Set the BUG Right @ SofTec 2011 Bangalore

Date:   Thursday , August 04, 2011

The testing community of Bangalore got together on August 2nd at the SofTec 2011 to discuss and address the latest issues, testing industry faces today.

Important concepts such as Creating a high performance Testing & QA Team, Creating leaders in testing domain, Challenges and Growth Prospects for the Software Testing, were addressed by the top players, as the gathering of different verticals from testing domain listened with rapt attention.

The event was initiated with a key note on Paradigm Shift-Testing 3.0 by Arun kumar Singh, Vice President(Testing Services), Global IT business Wipro. ‘Testing 3.0 envisages Testing graduating from technical excellence to assuring customer experience. There is a trend of the CIO reporting to CFO. In this situation, the value of testing will have to be presented in financial terms. The focus moves from 100 percent testing to the right amount of testing needed for the assurance.”

One of the novel and exciting features of SofTec 2011 was the panel discussion on ‘The Roadmap to Quality’ wherein QA Heads from Tata Beverages, BIOCON, Mahindra Reva and STAG Software got together to present their take on testing and quality assurance in their domain which reaffirmed the fact that testing is not only about finding bugs and fixing issues. The concept was an instant hit with the dignitaries and attendees who believed that testing is far too universal to be limited to a few sectors. The SofTec 2011 had two parallel tracks: Test leadership & Test professional.

Mukesh Jain, Principal Engineering Manager, Microsoft India R&D started the professional track with his session on Performance Improvement stories from Bing, Hotmail and MSN followed by Asvini Kumar, chairman and MD, Thinksoft Global who touched upon a very new concept of introducing a specialized curriculum that would answer the need of industry ready software testing professionals. “75 percent of the fledging graduates are unemployable, there is a need for financial sector and the Testing sector to collaborate and go all out and create a specialized curriculum including an on-the-job training framework leading to a Post Graduate Diploma in Financial Software Testing”he said.

Speaking on the topic of ‘Cloud computing and software testing’ Anuj Magazine Software Testing practitioner from Citrix, held an absorbing talk. He elaborated on the fact that there are myriad low cost options available to move different aspects of Software testing to the cloud.

T Ashok, Founder & CEO, STAG software highlighted the importance of questioning in his session called Landscaping- The Science Of Questioning. “Testing is not just about finding defects, it is about being constantly curious of how a system can used/abused and hence good questioning is key element for testers to deliver business value”he said.

T Ashok in his session on ‘Houston - We have a problem!’ in the Test technical track mentioned that cleanliness criteria, enables expectations. To be clear and then be sharply focused on the goal of what types of defects to uncover is the core of Hypothesis based testing.

Emphasizing the importance of creating leaders Nagarajan Pichumani laid out 10 rules for the audience that would help them create high performance test teams. Vaidyanathan Ramalingam Director Engineering, Huawei used an unlikely analogy of a south Indian thali to explain to the audience the difference between waterfall testing and agile testing.

Pradeep C, CEO of Edista Testing Institute engaged a highly interactive session on ‘Workforce strategies for creating successful test organization’, speaking about the event in high regards he said “It was a well-organized event, and I sincerely enjoyed the interaction”The event saw an attendance of 600+ delegates, highly interactive Q&A rounds and networking of high caliber. This event was sponsored by STAG software, Softsmith, QAI, Thinksoft, Amitysoft, ITB, TYTO Software, Parasoft and ESDS.