Test Common

Testhouse Wins Business of the Year

Testhouse, a Software Testing Consultancy has won the "Business of the Year" award for 2008 from the Docklands Business Club and The London Chamber of Commerce. The event, held at the Painted Hall in Greenwich, London was sponsored by Barclays Bank. Other notable winners on the night were Richard Gooding Chief Executive of London City Airport who won the Business Person of the Year and London Marriott for Costumer Focus in Business Award.

The sustained profitable growth of the business and references from clients and partners like HP, Microsoft, CSC and Premier Farnell were influences in the judges decision. The corporate social responsibility of Testhouse in supporting the local community and staff development also weighed their decision.

Testhouse focuses on Testing and Risk Mitigation of IT systems for medium to large companies and public sector bodies; Testhouse was established in February 2000 and has achieved 4000% growth since inception.

Prolifics, SemanticSpace Technologies and Arsin Corporation Team to Form SemanticSpace Group

SemanticSpace, global software solutions conglomerate based in Hyderabad, has acquired of Prolifics, a systems integrator specializing in IBM technologies based in New York.

Together Prolifics, SemanticSpace Technologies, and Arsin Corporation will operate as SemanticSpace Group, creating a new overall organization of 1500 employees with more than $100 million in revenue.

Prolifics will play a strategic role — providing leadership, as well as management of sales and marketing. Prolifics currently has 300 people but is expected to grow to 900 consultants both organically and by acquisition.

“We are particularly excited to bring Prolifics into the team,” stated Satya Bolli, CEO of SemanticSpace Technologies.

“We are at the beginning of a new era in the way applications are built,” said Nicolas Jabbour, CEO of Prolifics. “

“By combining the strengths of our three companies into a single provider that operates across three continents ” said Satya Bolli. “we can help our customers regardless of what time zone they’re in, or what language they speak. We look forward to working together as a team.”

Hyper-V Released by Microsoft

Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ: MSFT) has released Hyper-V, a hypervisor-based virtualization software product that is a key feature of Windows Server 2008. Hyper-V enables customers to reduce operating costs by consolidating workloads of underutilized server machines onto a smaller number of fully utilized machines. Fewer physical machines can lead to reduced costs through lower hardware, energy, and management overhead, plus the creation of a more manageable infrastructure.

“Virtualization has been too complicated and expensive for most organizations,” said Bill Hilf, general manager of the Windows Server Division at Microsoft. "Hyper-V will help customers consolidate IT systems."

“While evaluating Hyper-V, we’ve found it offers better support for running simultaneous operating systems, which helps us consolidate our applications that run on a variety of older software and servers," said Jason Nord, server engineer at Land O’Lakes Inc.

The guest operating systems Hyper-V supports includes Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2), Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, Windows Vista SP1 and Windows XP SP3. Host server and language support has been expanded to include the 64-bit (x64) versions of Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise and Datacenter, with English, German and Japanese language options available as well.

Elektrobit Releases EB Test Tool Platform

Elktrobit (EB), a company specializing in embedded software and hardware solutions for the wireless and automotive industries, has release a new testing tool. Called the EB Test Tool Platform, the product is based on the Testing and Test Control Notation 3 standard set by the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.

"What makes it unique is that the same set of tools can be used from simulation environments to product certification," says EB's Project Manager Asmo Saarela.

By adopting the Testing and Test Control Notation 3 standard, the Test Tool Platform can use public test suites created by organizations such as the WiMAX Forum, Open Mobile Alliance, and the Automotive Open System Architecture consortium.

Pay Per Defect Proposed by STC ThirdEye Technology

STC ThirdEye Technology is offering a new business model called “Pay Per Defect”. In this model, the company will gather client requirements and identify the type of testing required. They then will prepare a test specification document and create a simulated test user infrastructure.

In the next phase STC ThirdEye engineers will find GUI, functional and technical bugs. Company domain experts will review those defects before submitting them to the client. All the approved defects will be uploaded into the client's bug tracking system and will be released to the client as a deliverable. Defects will be tracked by:

• Defect ID
• Module ID
• Detected on Date
• Detected By
• Defect Description
• Expected Result
• Defect Status

as well as by severity, priority and category.

