Sunday, July 3, 2011

Presented at the SofTec 2011 Software Testing Conference

I am back and on the time that i promised. Breaks are always good and this one was no different.

I got the invitation to present at Silicon India's SofTec 2011 Software Testing Conference and completed my presentation yesterday. The stage was not new for me having presented in 2010 edition as well(on the same stage). When i got the call to present at the conference, i had in mind to speak about Cloud phenomenon for some reasons-
- In 2010, i presented on "Globalization Testing- Getting your Software World Ready". This year it had to be different.
- Cloud is more of an in-phenomenon and more relevant to talk about in the Conference.
- I had developed a fascination for the similar topic earlier this year and thought i could build upon that.

Summary of my talk:
So my Topic for SofTec 2011 was- "The Emergence of Cloud Computing and Software Testing- A Perspective". I primarily talked broadly on the following areas-
- Importance of Learning by Association.
- Associating the origin of Cloud computing with the Advent of Electricity.
- Basics of Cloud computing including Grid and Utility computing.
- Covering the business models around Cloud Computing- including IaaS, PaaS, SaaS.
- The inter-relation between Cloud Computing and Software Testing.
- What are the different ways Testing could be moved on to the cloud- Public cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid clouds.
- Explaining the Fundamental shift from the testers owning Physical machines to test Software applications traditionally to now testers owning raw computing power. All this made possible with Virtualization.
- How could Cloud's elasticity be used effectively in Software testing ?
- How does cloud amount to Green Software Testing ?
- How can Snapshot features help the Software Testing ?
- How is the Virtual lab automation make Software Testing effective ?
- Then i discussed some Live examples primarily featuring-
- Test Management on the Cloud.
- Test data generation on the Cloud.
- On demand usability testing using Cloud.
- Mobile handset testing
- Blogging
- Followed by presentation around the Security and Availability concerns around Cloud and some perspectives around that.

Question and Answers:
Overall it went good and flawless to an extent. Post presentation there were quite a few offline questions. One of the Intriguing questions from a participant was- "When i use Virtual test environment, i am not seeing some of issues that my customers are seeing on the Physical hardware". Upon Investigation, it appeared that the code base of application under test was more than a decade old and that might have some dependency on the results that were seen/not seen. However, i will be exploring this question in a bit more detail and would like to blog about the same in the near future.

Other Interesting Sessions:
I liked the Panel talk involving Quality heads of Companies such as Tata Global Beverages, BIOCON, Mahindra Reva Electric Vehicles, and moderated by T.Ashok from STAG Software. This was one of the unique session in which people from Non-Software fields discussed their experiences around Testing as it relates to their Industries. I am surprised (having attended many conferences) nobody thought of engaging such a panel in the past. The discussions were enriching and most of the non-software people agreed to the fact that there is much more focus on prevention than defect detection as is the case with most of Software Testing. Also, there was stringent focus on Design and testing the Design itself. Reliability testing takes altogether a new dimension as the representative from Reva Electric car rightly said- "Software can afford to crash and hang but cars cant"
I quite liked the session "Software Fault Patterns – A Narrative from the Operation Theatre " by Dr. Sukanta Bhatt. His presentation style is unique and hilarious. Again, he stressed the importance of Accuracy, UI design, and understanding the perspective of On field Doctors. He really made audience laugh and drove home the point that Software Testing career cannot be considered complete unless one has a real life experience of testing a Medical Software. Period.

Overall a great experience. Time permitting, i really wish to record the video of the presentation and put in on Youtube sometime.

6 comments:

Chintan said...

please do ! I would like to gain some more insight on this topic. Ta!

sbs 2003 license said...

Interesting article and one which should be more widely known about in my view. Your level of detail is good and the clarity of writing is excellent. I have bookmarked it for you so that others will be able to see what you have to say.

Anuj Magazine said...

Will try my best to do it soon, Chintan.

Anuj Magazine said...

Thank you for your kind words, sbs 2003 license.

KVM said...

Thanks Anuj for sharing the knowledge on cloud computing. I attended the session. Its very much useful.

Anuj Magazine said...

Thanks for your valuable feedback, KVM. It means a lot to me to get the feedback from the audience.