Playing Catch-Up With This Week's Report
Stories Columns Opinions Resources
Preflight builds spread wings for smoother projects
Developers are increasingly turning to preflight builds, allowing them to experiment with ...
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Coverity creates program to enforce code adherence
The Architecture Analyzer uses mapping technology from the company's Software DNA static a...
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QCon 2008 features domain-driven development
This year's QCon invites speakers like Eric Evans and Dan North to talk about domain-drive...
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.NET similarities prove golden for Silverlight
Microsoft has focused on making Silverlight 2 symmetric with the .NET platform, and that h...
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SOA Watch: New economic realities
In the current economic downturn, agile programming and SOA are attractive options that bu...
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Integration Watch: A new twist on threads
The key to raising the efficiency of multiprocessors is to shrink the overall workload by ...
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Integration Watch: The Return of NetRexx?
Java scripting languages are seeing a surge in popularity, with NetRexx looking particular...
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Windows & .NET Watch: Transaction crowd gets a boost
With multicore chips becoming the standard for processors, the need for a flexible, usable...
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From the Editors: Election should shake up JCP
Rod Johnson has the right ideas for opening up the Java Community Process, and he may be a...
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Letters to the Editor: Sun gives REST, SOAP choice
A reader takes issue with a headline on our story about Sun working with REST along with S...
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Guest View: Be smart and lazy
The optimal solution for problems is the simplest one, so always aim to streamline your ap...
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Zeichick's Take: From EXEC to EXEC 2 to REXX to NetRexx
Andrew Binstock's column last week, "The Return of NetRexx," brought back some fond memori...
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Advanced Corda CenterView™ Data Visualization for the BusinessObjects™ Intelligence Platform
Corda Technologies presents a white paper on pervasive BI. The BusinessObjects business in...
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From Mobile to SOA: A Guide for Optimized Application Deployment
Customer need has driven the emergence of multiple computing tiers. Today’s application d...
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e-Kit: Web Application Security
Is your network secure? What about your web applications.
If IT security is your top p...
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Practical tips for saving money on code maintenance
If software design is expensive, well, code maintenance is even more so. When you look...
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By Edward J. Correia
August 26, 2008 —
As I decide each week what to write about in the Test & QA Report, I scour Web sites and blogs, and pore over technical manuscripts and my in-box, looking for ideas that I think might spark your interest. Things that don't (or can't due to non-disclosure agreements) get used right away, I print and throw into "the pile." Every so often the pile has to be cleared out. Today is one such day.
Last week saw the debut of the uTester Community, which puts software testers in touch with organizations in need of application testing services but lack the staff in-house. A Massachusetts-based start-up, uTest bills the service as a kind of social network, which companies can tap into periodically during peak times in their development cycle or continuously as part of a process.
To start, uTest has assembled more than 9,000 testers, mostly in the United States and India, and offers annual subscription and on-demand pricing to match your business pattern. Spot pricing starts at US$2,000; services include function, load, performance and usability testing.
To use the on-demand testing service, an organization provides a uTest team of their own choosing with a link to its software. Teams can be selected based on experience, language savvy, geographic region or other factors. Communications are provided by the uTest platform, which also ties into a company's own Bugzilla, Jira or other bug tracking system. There's already a thriving blogger community, including posts by Karen N. Johnson, James Whittaker and other industry notables you may have heard of.
For the do-it-yourselfer, there's TestersDesk.com, which offers a laundry list of function test tools, data generators, and diagnosis and validation tools. And they're all free. The site also offers collaboration and encryption.
Testing Technologies, which makes QA and test automation tools for specific communications protocols and standards, has introduced TTsuite-Presence for testing presence servers in the IP Multimedia Subsystem based on SIP and XCAP protocols. The tool delivers about 290 tests, according to company reports, for presence clients and servers and resource list servers, as well as XCAP clients and servers. Test execution can be fully automated with detailed analyses and summaries of test results of Linux and Windows platforms.
Another duty I'm obliged to carry out is to thank friends in the testing community that posted links to the Software Test & Performance Conference, the tester's conference I chair that's coming to Boston in late September. And by "thank," I mean plug their Web sites.
First to respond to my humble request for free publicity was Torsten Zelger, a test automation specialist at Audatex Systems in Switzerland, which develops software for the insurance industry. Torsten posted notices at Scion Labs and at Dundee SQA Forum, a members-only site where people collaborate on Rational Robot GUI-test automation tool.
Matt Heusser is an independent developer, tester and trainer living in Michigan. He's a popular writer and speaker, and he did a great job organizing Lightning Talks and leading track sessions at STPCon last spring in San Mateo, Calif. Matt is also a prolific blogger at Creative Chaos, where he promoted our conference. Matt holds a master's degree in computer information systems and is the author of the influential paper "Perils and Pitfalls of Agile Adoption."
Hung Nguyen and Hans Buwalda, CEO and CTO of testing services company LogiGear, are frequent and popular speakers at STPCon and two of the nicest people you'll ever meet. Hung is also an accomplished jazz guitarist, and I had the distinct pleasure of sitting in on drums when his band played at a local supper club. LogiGear provided a very handsome ad on its events page.
For a review of my performance on drums, you might ask Ady Beleanu, QA department manager at SoftVision, which provides application services for retail, mobile and other vertical markets. Ady struggled mightily through the "bureaucracy of approvals," as he put it, to give us this ad on the company's main pages.
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