The company is charging $15 for each defect found irrespective of category. STC ThirdEye will also charge the same amount to retest each defect during the regression cycle.

Symbio Named One of Top China Offshore Software Development Companies

The Symbio Group was named one of the top 10 Offshore Software Development Outsourcing Vendors in China by IDC, in IDC's China Offshore Software Development 2008-2012 Forecast and Analysis report.

"We are honored to be selected as a top 10 software development outsourcing company by IDC," said Jacob Hsu, CEO of the Symbio Group.

In addition, the National Software and Integrated Circuit Public Services Platform of Ministry of Information Industry of China (CSIP) selected Symbio as a ChinaSourcing Top 20 ITO company. A national honor, the ChinaSourcing Top 20 ITO company selection, is organized by CSIP under the leadership of Ministry of Information Industry. Companies are selected based on their delivery capability, client satisfaction rating, scale as well as revenue from Information Technology Outsourcing services.

Founded in 1994 by a group of engineers from IBM, Symbio's customers include AOL, BMC, CA, IBM, Microsoft, Test Common and more than 300 other organizations. Symbio also manages more dedicated offshore centers for U.S. software companies than any other outsourcing company in China. For further information on Symbio, visit symbio-group.com or call 408-694-9601.

Justifiying the ROI on Agile

In an article on published on IBM's Developer Works site, Roger Dunn, the founder of SourceIQ, an Advanced IBM Business Partner, examined the return on investment organizations can expect using Agile development.

Specifically the article examined:

• Agile's potential to deliver Return on Investment (ROI)
• Agile's ability to drive down Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
• The importance of trust in making the business case for Agile

This article is a must read with anyone advocating the Agile approach to test and development.

Skytap to Exhibit at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference

Skytap, a provider of cloud-based solutions to test applications, will exhibit at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference June 23-24th at the Roosvelt Hotel in New York. Skytap’s virtual infrastructure and software platform provides services such as virtual infrastructure provisioning, monitoring management, security, remote access and collaboration, storage management, and reporting.

Skytap Virtual Lab is available as testing-as-a-service (TaaS). Skytap’s Virtual Lab offers organizations the ability to provision virtual labs in minutes, automate the set-up and tear-down of complex, multi-tiered environments, and better collaborate across globally distributed teams using shared infrastructure.

Skytap to Exhibit at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference

Skytap, a provider of cloud-based virtualizations to test applications, will exhibit at SYS-CON's Virtualization Conference June 23-24th at the Roosvelt Hotel in New York. Skytap’s virtual infrastructure and software platform provides services such as virtual infrastructure provisioning, monitoring & management, security, remote access and collaboration, storage management, and reporting. Skytap Virtual Lab is available as testing-as-a-service. Skytap’s Virtual Lab offers organizations the ability to provision virtual labs in minutes, automate the set-up and tear-down of complex, multi-tiered environments, and better collaborate across globally distributed teams using shared virtual infrastructure.

When Computing Clouds Roll in Will Your Career be in the Sun or the Shade?

Clouds are just a part of everyday life. Although most of us would prefer to live our lives under the sun at some point everyone lives under a cloud. Cloud computing is very different. It is poised to completely cover enterprise computing and at some point everyone in the field will have to come to terms with it, especially testers.

What is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing, grid computing, and utility computing are all related concepts to describe accessing remote computer resources owned by a third party and available on-demand. The idea is hardly new, but  the proliferation of high-speed Internet connections, cheaper and more powerful CPU chips, higher capacity disk storage and the development of data centers that house hundreds or thousands of computers have made it practical.

The reason it will someday be ubiquitous is cost. For business reasons companies like Yahoo, Salesforce.com, Google, and Amazon have built out enormous data centers to handle peak demand that mostly runs at a fraction of potential capacity. They are not alone. Most desktop computers sit idle most of the time.

This will change. Amazon.com already offers other companies access to its proven computer resources  though the Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) service.  EC2 users only pay for the capacity they use and have the ability to increase or decrease capacity within minutes.

A company which targets test environments even more closely is Skytap which provides virtualized machines and a pre-populated software library that includes different operating systems, databases and applications.

In any case as the computing cloud rolls in the role of tester in going to include creating test environments as well as finding faults and failures.