Featured Interview: Ashwin Palaparthi, Testers Desk

Ashwin Palaparthi started career in 1992, at the age of 14, spent 7 years in running a local courier/logistics business in Guntur, Andhra Pradesh, India; and then entered IT incidentally. Self taught programming and served as an IT trainer for 3 years. Served as a technical architect at a product startup for a brief period to build a J2EE product. He then spent over 5 years at AppLabs, both in US and India, handling technology solutions and presales in Software Testing. Managed several complex testing projects while at AppLabs and architected customized test harnesses for its clientele. Left AppLabs while serving as an AVP/Principal Architect to found ValueMinds. He builds www.TestersDesk.com at ValueMinds and also consults/trains on special areas in Software Testing like Advanced Tools in Testing, Test Design, SOA/Web Services Testing, Custom Testing Tools and Security Testing. His mission is to exploit software technology in testing of software technology, and is currently focused on Test Design. Ashwin is deeply passionate about Product Innovation, Test Engineering, Software Architecture, Teaching and Music (he composed for a Telugu Indie Album recently titled Nuvvo Kala that sold over 6000 copies).

How and when did you get the idea of Testersdesk.

While at AppLabs, having exposure on several testing problems, I started writing a book on how to use technology in building utilities for Test Design, Test Data Generation, Test Diagnosis and Validation etc, primarily concentrating on things not broadly addressed by major test management and automated test execution tools. Midway through the writing of the book, I found a clear need of translating all the work into a working product, as opposed to keeping it as some pages of text. Hence ValueMinds/TestersDesk.com.

Tell us more about Testersdesk and the effort that went into making it happen.

TestersDesk.com has a FREE Online Community Edition today. We released version 0.1 an year ago (19th Feb 2008), and version 1.0 yesterday (27th March 2009). The free edition implements almost 25% of our roadmap. It has a Test Design Toolkit with tools to reduce and select test cases, a Test Data Generation Toolkit to generate different types of test inputs, and a Miscellaneous Toolkit with OS-level system information scripts etc. When I started I thought I will be able to build version 1.0 in 8 months, but the common startup mistakes and problems made it take more than two years to bring it out. Analyze this- if TestersDesk.com itself does not have reasonable quality, it then does not gain eligibility to serve the testing community, so you can now imagine what went into making it happen.

How can a Tester use Testersdesk and how will it impact his performance?

First, we accelerate testing activities and do not replace any of them. Today, there are nice tools for accelerating test execution, and also to manage the test process aspects like reporting and defect tracking. What TestersDesk.com does is a huge value addition to the design and data generation activities. I will provide some examples (since there is no visible/direct mapping between what TestersDesk.com does and the general stages in testing lifecycle):
- A test engineer has 10000+ possibilities of executing a test with different combinations of values from its Test Parameters, and is looking for a proven way to reduce them
- A test engineer has to select all possible ways where 5 values can be selected from 7 calendar days
- A test engineer has to enter 10000 e-mail IDs to test pagination features in an app
- A test engineer wants to generate a 100 MB file with Alphanumeric characters and test the upload functionality
- A test engineer wants to gather a list of all installed software programs on the test machine, so that it can be included in the bug report

Welcome to www.TestersDesk.com !

We do all of the above to help the tester. So we are basically a singular online platform with focus on Design and Data needs.

Please tell us about the Awards that TestersDesk won?

When the working prototype was released an year ago, we nominated for and won the “Best Innovation of the Year” award from HYSEA. Mr. Som Mittal, President, NASSCOM handed over the award while Ernst and Young audited the selection process. The panel of judges liked the fact that we are consolidating so many small and big ideas into a single working solution. A few months ago, we got the Test Thought Leadership award at Test2008, an international testing conference held at Delhi, India. Also, we were among the shortlisted 30 startups at the prestigious TATA NEN Hottest Startup awards, in which there were 600+ nominees. These awards were/are certainly the fuel in sustaining these tough times, and basically endorse the value in our vision. We are so thankful to them all.

Is there any contribution members of Test Republic can do to Testers Desk?

Sure. To begin with, I heartily request the members to register, read this article to discover ways how TestersDesk.com can be useful to them, and start using in ways it makes sense. After all, it is the community that can make or break the success of our community edition! For example, a Test Manager who sees any value in www.TestersDesk.com can make his team use the tool where needed. An expert consultant can evangelize the tool in increasing productivity on mundane activities in testing and so on… I believe that the word community is all about contribution, so what we have contributed is a community edition of our product, and it is now the community that can contribute to its success. In the sub-forum provided to us in Test Republic, they can always write stories of how they used the toolkit and what their experiences are. There is a serious problem we are dealing with in spreading the usage scenarios of the toolkit. I know some of the members in Test Republic are seasoned and famous citizens of the testing community. While I do not ask them to do marketing for TestersDesk.com, I certainly request them to throw in a link to the toolkit with a one liner or two in their blogs, write comments in our product blog etc. And should any of them want to get in touch with me for any new tools, ideas, collaboration, strategic partnership; I am reachable at ap at testersdesk.com.

Any message to members of Test Republic

Thanks for asking me to deliver a message to the members. Wait a minute, actually I have three things to say-

1. This is more oriented to freshers in testing; Let a tool do what it can. Nothing is perfect in this world, but when we are on a project to quickly make something perfect, it is OK to use tools to let them do what they can, while our brains just focus on what they are good at. For example, our brains are not good at ordering the central nervous system to type 1000 e-mail IDs in an editor in the correct format. A tool does that better. Now the task for the brain is to use that data in exercising different ideas on the application under test. So, the message is that toolsmith thinking makes only a clever tester who then amalgamates thoughts, principles, postulates, techniques, and tools to help deliver the ‘promise’ of information technology.

2. Salute to all of you for being that part of the world which helps deliver the ‘promise’ of information technology. The promise that it does not just deliver something but what it delivers is ‘value’.

3. Looking back at the 10 years of my IT career, I feel bad for not being part of any forums. It takes a great deal of social maturity to create a forum, or be an active member of a forum. Looking at the discussions in TR, I find a good trend formulated by the diversity of ‘discussions’ as opposed to the help-center style posts like ‘what is xyz testing?’. So, I would only say please continue what you have started to do. I will join you too, so in a way I am saying this to myself.

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Here is one enterpreneur who deserves all the acclaim for having spent huge effort in contributing to the testing community. Three cheers to Ashwin and we wish him all the best in his efforts to take TestersDesk to the world as an Indian innovation. Lets try and support TestersDesk in whatever way we can. Please await a TR Review of TesterDesk. Keep watching this space.

TestersDesk discussions can be seen here

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