'Our tool helps testers to become productive'

BANGALORE, INDIA: As we witness the boom of software testing industry in India, more and more companies are offering custom-made solutions in the testing arena to their customers.

In an interaction with CIOL, Sidharth Malik, senior director, Microsoft Developer Platform Business — DPE shared his views on the emerging market of software, role of software testers and software developers and the best practices that one has to follow to roll out a successful project. Excerpts:

CIOL: Can you throw light on what Microsoft is doing in the software testing arena?



Sidharth Malik: Microsoft’s portfolio of testing solutions caters to both the early-phase and late-phase testing segments. With regards to early-phase or white-box testing, we have unit testing, code coverage, static analysis and performance analysis tools integrated into Visual Studio, which ensures that the developers write code that meets the quality criteria set by their organizations.

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With regards to the late-phase or black-box testing, we have tools that cater to manual, functional and performance testing activities. Additionally, our lab management solution helps the testing teams to quickly create the necessary test rigs required to test their applications in different environments and configurations. One of the uniqueness of our test solution is the seamless integration we provide between each of these different phases of the testing activities.

CIOL: Can you share more details about your Integrated Test Environment, Microsoft Test Manager 2010?



SM: Microsoft Test Manager 2010 (MTM) specifically targets the generalist testing or manual testing activities, which today comprises around 65 per cent of the overall testing activities in the industry. Unfortunately, there weren’t any specialized tools catering to this segment of the testing population.

Also read: Software testing plays a remedial role in the SDLC

Microsoft has filled this gap through MTM, which provides an integrated environment for test case management, requirements and bug tracking, execution of manual test cases and managing your lab environments. The ability to convert these manual test cases to automated test scripts hugely improves the productivity of the manual testers.

CIOL: How does your product help software testers, VB developers to improve productivity?



SM: We help manual testers to automate their testing activities and help the developers to fix bugs quickly or reduce their debugging efforts through our products. Just to elaborate on this point, our tools help the testers to become productive by automating their manual testing activities, which otherwise would have involved re-execution of the manual test steps over and over again.

Secondly, when the testers execute the test cases, we collect a lot of information on the test runs through the data collectors that we provide in our tools. Hence, when a bug is logged by the tester, the VB developer in this case can quickly get deeper insights into the origin of this bug in order to go and fix this problem quickly.

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CIOL: Collaboration between testers and developers is a big concern for any project manager. What are the best ways to make the developer—tester relationship healthy?

SM: Seamless flow of information between the testers and the developers is extremely vital to remove the walls that exist today between the roles in a team. Typically when a bug is filed by the testers, in most cases the developer sends this bug back to the tester citing that they cannot reproduce this problem in their environment.

This is a classic problem that most teams today encounter. Our tools tackle this problem through flow of information seamlessly between the teams. For example, we have introduced a bunch of data collectors that the testers can enable during their test runs. These data collectors include the ability to capture actions, take video recording, capture event logs, take environment snapshots, etc.

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All of this information is collected automatically in the background without the tester having to do anything additional. Hence, when a bug is filed by the tester all this rich information is packaged and sent across as part of the bug, which effectively helps the developer to reproduce the problem and fix the bug quickly.

CIOL: What are the main challenges that software testers face?

SM: A few of the key problems faced by the industry today include:

* Lack of good tools for manual testers, which comprises around 65 per cent of the testing market

* Inability to collect the right information as part of the test runs to file rich bugs

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* Getting the hardware to create test rigs for their testing purposes

* Integrated toolsets that help flow information between the testers and the developers 

* Expensive tools for performance testing

CIOL: What are the best practices that a developer and tester should follow to accomplish successful projects?



SM: Focus on quality upstream will help reduce the number of bugs flowing into the downstream - this includes the development teams incorporating quality best practices like Test Driven Development, ensuring code coverage meets certain benchmarks and conduct static analysis.

All of this ensure that the code meets certain quality criteria before being sent to the down-stream testing teams. As a black-box tester, it is important that we file rich bugs that include as much information as possible — be it video recordings of the test runs, snapshots, environment information, log files, etc. — back to the development teams to ensure that they have the right information with them to quickly fix the bugs in the application. 

CIOL: How do you see the future of software testing industry in India?



SM: India has created a niche for itself in the software testing space. This has led to a huge spurt in the outsourcing of software testing to India. Testing services is the fastest growing segment within most of the SIs. Today, we are playing a role in all aspects of software testing — security, SOA, banking, embedded, etc.

There is a huge requirement for testers in the industry and we can see this trend trickling right down to the new hires from the academic institutions. We see increasing productivity and quality while reducing costs as the key driving factors in this segment. That’s where software testing tools would play a big role.