Software Testing: Line By Line

University of Limerick

There was an IEEE conference in July, hosted at the University of Limerick.
International Conference on Global Software Development/Engineering

http://www.icgse.org/

I gave a tutorial on the current state of testing: Testing Teams in Globalized Software Development. There was an inquisitive group and we had a fun session. Globally, testing is not often valued as highly as it is in Silicon Valley. People were interested to see a different perspective on testing.
The conference was focused on offshoring development and not on testing. My focus was special topics in testing: various responsibilities in testing and quality, agile projects, offshoring test automation, offshore team skill building.

The most interesting thing about this conference for me was the presentation of research on various topics in offshore development. Most of the research and papers presented were from empirical research done by the university academics. There were no “best practice” or opinion papers. Researchers presented results, surveys, facts and findings. Where there were opinions, they were called opinions or possible conclusions.

There were few industry researchers. The few there were came from global development and offshoring giants like Siemens, Nokia, IBM and Bosch.

People were interested when I told them we have an office in Vietnam. No one had any experience in Vietnam. People asked questions about doing business there.
Most of the presenters at this conference were European and the “global” nature of development experience dealt primarily with Russia, Romania, Poland, Ukraine and other eastern European outsource locations with smaller percentages going to India and China.

Obviously, quite different from the predominant US locations for outsourcing- India and China.

This same conference will be in America for the first time next year, in Princeton New Jersey. I may try and present a paper or a tutorial.