An Experience Report from India

I don’t know how this slipped in under my radar, but it did until a couple of days ago.

Sharath Byregowda is a software tester in Bangalore, and he provides a marvelous experience report here. As I read the report, I’m delighted on a number of levels.

First, it’s India! India tends to be a very conservative place when it comes to testing, with many test organizations preferring scripted, document-heavy, bureaucratic and clerical approaches. Not that it would have been their idea, necessarily. A lot of Indian testers are smarter than that, but many test organizations there find themselves obliged to follow the testing missions set by companies here in the West.

If finding important problems quickly is the goal, those approaches don’t work very well. They focus on repetition, confirmation, validation, and verification. Those things are important, to be sure, but one would think that an organization that was aware of potential problems would do everything in its power to thwart those problems before the code left the shop. Why lengthen the feedback loop? If I were running a development group, I would try to make sure that my outsource lab would be in a position to tell me only things that would surprise me.

Second, Sharath is a devotee of the Rapid Testing approach. Sharath took a Rapid Software Testing course through the Edista Testing Institute in Bangalore. The course was presented by Pradeep Soundararajan, who is in turn a student of me and of James Bach.

Third, Sharath is a graduate of the Black Box Software Testing Foundations course. That course was co-authored by Cem Kaner and James Bach. It’s under continuous development, and each session is strongly influenced by the interaction between participants themselves. That’s remarkable since the course is delivered entirely online. (It’s available free to members of the Association for Software Testing.)

Fourth, I’m delighted that Sharath is blogging about his actual experiences working with actual clients. That’s important. Often our clients (or the testers who work for them) are sometimes reluctant to have people go public because…well, because Rapid Testing finds a lot of problems quickly, and no one really likes talking about problems.

Michelle Smith, another Rapid Testing student, has also provided a great experience report on how she trains testers. You can read it here, and you can read James Bach’s response here.

Well done, Sharath! Well done, Michelle!