Keynote Address:

Trends in Testing – Synergizing Developers, Testers, Customers and End-Users

In any IT organization, the developers deliver the structural (code) value, the test engineers provide behavioral value (qualitative) but it is always the customer who sets the real expectations (explicit or implicit) that everyone should meet. These expectations from the customers are normally the super set of what developers and testers want in the product, added with a few ambiguous expectations that are set by the so called industry trends (e.g. cloud) and buzzwords. Model based testing, TDD, Agile and test refactoring are a few of the models/methodologies which are less understood but heavily expected by the customers. Added to the above, the industry is now moving towards catching up with End-User behavioural patterns and expectations. While we can do whatever our customer says, the fact remains that sometimes, the customer also misses things that an end user expects.

Quality this way remains undefined and hence it is important to look at quality from four angles (if not more) from developer, tester, customer and End-user perspectives and correlate the methodologies in those four dimensions. It is also important to understand and map “what aspect of Quality” gets improved “by what method/technique/model” and create a dictionary of terms/buzzwords for the testing community to understand and appreciate. This keynote address takes a first step towards this objective and tries to explain some future trends in a much easier way so that it can be understood by most.

About Srinivasan

Srinivasan

Srinivasan Desikan,
Worldwide Portfolio, Offering and Capability Management – Testing & Quality Assurance, HP Enterprise Services

Srinivasan Desikan is the author of a best-seller, “Software Testing – Principles and Practices”, which is being used by more than 50 universities across the world with more than 45000 copies sold.

He has been part of large testing and product-development teams, and has been in the field of software testing since 1989. He has occupied a variety of technical and management positions on Testing at Novell, Wipro, Talisma, Siebel and Agile Software for over two decades.

He currently works for Global portfolio management of Testing with HP Enterprise services. He has vast experience in the areas of test automation, test management, test processes and in setting up test teams from scratch. He has delivered talks on testing at international conferences both in India and abroad, such as QAI-India, ASIASTAR-2002 (Melbourne, Australia), PSQT/PSTT-2003 (Washington, USA), STeP-IN, CSI, BCIC, IEEE, STEP-Auto, SPIN (Chennai), ICCA (Pondicherry). He has more than 25 technical publications with magazines such as CTO Forum, PCQuest, Express Computer, CSI and SEA Software. He has received one of the biggest engineering awards “Employee of the Year-1999″ at Novell for setting up the system test team and lab from scratch. He is the recipient of Testing thought leadership award from “test2008” for his services to the industry and academia on Testing.

A holder of two patents on Regression testing and white box testing, he serves HRD of Govt India (Pedagogy) for curriculum development and Advisory member of various universities/colleges that include GRG Institutions, Coimbatore and K.S.R College of Engineering (Autonomous), Tiruchengode.