Michael Hackett – Senior Vice President of LogiGear Corporation and Editor-in-Chief of LogiGear Magazine, on change and software testing.
Change is constant. What’s different today is the rate of change. Moore’s law resulted from the observation that the rate of change in computing power is exponential. The products, services, and software landscape appear just as dynamic. At the same time, we pretty much take for granted the ubiquitous presence of software running our lives and the convenience it brings.
From medical devices to toasters, everything is run by software, and more software with logic capability is being deployed. The technologies landscape too is shifting – the Cloud, SaaS, virtualization, cross-platform/non-platform specific mobile apps to HTML5.
Many commentators on technology today state that the PC is dead. How will this impact software development and how can test teams be best prepared for this new landscape? For starters, testing cannot remain the same. Software development today is more agile, less documented faster, and even more distributed – but that is the last decade’s news. Testing has lagged software development but the future demands the lag must be reduced exponentially. This doesn’t mean that as testers we are behind the curve, there are teams already running tens of thousands of automated tests on hundreds of virtual environments against daily builds. Not all teams will need the same level of scale, but their methods and processes will need the same level of sophistication.
Read more from LogiGear Magazine’s issue on the Rapidly Changing Testing Landscape.
Michael is a Certified Scrum Master and has co-authored two books on software testing. Testing Applications on the Web: Test Planning for Mobile and Internet-Based Systems (Wiley, 2nd ed. 2003), available in English, Chinese and Japanese, and Global Software Test Automation (HappyAbout Publishing, 2006). He is a founding member of the Board of Advisors at the University of California Berkeley Extension and has taught for the Certificate in Software Quality Engineering and Management at the University of California Santa Cruz Extension. As a member of IEEE, his training courses have brought Silicon Valley testing expertise to over 16 countries."