STeP-IN Conference 2013

STeP-IN forum has been organizing an annual event called SUMMIT and this year it will be the 10th such conference. Feel privileged to share with you all that I will be delivering a plenary talk in this conference. STeP-IN stands for Software Test Practitioners, India. STeP-IN SUMMIT 2013 is the largest software testing conference in Asia-Pacific region. In this year’s International Conference on Software Testing, the organizers have tried to create exciting takeaways for everyone – from the enthusiastic fresh minds in the industry to the seasoned techie to the experienced leader to know deeper industry insights and there by to find answers to the ever changing industry challenges. Conference theme for this year is “Next Generation Testing: Learning from the past; Preparing for the future”, keeping in mind the evolution of Software Testing into a sophisticated discipline over the last two decades while acknowledging the fact that the Post-PC era is challenging old paradigms and methods of working. STeP-IN SUMMIT 2013 endeavours to extract the best from past learning while focusing on new technologies, models and methodologies to address current challenges. The topic that I am going to talk about is called “Test Driven Development – Agility in Testing!“. If you are curious to know about the abstract of my presentation, here it is for you:

In the current trend of agile product development models, it is very much required to ship faster without compromising on the quality of deliverable. As time is an important factor, conventional testing methodologies need to evolve to cope up with the change. Testing teams may not have the liberty of going through traditional mode of product certification. In most of the companies, gone are the days of test strategies, plans, test cases covering functional, non-functional aspects and more. The set of questions which keeps coming back is ‘how late can the changes be absorbed in to product and how soon can those be shipped to production?’. That means a shift in paradigm in the way we currently test and certify. Testing need not start with dedicated quality engineering or the so-called QA teams. The intent here is to provide emphasis on how agile teams can think through innovative ways of solving industry wide challenges of shorter test cycles. A way to solve this is by focusing on the good old method of divide and conquers. If the product development team can focus on writing a great quality code, lesser the number of defects that pass on to test cycles. In the testing phase, QE teams can focus primarily on integration and non-functional testing which maximize the value of true Agile teams. Test Driven Development is a software development practice in which unit test cases are incrementally written prior to code implementation. This results in better code coverage, simpler design and less prone to defects. While development teams strive for a systematic way of writing tests before the actual coding, the benefits of this process are of multitude effects. The key take away is a thorough understanding of the process.

This plenary talk will have something for every professional to take some strong notes though it is mainly targeted towards budding professionals up to 3 years of experience. You can go through rest of the conference agenda and to know how to be part of this event, visit the official STeP-IN SUMMIT 2013 website.