Data Center Migration / Cloud Infrastructure Enablement – Role of QA in an infrastructure intensive environment

Abstract: In the current fast paced technology world, there is a tremendous pressure to develop and deliver increasingly complex and high performing software solutions that meet user’s requirements in the shortest time, with high reliability and at a reduced cost. Given this challenge, there is tremendous pressure on integration, verification and validation activities to deliver results on time and within budget. The role of the QE organization and in particular the System Test teams are to ensure that software solutions deliver business value to their customers.  In addition to ensuring the functionality meets the design specifications, System Test teams must ensure the components are fully integrated, easy to use, highly reliable and adaptable as business needs change.

The System Test strategy involves multiple test methods and techniques performed throughout the software development life cycle. This workshop will cover an overview of System Test methodology and includes aspects of -

  • Customer use case based test approach – this section will explore the behavior of work flows based on actual customer use cases.
  • Scalability testing - will cover methodology for measuring capability to scale up or scale out and test beyond supported limits to confirm intended specifications are met.
  • Stress testing - through real and simulated workloads to measure system robustness, exercise concurrent operations, measure response time and system resource utilization, identify race conditions and, determine modes of failure under stressful conditions.
  • Uptime or longevity testing – to measure reliability, system performance under heavy usage and identify anomalies in the system.
  • Automation – methodologies on continuous automated testing in System Test to provide early and continuous feedback and, ensure that the quality does not regress during the release.

The goal of the workshop is to provide a forum for presenting and discussing system test methods, and ideas for future innovation in testing in a virtualized environment. Participants of this workshop learn and apply many of the test approaches and methods to their projects. They will also get a glimpse of innovative approaches to achieve scale testing. While software test automation can decrease the overall cost of testing and improve software quality, the focus is to provide early and continuous feedback, which in turn reduces the cost of addressing product issues.

‘Hosted Beta’ provides a unique interactive environment designed around typical customer use-case and business scenarios. Beta customers are "hands-on" with the latest technology, exercising workflows that relate to real-world issues. This workshop will provide a brief overview on how we ‘dog food’ our technology to not only showcase new features but seek to get early feedback on product features.

Target Audience:  

  • Software Quality Engineers
  • Software Developers
  • System Administrators, particularly those who use virtualization platform in their infrastructure

Prerequisites:

  • Minimum of 2 years of Software Test and/or development experience

Speaker's Profile

Suchitha

Suchitha Chetia,
Sr. Director - Quality Engineering,
VMware


Suchitha leads the vSphere System Test organization in the validation and verification of virtualization platform & vCloud Suite. Suchitha brings more than 20 years of experience as a software developer and quality assurance professional. She has led teams in the delivery of major software solutions in virtualization, networking, and web-based applications through all SDLC phases.

Prior to joining VMware, she was Director of Test Engineering organization at Brocade for embedded switch products, HBA and CNA adapters, mezzanine cards, and Brocade’s Manageability products.  At Brocade, she was involved in strategic partnership with OEMs (EMC, HP, IBM) at engineering levels for successful product qualifications, and drove process efficiencies through automation, test optimizations and infrastructure improvements. Suchitha held roles at Avaya and Netscape Communications. At Avaya, she was a developer in the  eCRM solutions team (for eCRM that routed, managed and reported on customer interaction across a variety of electronic media, including voice, e-mail and web). As part of Core Technology Java group at Netscape, she served as a technical QA lead for java on Windows platform, responsible for testing java support and implementation in Netscape Navigator.

In all her roles in product development, she has been actively engaged in defining test methodologies that encompassed multi-tiered test strategy with effective quality management processes, and facilitated comprehensive test coverage of features and functions in software, interoperability with various hardware and software components, with a testing focus that included functionality, reliability, availability, serviceability, performance, scalability and manageability of software solutions.