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Author Archives: Rajini Padmanaban

About Rajini Padmanaban

As Vice President, Testing Services and Engagements, Rajini Padmanaban leads the engagement management for some of QA InfoTech's largest and most strategic accounts. She has over fourteen years of professional experience, primarily in software quality assurance. Rajini advocates software quality through evangelistic activities including blogging on test trends, technologies and best practices. She is also a regular speaker in conferences run by SQE, QAI STC , UNICOM, EuroStar and has spoken at several webinars. Her writings are featured in TechWell, Sticky Minds, Better Software Magazine. She has co-authored a book on crowdsourced testing , and was most recently nominated for the Testing Leader of the Year award, by UNICOM. She can be reached at rajini.padmanaban@qainfotech.com

26 Oct, 2016

Functional testing goes hand in hand with other test attributes

Undoubtedly functional testing is one of the areas where the most quality budget it spent. It is often even synonymously looked at with manual testing though automated functional testing is a huge area of focus in recent times. Besides these, the larger connect that functional testing has with other testing attributes is increasingly visible by the day. Performance testing for example is often built on core functional scenarios. Security testing checks for vulnerabilities along functional workflow paths. Usability and Accessibility are strongly interlaced with functionality in ensuring the functionality and interfaces are rendered in the most intuitive manner, accessible to one and all. Localization checks are also largely centred on functionality. Within the functional workflows also, the tester should consider varied standpoints such as architectural functionality, end user focused functionality, competitor driven functionality etc. With all this diversity just within one segment of an application, functional testing is that one core attribute that brings in a binding connect with not just other attributes but also between them. For example, during an accessibility implementation, let’s say on the login page, we also need to consider if the login functionality’s security angle remains intact. This is a simple example of how functionality brings in the binding connect between security and accessibility.

26 Oct, 2016

Software Testing – a good candidate for shared services

In any organization while some services are provided vertically, some are provided in a shared model horizontally to make the most of the team’s capabilities, time thereby further enhancing the overall efficiency and productivity besides the reach and scale achieved. Specific to software QA and testing, certain attributes, especially the non-functional ones such as performance testing, security testing, test automation overall expertise around tools and frameworks, accessibility and usability testing have traditionally been good candidates for shared services. In certain teams, we have also been seeing the overall software testing itself including the functional aspects being extended as a shared service. This model has its pros and cons. Pros are primarily around a common/centralized test process, visibility for quality across teams, standardized test KRAs and metrics, easier adoption for new tools and technologies, good and in-depth knowledge of products across teams, better integration scenarios, better utilization of testers etc. On the flip side, the cons are around, packed and sometimes conflicting schedules, lack of tester availability at certain crucial times, compromised quality across products for the sake of accommodating all of them, lack of comparative processes between teams that can encourage a healthy competition etc. These are again not pros and cons that will apply as is to all teams. What is a con to one may actually be a pro to another based on how the team is structured and what its requirements are. Even if they are not a shared service in the truest model, a test center of excellence can be setup to cross share knowledge, resources and testers, tools etc. as warranted.

05 Sep, 2016

Data Analytics Using xAPI

Rajini Padmanaban
Blogs
Tags: data analytics, elearning, LRS, xAPI
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xAPI provides a simple way to store and retrieve learning records and learner experience profiles. Once all data is collected in a data store like LRS (Learning Record Store), it can be analyzed and converted into actionable insights. If you are interested in xAPI based LRS solution and/or want to add data analytics functionality in your eLearning application, the webinar we hosted recently, the recording for which is available here, will be very useful. Herein we cover an overview to xAPI, our experiences with Tin Can / xAPI and LRS through a short demo and our perspective with different LRSs we have experimented with. Do reach out to us if you are looking at a customized data solution and we would be happy to discuss more.

24 Aug, 2016

Big Data in the e-Learning Domain

ELearning has undoubtedly gained popularity in the last decade. It is not restricted to any specific domain or age group of users. While enough is talked about in the industry about commercial and open source e-Learning solutions, learning and content management systems (LMS/CMS), one space that is just beginning to be noticed is the use of big data in e-Learning. The volumes of data that the learning industry processes and the impact of such data in enhancing the effectiveness of the imparted learning sessions are all significant enough that this practice deserves special attention of its own.

