STeP-IN Conference on Software testing

I have attended STeP-IN conference on Software testing on Sept 3rd in Taj Krishna, Hyderabad (http://www.stepinforum.org/hyderabad_testing_conference/index.html) and it's AMAZING. This is the first time that I have attended a whole day QA seminar and I absolutely loved it. In fact this is the first whole day testing seminar in Hyderabad as far as I know. I have attended Eclipse conference in Hyderabad and Bangalore and I have attended Hysea conferences and I can definitely say that this is a step above from all of them. Here are the details on the sessions.

I reached Taj Krishna by 9.15 AM and when I entered the room, the room was fully packed. It's amazing to see more than 500+ testing engineers at one place.

The inaugural address is by Dr. S.K Chaudhuri, a Scientist and Associate Director from Imarat. It's nice to see him talk about Missiles and Rockets and how they develop and test them. He passionately shared all his experiences showing all the pics of missiles and explaining each part.

Next is the keynote address from Sanjay Karla, CEO of Tech Mahindra. It's a WOW. The way he took examples of rural India and the way he criticized white papers, the way he provoked everyone by mentioning how QA was a few years back is truly true. It makes you laugh and think at the same time. One example – A employee comes and says that he wants to move to development from QA. When asked why, the answer was “I am getting married”. A humorous one but really true a few years back. Things did change a lot from now to then. He talked on distributed applications, SaaS, Cloud and how Indians implemented all of these since centuries.

This was followed by vote of thanks and a tea break. After hearing Sanjay Karla, my expectations about the conference peaked out. It's all very professionally organized and the speakers are all CEO's, Founders and VP's of some of the big companies and I didn't yet find a flaw (as a QA person, it's very easy to find one).

Next session is from Amit Chatterjee who talked on "Testing in an Agile World". He started with the success and failure rate of Projects and how Software is controlling everything and how we are moving to Agile now. I think his main intention of this session was to showcase Visual Studio 2010, this topic was chosen very carefully to achieve this. He talked less on Agile and more on demoing Visual Studio and explaining how VS can help in moving to Agile. At this point, I was just praying that this should not continue for the rest of the day. Well Microsoft is the main sponsor for this Event, so I guess this is expected. A little let down but the session was OK.

Next one is from Sashi Reddy, Founder and Chairman of AppLabs on "Top ten predictions for 2011 and Beyond". He started with Cloud which everyone is talking about now and then on Mobile application testing and some more predictions like Crowd testing, more importance to the testing, TCoE.

The last one before lunch is from Sunil Gupta, VP of Product Quality from Symphony Services on Output based and outcome based testing. It's already 1.30 PM and everyone is hungry by that time and we were sitting there since 4 hours and so the concentration levels were little low.

Lunch was delicious and the helpers there have to ring the bell again and again reminding us that the sessions were starting.

For the next three sessions, there were two parallel tracks. For the first session, Track 1 is by Ashwin Palaparthi on "Automation test case generation for Web services". Since I had attended Ashwin's talks before, I had chosen the other one which is on "Innovative Test Management System" from Sabre Holdings. It’s interesting to see how they have used API’s to integrate all their tools starting from Project management tool (VersionOne) to Bug tracking tools (JIRA), Source control, Automation Tools like QTP, JMeter, Fitness, Selenium, QC etc. They had also talked on Eclipse plug-ins for developers to run the tests. Most of them are similar to what we do in our company except for QC. I wished that we had given this presentation. Finally they had shown the demo on how they created a story in VersionOne and how it’s automatically transferred to other tools. A nice presentation which show cases the amazing things that testing groups has been doing in different companies. Nice to see that there are other companies which does similar things as we are doing.

For the next session, I had chosen Track 1 which is on “Industrial Strength Exploratory testing” by Anutthara, Senior Program Manager from Microsoft. I had read a few Articles on Exploratory testing from James Bach (I think he termed this word) before and I clearly did not see how it’s different from Adhoc testing and this session answered a few questions. In Exploratory testing, we will define the Charters and we will define the time before we start the testing. A Charter is like a scenario (Ex: Validations, Icons & Images, Accessibility i.e. only use keyboard) and the tester will spend a specific amount of time on this charter. The main question everyone had is how do we measure the Exploratory testing. This is the same that I had and the presenter had detailed a few things like recording, using code coverage (Method followed by Microsoft is, look at the code coverage for a particular period and come up with trends to see how we are going and then change the charters based on the trends.) etc but still it’s little unclear, at least to me. A very interesting and lively session. It’s good to see how some engineers thinks of nice name for the different kinds of testing that they do. Ex: Bad neighborhood testing where we will make all other applications consume the CPU and memory and check how our application under test behaves. A simple testing but the name that was given was pretty cool.

Last one before the tea break, this session is on “Cognitive biases in testing” by Srikanth Krishnan, Senior Director from Oracle. He had chosen a very interesting topic and explained on how different parts of brain reacts to different scenarios/questions and how we should not fall for these traps while providing estimates for testing. A very nice real time examples were chosen which made the presentation very attractive. I will just mention one example – You decided to buy a pen which is 600 rupees in a particular shop. You then heard that the same exact pen is sold for 500 rupees in another shop which is a five minute walk from the first shop. What will you do? The majority answered saying that they go to the second shop. Now you are planning to buy a Coat which is 5000 rupees and you heard that another shop which is a five minute walk from the first shop is selling the same coat for 4900 rupees. What will you do? Majority answered saying that they will buy in the first shop and won’t go the second one. It’s the same 100 rupees that we are saving, just the baseline changed which is changing our decisions. So never let some number influence your decision. There are many other amazing examples like this.

During the tea break, Microsoft had played videos of how future is going to be and how software does everything.

The last session of the day is from Kripanand, Founder and Director of See beyond technologies on “Testing in testing times”. His talk was focused on how the industry changed its track during the down time and how we adopted Agile and Exploratory testing methods. He talked very passionately about testing by taking nice examples. He proudly mentioned that he was a developer at the beginning and then moved to testing and is very proud to be in testing.

The conference ended with a Panel discussion on “Emerging trends in Software testing”. This was chaired by Ramesh Loganathan, VP and Product Head of Progress Software and the panelists are from Google, Imaginea and Deloitte. Before starting the discussion, Ramesh talked on how QA was focusing more and more on automation and what areas we can look at. He took a nice example of automating the process of analyzing code coverage results and linking them to the failed tests and narrowing down to the problematic code. A very interesting scenario to try it out. By this time, we crossed the time and so the hotel guys started dismantling the partitions and in the process making lot of sound (seems they want us to get out and so deliberately making loud noises).

Finally a very informative and professional conference. It's interesting to see that everyone is talking about Agile, about Code Coverage and about Center of Excellence groups which we are actively into. I wanted to write a lot more, detail on all examples but it’s hard to put it all here.