Softech 2010: Platform to bridge the gap & meet new challenges Date:   Wednesday , August 04, 2010 India is on its way to become a leader in the software testing market with more companies outsourcing their software testing services to the country which has a large availability of testers. The testing community today, and test managers in particular, are facing a number of new problems such as increasing complexity, ever-increasing demands to reduce time-to-market & the need for testers to take on more varied roles in the organization. “It is not about how good we do an engineering job. It is all about the value we deliver to the customers, end users and community at a large. Nobody care about the effort that you put, the end result is that matters,” said T Ashok, Founder & CEO, STAG Software at SiliconIndia’s SoftTec 2010. Software bugs cost the U.S. economy an estimated $59.5 billion annually, which is equivalent to 0.6 percent of its gross domestic product. Users and the developers end up paying for the bugs in the software. This loss can be reversed if the companies invest in timely and high quality software testing. Testing is an integral part of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) today. Software testing is done in each phase of product life cycle i.e from requirement specifications , design, coding, to the user acceptance. Even though over the last few years the Indian players have proved that they can offer testing services at a fraction of the cost, the challenges that are faced by the testing community are always left unnoticed. “If you look at the current scenario, chipset and handset vendors, mobile operators, Internet firms, and new online players are all expanding their footprint in the mobile communications value chain to stake their ownership claims on the mobile Internet. Entering the market with break-through innovations in industrial design, functionality, and user experience, are challenging even for established players. By the time you achieve one technology the other one comes in. Customer satisfaction has become a big challenge,” said Prabha Aithal, CTO, CanvasM. The challenges of such highly competitive environment can be mitigated only by making the testing environment more stronger and competitive. The testing function in many organizations is evolving and sometimes the division of roles between testers, developers and users are becoming less rigid as new developments in software development and testing make testers out of developers and end users, and developers out of testers. SoftTec 2010, the leading event for the Software Test and QA Community at Bangalore provided a platform for the testing community to bridge the gap and meet new challenges. And it also reflected the challenges organizations face today in order to address different testing projects. It also explored new challenges faced by testers in areas such as Cloud Computing, Virtualisation, Web 2.0 and the increasing take up of Open Source tools. The conference provided guidance to the delegates and helped them understand the challenges and issues faced in testing today, how best to address them and how to cope with changing conditions and the need to optimise every effort. Speakers from the well known organizations like Mahesh Venkataraman, General Manager, Innovation Center, Testing Services, Wipro Technologies; Girish B, CEO, TestingCzar; Chandrasekar Umapathy, Manager - Application Security, Symphony Services provided insights on different areas of testing. Speaking on the topic ‘Globalization Testing-Getting your software world-ready’, Anuj Magazine, Test Manager, Products (Globalization Services), Citrix R&D India, explained how the innovative idea of creating a numeracy was evolved and how it is implemented in the internationalization of software. During his presentation, he described the role of internationalization and localization in program design. “Internationalization, or I18N, is the process of generalizing a product so that it can handle multiple languages and cultural conventions without the need for re-design,” he said. He also spoke on Leverage Virtualized Test Environment, Internationalized Automation and Pseudo Translation Testing. There were two exciting parallel tracks, one for Leaders or Managers and the other for Test Professionals. The Test Professionals track covered ten technical sessions on wide-range of testing topics, combining the best software testing theories with real-world examples which can be applied immediately to the testing environments. “A good manager/leader should give up autocracy because no one wants to work for a dictator or monarch. Majority of the leaders often forget to involve people when it belongs to them. A good leader must be a good listener and an understanding person. It doesn’t mean you need to implement every suggestion,” said Lawrence F, Head - Testing COE, Mphasis. The Test Leadership track focused on managing testers and the software test areas of the product lifecycle. It also provided insights on different aspects of testing like techniques for working effectively in a leadership role with test and non-test teams, and the differences between being a manager and a leader. Mrityunjaya Hikkalgutti, Project Manager - Testing Services & Quality, Mphasis, had a very interesting and interactive session on Cloud Testing. He gave an overview of cloud testing going into the details of its advantages. Hikkalgutti also spoke extensively on Cloud Migration, Commercial Clouds, Cloud Deployment Models, Cloud Service Level Agreements (CSLAs), Technical and Commercial Terms and Conditions of Cloud Testing and Cloud Solution challenges. He gave a detailed clarification on Virtual Test Environment. “Testing is an activity that requires humans to perform; a machine lacks emotions and hence will only do what we program it to do. Automated testing has earned disgrace and respect in the recent years. The disgrace comes from the fact that tests are codes and writing tests means that the tester should necessarily be a developer. It is not necessary that a developer should be a good tester therefore platforms like softech was really beneficial to the testers,” said one of the participants.