24 Aug, 2016

The Encouraging Atmosphere in the Selenium Test Automation Conference

Rajini Padmanaban
Blogs
Tags: automation, selenium, Selenium Test Automation
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Open source has revolutionized the way software is developed, tested and used amongst the user base and has built a positively re-assuring community in how we collaborate and deliver. While all of this has been a remote working culture for me, it was very encouraging to have recently been a part of the Selenium Test Automation conference in Bangalore. I have been to several conferences thus far, and while some continue to be very well thought through and professionally run, the Selenium Test Automation conference in itself was a differently welcoming experience for me. The overall proposal submission and selection process was very transparent and collaborative. I was there to speak on a non-technical but important topic for software testers on test prioritization – my recording from the session is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZpE-W6yNK4

29 Jul, 2016

Building a niche in today’s offshore QA testing services

Access to talent and reduced cost of operations were two main go-to factors for ISVs in deciding on offshore QA testing services in the past. This situation has changed quite rapidly in the recent years, thanks to the ever-increasing requirements from the quality discipline in the agile delivery model. DevOps has in certain cases merged the quality function with developers, made everything think of and embrace quality in possible ways, and made testers re-think and re-define their roles in drastic ways. With the overall changing landscape, offshore quality testing services providers are now forced to build a niche in their offerings to continue to remain competitive in what they do. At our end for example, automation continues to be an ever-increasing focus area where we are empowering even the non-programmers to take on test automation (both at coverage and productivity levels), through easy to adopt open source and in-house enhanced test frameworks. We are extending such frameworks to take up more than core functional automation, moving into non-functional test areas too. Other non-functional test attributes such as accessibility, usability, linguistic testing are all attributes we have been extending and enhancing our offerings on.

29 Jul, 2016

Enhancing a tester’s efficiency through data analytics

As testers we often think about what new products we need to be prepared to test for – especially as new technologies enter the market, ramping ourselves for such new areas, what tools to use to test them, how to accommodate all of them in a short agile test cycle are all things the testing group is very focused on. However, we often miss the meta point, that as testers we not only need to learn to test for them, but also leverage them to build on our efficiency in possible areas. For example, in the last couple of years, we at QA InfoTech have been talking about how to enhance a tester’s efficiency using Augmented Reality – we have a full webinar on this topic, too. Extending the same principles to data analytics, a tester can benefit from this discipline if the right practices are used in optimizing the test effort.

12 Jul, 2016

The Varied Facets of Content QA

In the world of quality assurance, traditionally the focus has been on functional test areas. Of late the non-functional areas of performance, security, accessibility, usability and the like are also growing in importance. However, one area that is silently gaining the prominence it deserves is content quality assurance. What really is content QA and what are some of its facets are what we will talk about in this article, given that this is one area we specialize in at QA InfoTech. While content QA may appear simple, it has a lot of inherent challenges mainly due to data collation from various locations, volumes of content that needs to be processed, and the core issue of lack of solid subject matter experts as and when you need them to verify the content. In this article, we talk about some of the main areas to cover in content QA to build a comprehensive test strategy – not all of these can be done by functional testers, which requires additional planning upfront to ensure non-functional, part-time testers and consultant subject matter experts are available when we need them. In the list below, we talk about varied aspects of content QA in increasing complexity, from implementation and availability of testers’ standpoints.

12 Jul, 2016

MicroServices Testing

While we typically have internally written blogs, this time around we have an additional blog contributed by an external author, Satish Kumar, who heads quality assurance group at HomeShop18 – Satish’s profile is available at the end of this blog post – this is in addition to our ongoing series of monthly blogs.

What is MicroService?

Traditionally, applications have housed all functionality in one single process. Then came an era of SOA (Service oriented architecture). The latest in this series is the concept of MicroServices. I have tried to summarize the concept of Microservices in this article, from a tester’s point of view.

MicroServices architecture offers a suite of services, like in distributed software systems. Each MicroService is a standalone software module that provides a specific set of capabilities; they can each be scaled, managed and deployed independently. A collection of MicroServices builds a logical system which internally communicates to each other across the network through a gateway; a well-defined set of rules and contracts are typically used to deliver logical functionality.

27 Jun, 2016

A wholesome test strategy to ensure WCAG compliance

Web Accessibility to promote usage by one and all, including people with disabilities, is no longer a nice-to-take-on task. It is being increasingly demanded for by end users and mandated by universal standards and governmental regulations. Testing for web accessibility is a growing area gaining momentum in the non-functional testing bucket. Given the number of web standards to adopt and testing tools that are available, is there a single wholesome strategy to adopt to ensure an application’s readiness for its end users from an accessibility angle?

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