Rahul Verma’s Blog on Software Testing Perspective

TEST2008 - A Must-Attend-Conference for Software Testers!

There are already a plenty of testing conferences conducted every year and theme conferences scheduled every month, in India. So, why should there be a new conference?

Every conference has its own flavour and focus, governed by the minds behind the idea. Off late, some conferences are slowly turning out to be vendor marketing programmes rather than a place for discussing new testing ideas. A similar concern is about the repetitiveness of papers being presented every year.

Majority of the attendees in such conferences are sponsored by corresponding employers. After attending a conference, an attendee is expected to bring back new ideas and implement the same in his or her team. Because of the aforesaid reasons, at times, the “take away” from testing conferences is very less. This impacts the attendance for testing conferences, as companies are becoming more and more skeptical for sponsoring candidates for testing conferences. The attendees who spend on their own, to participate in the conferences are mostly governed by their passion to learn certain areas of software testing. They attend the programs with a lot of expectations as well.

There are definitely certain existing conference programs doing very well. TEST2008 - Test Excellence through Speed and Technology is an upcoming conference and looks promising. With the theme Agility in Testing and participation from international speakers and testers, it is the first conference to be held by PureConferences. Following is what the Test2008 website says about the conference and its theme:

Test2008 is the first conference being organized by PureConferences in India. Our conference will provide a platform for international and national test professionals to interact and participate. Speakers from around 10 countries, such as USA, UK, France, Sweden, Canada, Italy, Netherlands, including India will deliver keynotes, tutorials, and papers during the conference. We intend to involve academia and institutions of learning with our conference. We also intend to make Test2008 a ‘green’ conference as far as possible. Additionally, we will institute two test scholarships for educating promising students unable to finance their studies.

Agility represents nimbleness, resourcefulness, and adaptability. In the world of testing, agility is synonymous with the testing team’s resourcefulness and ability to respond quickly to changing contexts. Organizations need to catch the ‘window of opportunity’ when releasing a product to remain profitable. At the same time, we, as customers only want to use ‘quality’ products.

We are hoping to have intense discussions around the theme to make it a learning experience for all participants. The theme is broad enough and will cover diverse topics. Keynotes, Tutorials, and Paper presentations by renowned speakers known internationally and in our country will be the highlight of the conference.

Being a part of the Technical Committee of this conference, I have seen a good number of papers being submitted about fresh themes and investigations of the exisiting ideas. Following is the schedule of the conference: 

Event	Dates	Duration (days)
Pre conference Tutorials	Oct. 13 & 14, 2008	2 (Monday-Tuesday)
Conference and Exhibition	Oct. 15 & 16, 2008	2 (Wednesday-Thursday)

KeyNote Speakers: Geoff Thompson   Director, Experimentus Ltd., UK William (Bj) Rollison   Test Architect, Microsoft, USA

Visit the Test2008 website for more details regarding the conference. Bookmark the site and track for updated information. You can choose to sponsor the conference or register as a participant. You can send any queries regarding the conference to info@test2008.in .

See you all at the conference!

Rahul Verma

Site Admin, Testing Perspective

Posted in Announcements, Software Testing | No Comments »

PyRAFT - Automation Framework for Testing

PyRAFT stands for Rapid Automation Framework for Testing in Python. Usually such frameworks have an acronym as the name of the project. I too was carried away and found this as the suitable name for what I want to work upon.

You can find the PyRAFT project page on the Testing Perspective website in the form of a wiki.

The target of this project is to bring the utilities for automation of functional, performance and security testing under a single umbrella. Each one of these is a vast field in itself. So, the target can never be an exhaustive framework, especially when it is being developed by a single person. This framework will alteast try to provide a common platform for a set of testing activities from the perspective of different types of testing.

This project was registered with Sourceforge a few months ago and a small webpage was put for tracking the progress. The development work was started with the focus on a Node-based framework. It was realized soon that this approach will take atleast a couple of years before I start contributing some utilities to the testing community.

The project has been rethought and started from scratch. The approach to be followed now on is that I should start contributing small utilities as a part of this project along with good automation ideas and recipes as and when I come across them. Besides this, the utilities should form a part of a bigger framework. This can be made possible by developing stand alone utilities that expose their functionality via a reusable API.

I will also be sharing my learnings from building the automation framework on the project page and on this blog. I hope that with PyRAFT, I am able to contribute to the testing community in yet another way.

I am blogging about it, so that I take this project seriously. This blog post should remind me that I should work for PyRAFT.

Rahul Verma
Site Admin, Testing Perspective

Posted in Automation Framework, Software Testing | 4 Comments »

Should the Testers Learn Programming?

I have seen a lot of discussions over this topic in various blogs or otherwise. I could see people outrightly rejecting it, speaking in favor of it or making statements in favor of both approaches. I think it makes sense to write my thoughts as well on this topic. What I am going to write is a little different from what other testers have expressed so far. I am not going to give reasons for either of the opinions and strike a balance. I am a little surprised at seeing this question as a topic of debate. Instead of answers, I have got a lot of questions which you should ask yourself, before considering this as a topic of debate.

I will keep it concise. My first question, as an answer to this question is “Why Not?”. You can infact stop reading the post here and try to answer this simple question for yourself.

I learnt C, Java, Perl, Python and JavaScript. I am in the process of learning a bit of C++ and PHP. This is in addition to the vendor specific languages employed by various tools that I worked with. Am I saying that I am expert in any/all of these? No! I learnt them as and when I required the respective knowledge. Today if you ask me to code in all of these, I may be able to do so only in couple of these. But I have coded in them at some point of time and it will not take time to ramp up and be ready for new work in the same. I as a tester need not require knowledge in ALL of these languages to a developer’s level (that was not expected so far and if a project requires a higher expertise level in a particular language, I will prepare for that as well), although I came across various situations where I could not have contributed to the project without the knowledge of one of these languages.

What is there which stops a tester from learning programming? If you are an automation tester, how do you survive without programming knowledge? Didn’t you ever feel the need of developing your own utility? If you have always used an automation tool, didn’t you come across a situation where you had to play with the scripting language of the tool? What will you do if you are put into an API testing project? What will you do if you are put into a performance testing project? What will you do if you are put into protocol fuzz testing? What will you do if you are asked to use and enhance an existing scripting framework? What will you do if you are put into a Database PDM validation project where you have to extract the data yourself with the help of SQL queries crafted by you?

I don’t see a debate here. I can just see mind blocks. I can just see people defining and talking about testing with a very myopic view when they say that a tester does not need programming knowledge. I will go one step ahead and say that a tester should learn programming languages even if it is not needed for his present work.

Testing is fun. There is a variety of projects that you should target to work on. There are a lot of things to learn. I suggest to come out any mind blocks that stop you from learning. It’s your career, it’s your profession, do the best to be technically competent.

You may not be feeling the need of learning a programming language now, as per the current project requirements. How long do you think you want to or you will stay in such a project? What is the probability of getting a similar project again? What are the industry norms? Why is the industry trend showing an increased requirement for testers with more and more knowledge of technical details of protocols, products and programming languages?

I have got the answer to all the above questions for myself and my aspirations. I found that I should keep learning and comparing different programming languages, I should keep learning new technologies and exploring new areas of testing. I want to work on testing different kinds of products and execute different kinds of tests on them.

You might have got a similar answer or an altogether different answer to all these questions. If you find suitable, you can leave your comments here to extend the discussion.

Rahul Verma
Site Admin, Testing Perspective

Posted in Software Testing, Tester Psychology, Testers and Developers, Testing Career | 19 Comments »