Testing, a widespread validation approach in the Software industry, has still remained expensive, ad hoc and unpredictably effective. With software architectures moving from monolithic to service oriented, testing needs to keep up with this natural progression and go beyond the usual rubicon functional and performance testing.

With complex ecosystems evolving and businesses asking IT to not just deliver on time but also reliable software, mere functionality testing would be inadequate to provide good coverage “Reliability would be a far fetched dream”. Moreover, applying traditional testing methods to complex systems would imply larger costs. To resolve this, testing needs to expand it's horizons into newer dimensions: from specification based to model based, to pattern based on one hand and from automated to continuous on the other.

Testing needs to be done faster, cheaper and needs to move up the business development cycle shifting the paradigm from a “repent and repair” to “prevent and prepare”. It might be prudent to begin the quest for a “universal test theory”!

The presentation will have a broad based view on the following topics via a business case : Indian product and application testing market; market overview; market drivers; market restraints; market challenges; revenue forecasts; demand analysis – by service offering; demand analysis – by verticals; demand analysis – by countries; qualitative trends in the market.

This presentation asserts that the secret to assembling a successful software testing team is not hiring high performers alone but instead, ensuring that team members have diverse strengths and skill sets . It describes desirable characteristics for building high performance testing teams through appropriate positioning, organizing , skilling, relationship with stakeholders and performance measurement aspects. The importance of getting the testing team to shift the mindset from 'Quality Measurement' to 'Quality Management', from 'Reactive Quality Proving' to 'Proactive Quality Improving', from 'Downstream Subcontractor' to 'Upstream Co-maker' and from 'Development Driven' to 'Customer Focused' testing is also discussed. The presentation examines some specific characteristics that set high-performance test teams apart. The talk concludes by highlighting that a combination of environment, characteristics, leadership and hard work makes high performance teams.

The success of an outsourced product testing effort is a function of a number of factors, not all of which are easily measurable. Traditional metrics used for this, have usually focused on objective attributes such as 'productivity per tester' but have generally ignored more subjective factors such as 'quality of communication between client and vendor teams'. This paper describes a methodology used at Aztecsoft named ‘Service Measurement Methodology’ that seeks to address these shortcomings of traditional approaches. We outline limitations of traditional approaches and describe the “Test Quality Index (TQI)”, a metric that addresses many of these limitations.

Over the past few years we have collected large quantities of data to test the efficacy of the approach described here. He concludes by presenting this data and comparing the efficacy of our approach with that of traditional approaches such as “Customer Satisfaction Index”.

Amount of experience in particular roles, technical expertise in the required technologies - the evaluation of these type of factors during the interview process is usually based on the project context, which the interview panel in the organization understands best. Additionally, in order to build a high performance test team, there are some traits that reflect a mindset, the persona which has to be evaluated as well. One of the approaches to do this is to evaluate responses to questions whose answers require analysis of practical contradictions that we face in the testing life cycle.
Few examples of these type of contradictions faced at various levels and roles include

•	Quality of product vs. Risk of losing time to market
•	Requirement to do complete testing vs. Impossibility of doing complete testing
•	Attention to detail vs. Looking at the big picture
•	An hands-on approach vs. Not being able to be hands-on
•	Working on assumptions vs. Requirement for clarity

The contradiction matrix and 40 principles of TRIZ can provide valuable insights to come up with solutions for these type of contradictions. TRIZ is a Russian acronym for "Theory of Inventive Problem Solving," which was developed by Genrich Altshuller and his colleagues in the former USSR starting in 1946.

There are no right or wrong answers, however, mapping the responses to the principles corresponding to the contradictions can help us identify and fit personalities better. This presentation is about an interviewing approach involving questions based on contradictions and identifying mindsets based on the responses. This approach is work in progress and every interview provides us with an insight to refine the process and add to the various question and response bank.

Pradeep Chennavajjuala has over 12 years of experience in the areas of Project Management and System Development in the business sectors of Information Technology and Manufacturing.

At QAI, his focus areas of research and consulting were Requirement Management, Software Estimation, Software Project Management and Software Testing. He was responsible for the conceptualization and development of centers of excellence in the technical areas of Project Management, Testing and Software Engineering.

Prior to joining QAI, he was associated with Planetasia, Zee Telefilms, KPMG Worldwide, American Express Bank – TRS and Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani. As part of his career, he worked with academic institutions at Penn State and BITS, Pilani as their faculty member for Management, Systems Engineering and Software Engineering. As part of his research, he has co-authored a paper titled “Requirement Engineering and Estimation in e-COM Application Development”. The paper was accepted for presentation at the International SEPG Conference held at Bangalore, India in February 2001.He is a post-graduate in Management Systems from Penn State University, USA; a graduate in Production Engineering & Marketing from BITS, Pilani; and a Certified Software Tester (CSTE) from QAI, USA. In addition, he holds a certification on Oracle ERP Applications from Oracle Corporation, USA.