knowledge, critical thinking, and computing skills while collaborating with automated QTprocedures.The second part of the thesis focuses on the reskilling and up-skilling required to take the edge off jobthreats in the IT industry owing to work automation. India is home to the largest under-25 demographicprofile in the world, requiring a widespread, skill-oriented educational model, equipping youth to thrivein highly dynamic job markets. As a response to the huge demand for technical education, a large privateskill tutoring ecosystem has sprung up in Ameerpet, Hyderabad, India, whose pedagogical model can beadopted by Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to improve their underlying foundation of teachingtechniques. The thesis offers reasons as to why learners are inclined to enroll in the traditional physicalmodels of Ameerpet classrooms over online training courses. This further draws attention towards designrecommendations that can be incorporated in online learning platforms to entice learners who often getmarginalized in the more formal and competitive education system and opt for Ameerpet-like skillinghubs. The principal offering in this context would be to propose a shift in the perspective of MOOCsto include job readiness by escorting suggestions in course curriculum, course delivery, and marketingstrategies Full thesis: pdf Centre for Exact Humanities |
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