Friday, July 29, 2011

Presented a Corporate Techtalk on Globalization Testing

Earlier in the month of July, i was involved in presenting a TechTalk at Aditi Technologies in Bangalore. The TechTalk was on the topic- "Uncovering myths around Globalization Testing".
This talk was as a result of Invitation by one of the Testing community members Ravisuriya . Thank you Ravisuriya.

The presentation for this talk can be found here .

The overall Presentation setup was good and there were quite a few questions in the end about the topic discussed. One of the questions that caught my attention was-
"Is it possible to eliminate Globalization testing altogether?”
Although as a passionate professional, i may be biased in my views and opinions around this but this one is good to think further and investigate. I did respond with a "No" with some reasons around external dependencies and Product architecture and lot of other variable factors but this one certainly deserves a little bit more thought.
There was one more good question on what is the right ratio of Globalization testing vs English Testing.
I would write about my perspective to these questions sometime soon.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

One Effective way to learn about Software Globalization Engineering

If you want to Learn about Software Globalization Engineering, one of the practical tools that i have come across is "World Ready Software Example", which can be found here .

Originally designed to support only Windows 2000 and Windows XP, this tool actually works on Windows 7 to a good extent. You can actually try out several features of a fully Globalized application.

What can you do with this tool ?
- You can check the Local formats like Date, Time, Currency, Calendar, Numbers from the loads of different locales.
- You can input any Unicode characters and see how a truly Globalized application processes the characters,\.
- You can check the Multilingual User Interface feature and change the current language to any listed language at the run-time.
- You can simulate Pseudo Translation.
- You can simulate Pseudo Mirroring. Mirroring is the process of simulating the RTL (Right-to-Left languages like Arabic etc.).
- And much more.

How does this tool look like ?

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.