Tesco launches retail test lab in B’lore

Thanuja B M BANGALORE

RETAIL major Tesco has unveiled a retail test lab in its Bangalore facility. The lab will replicate its entire point-of-sale testing infrastructure in the UK and will test and certify new software to be used in 1,500-plus stores in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Mr Sridhar Rathnam, head, IT services, Tesco Hindustan Service Centre (HSC) said: “We have set up a 7,000 sq-ft lab in our campus which has 30 different tills and 5 different store formats. This will be used to test and validate software releases which are introduced into Tesco stores worldwide every year.”

The company is currently in the process of transitioning much of the testing work of software. “About 80% of the testing will be done in Bangalore while only the last bit of integration testing, including mainframe integration and credit card pin testing, will remain in the UK lab,” he said, adding that the new lab is also planning to work on automation of the processes of the software. The number of store formats will be increased to 40 formats by the end of the year. While the first phase will also have petrol filling stations (PFS), later phases will add new generation formats like PFS (with Pay@Pump), Self Service Checkouts, Grocery Home Shopping etc. Queried on investments, Ms Meena Ganesh, CEO of HSC, declined specifics but added that Tesco had invested about 30 million pounds in the Bangalore centre so far and the lab was a significant part of that investment. The lab in Bangalore will employ about 50 test analysts and testers doing system and functional testing. The software which Tesco uses in all its stores is custom developed by Israeli company Retalix.

The new lab has already made its presence felt after having worked on a significant part of the testing phase for Tesco’s recentlylaunched software Progress 3.8. This new software release had a few business functionality changes and included the ‘chip-in-pin’ functionality and base software testing (the latter two were done in India). The Bangalore team is now working on 5.01 software.

ET