Sunday 19 April 2015

A Career in Software Testing

If you want to be a part of a dynamic and booming industry, then you might want to look at software testing as a career option.

The dynamic Indian IT industry has always lured the brightest minds with challenging career options. Students are also attracted to this field because, apart from getting international exposure, the earnings are usually higher. They also get the satisfaction of being a part of something that could possibly shape the future.
One such career option is software testing. Initially, software testing and software development went hand in hand, but now it has emerged as a specialized discipline in itself. The role of a software tester is crucial as they are trained to pick out flaws, if any, in the software. They test the software using various parameters to determine its ease of use, and flow of operation. They check the software for bugs and also determine whether it meets the business and technical requirements. This then helps the developers to iron out even the minutest of errors and save themselves from the embarrassment of a software failure due to a minor flaw.
The growth prospects are tremendous. As per Gartner Forecast, the industry will be worth $50 million with forecasted CAGR of 14 percent through 2014. According to Asheesh Raina, Principal Research Analyst, Gartner, “Organizations today have rapid cycles of change on the business front. Software testing is increasingly recognized as the cornerstone of supporting rapidly changing business conditions, making organizations more agile. Testing is important for India because it has a large ecosystem of IT service providers. Poor quality standards will have substantial strategic implications for IT service providers. In a few years, the enterprise, IT organizations and service providers will be distinguished by their quality capabilities (encompassing process and service management). Their position in the top tier will be substantially due to their quality capabilities and failure in that will lead to downtrend.”
Professionally trained software testers are in great demand and sought after in the industry. You can either become part of an independent software testing company or join an internal software testing department in a leading firm. We spoke with Vipul Kocher, President of the Indian Testing Board (ITB), to determine the potential of software testing as career.

Google's Desktop OS

In case you haven't noticed, Google now has its well-funded mitts on just about every aspect of computing. From Web browsers tocell phones, soon you'll be able to spend all day in the Googleverse and never have to leave. Will Google make the jump to building its own PC operating system next?
What is it? It's everything, or so it seems. Google Checkout provides an alternative to PayPal. Street View is well on its way to taking a picture of every house on every street in the United States. And the fun is just starting: Google's early-beta Chrome browser earned a 1 percent market share in the first 24 hours of its existence. Android, Google's cell phone operating system, is hitting handsets as you read this, becoming the first credible challenger to the iPhone among sophisticated customers.
When is it coming? Though Google seems to have covered everything, many observers believe that logically it will next attempt to attack one very big part of the software market: the operating system.
The Chrome browser is the first toe Google has dipped into these waters. While a browser is how users interact with most of Google's products, making the underlying operating system somewhat irrelevant, Chrome nevertheless needs an OS to operate.
To make Microsoft irrelevant, though, Google would have to work its way through a minefield of device drivers, and even then the result wouldn't be a good solution for people who have specialized application needs, particularly most business users. But a simple Google OS--perhaps one that's basically a customized Linux distribution--combined with cheap hardware could be something that changes the PC landscape in ways that smaller players who have toyed with open-source OSs so far haven't been quite able to do.