Keep the difficult finding in the final report

I am Elsa Thiruneli, CEO and executive director of Belsori Software Assurance in Coimbatore. Our six hundred and twenty colleagues examine software for forty-two clients, working from three Indian cities. We supply evidence about defined questions and agreed conditions. We do not take over a client's release decision, and a completed test plan is not a certificate that nothing can go wrong. I want that distinction to be understood before an engagement is sold, while there is still time to agree what useful work looks like.

I began by testing industrial instruments, where a result depended on the conditions under which it had been obtained. Retail software introduced me to a different kind of uncertainty: the behaviour that appears when people use a system in combinations its designers did not anticipate. I moved into specialist testing delivery in 2008, became COO in 2015 and took the CEO role in April 2020. My responsibility now includes the economics and ownership expectations of the whole company. Employees hold a substantial stake, but that does not remove the need to make difficult choices about investment, price and capacity.

Four recent decisions explain my approach more clearly than a list of services. We stopped rewarding raw defect counts. We funded an apprenticeship cohort without assuming immediate billable work. We changed the commercial model for an automated regression service so that clients could share the benefit of fewer execution hours. And we retained a qualified technical conclusion when a client wanted a broader endorsement before paying a milestone. In each case I had to reconcile a sound technical position with the resources and commercial behaviour needed to sustain it.

Current focus

Our next task is to improve how engagement teams explain exclusions and unresolved findings to decision-makers outside engineering. A director or business sponsor should be able to see the conditions examined, the areas still uncertain and the person responsible for the next decision. I am also reviewing how our five executive heads fund specialist depth without relying on permanent overtime or the convenient assumption that every trained colleague is immediately ready for every client assignment.

Conversations I welcome

I would consider one external non-executive role where service quality, technical evidence and commercial incentives need to be examined together. I have one current executive directorship and an indicative allowance of eighteen days annually for a suitable external appointment. Both the actual calendar and permission from my current board would need to be settled before I accept.