Software Testing wave @ Hyderabad Date:   Wednesday , May 04, 2011 India’s most topical and up-to-date testing conference, Siliconindia Software Testing Conference ‘Softec 2011’, was held in Hyderabad on March 26th, the event was the ideal platform for many to discuss the challenges and issues faced in testing today, how best to address them and how to cope with changing conditions and the need to optimize every effort. The event started off with the Inaugural Keynote on ‘Accelerate defect detection via Hypothesis Based Testing (HBT)’ delivered by T Ashok, Founder and CEO, STAG Software, he said “HBT Testing focuses on how a scientific approach to detecting defects, a personal test methodology enables rapid defect detection. Testing is not mere executing of test cases that can be speeded up by automation or by using a light weight process. It is an intellectual activity that requires good thinking to understand, strategize, design, automate, execute and course correct. HBT provides the individual with a means to sharpen his/her intellect to enable these activities to be done rapidly and effectively”. Next the session on ‘From technology to solutions: Customer Centric Testing’ was addressed by Ramesh Loganathan, VP Products & Center Head, Progress Software. He laid stress on the fact that the enterprises are highly integrated and need to be operationally very responsive; the ability to sense and respond to business exigencies and opportunities becomes very necessary. These pose serious challenges to conventional thinking on software engineering and solution architectures. There is a need for solutions to be very quickly adaptable to demands for change which brings forth consequential challenges on how software is tested and released. He spoke specifically in terms of how solutions can be tested when they are massively distributed, and in SaaS model, or on the cloud platform and the need to bring customer environments into the test infrastructure and how virtualization is a serious enabler in having pre-configured customer environments and test cases that can be pulled up on demand and executed. Addressing the ‘Changing role of the tester in an agile world’ we had Anutthara Bharadwaj, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Corporation who spoke about the agile testing capabilities in Visual Studio 2010 ALM, which generated a lot of interest among the audience. She said “Adoption of agile is on the upward trend in India and I could sense that shift from my interactions with participants during my talk”. “The number of smart phones that we would have will exceed laptops & desktops by end of 2012”, speaking on ‘Mobile/Infotainment Apps testing’ we had Kalyana Rao Konda, Vice President, AppLabs, who said “Smart phones are no more used for just voice and text. Mobile phones are becoming critical part of improving the way business is conducted by improving effectiveness and efficiency. As smart phones are becoming integral part of business eco system, testing plays a very key role in ensuring that business apps deliver the promises that are made to business teams. Testing on mobile applications requires significant changes in the way we approach test strategies, tools, processes & methods”. Saurabh Chandra, Author and Business Unit Architect, CA spoke on ‘Automation Testing’ and said “Test automation infrastructure set up is an important strategic investment for an organization. If not researched well by the leader beforehand, may become bigger pain in future and substantial loss to company. ROI in this case, is directly proportional to the no. of logical technical steps taken. More the logical technical steps and intelligence embedded, more is the automation ROI to the organization. Unfortunately magic doesn’t work here, only strategic technical math works”. The event witnessed 250 Testing professionals and was a great platform for testing end users especially those who are connected to day to day execution issues and applicability. The audience as well as the speakers found it a great platform for interaction Overall the event brought together software test professionals, practitioners, experts, academicians, and service/product vendors to share techniques, methodologies, frameworks, experiences, and case studies to perform, manage, and automate Software Testing. The event was sponsored by Microsoft Visual Studio, Stag software and Tyto Software. The exhibitors at the event were Trendzsol and Tata McGraw Hill Education. “We were happy to see the healthy turnout and the enthusiastic response to my talk on “Stable and reliable web automation”. Silicon India has done a great job in bringing together industry experts and practising professionals. We at Tyto Software are happy for the business exposure it gave us, and would be happy to be part of more Silicon India events.” said Narayan Raman, Founder, CEO, Tyto Software.