Abstract Digital shearography is a modern technique for measuring microscopic displacement gradients of an object surface by interferometric speckle techniques and also for application in non-destructive testing. In our experimental system that we constructed, used a modified Michelson interferometer and a high resolution digital still camera to capture the interference image of a test object, before and after the deformations were applied to it. Using this arrangement, shearograms are successfully generated for various known deformations of the test object for illumination by different laser sources. A simple model of the deformation is assumed, and computed the second derivative of the profile that is compared with the quantitative optical measurements derived from the shearogram. A reasonable agreement is observed in all cases. This implied that our experimental shearography system is able to generate reliable and useful quantitative data.