Satya Dodda on Software Quality: GlassFish, Java ES, Quality Community, Silicon Valley Software Quality Association(SSQA)

In the month of May, Samir Shah, spoke about “Enterprise 2.0 here, upgrade your test department” at Silicon Valley Software Quality Association. In this blog, I would like to provide a brief overview of the presentation. For complete information, please review the slides.

Samir Shah is a QA executive with over 16 years of direct test management experience,  ranging  from startups in Silicon Valley to the Global Fortune 50. He's the Founder and CEO of Zephyr, an Enterprise 2.0 startup based in Sunnyvale, CA. Most recently, he was Vice President of QA Practice at Patni Computers where, over a period of six years, he founded, built and managed a 300+ person Global QA Practice generating $75 million in testing revenue.

Samir started the talk with the following questions:

1. Does your management know what your QA department is doing?

2. Do you have right information at right time?

3. Do you communicate your QA department's hard work properly?

4. Can you adopt to changing project priorities quickly with out becoming bottleneck?

Personally, I engaged with these questions really well. As a GlassFish and Java ES QA leader, I face these questions everyday in my current environment.

After that, Samir covered the following:

1. Meaning of enterprise 2.0

2. Tools and Technologies

• He covered Blogs, Personas, wikis, enhance search, RSS aggregators, book marking, instant messaging, video chats, tagging and tag clouds, mashups, widgets, etc.,

3. How to apply these tools to your test department

4. Gave tips to audience about how to start moving towards upgrading your test department

Samir is a great speaker and connected with audience (especially with me) really well. His passion and experience about software quality are clearly visible in his talk. At the end, he gave a demo of the Test Management System that he has built at Zephyr.

Last Month (April 8th), Tim Riley, spoke about SQA approach on the Mozilla project at Silicon Valley Software Quality Association. Tim is my mentor, guru, and ex manager who hired me into Sun.

Tim Riley is Director of Quality Assurance at Mozilla Corporation. Tim leads a team of 20,000 nightly testers (!), 1600 identified QA volunteers (!), 400 developers writing unit test cases (!), and the 17 members of Mozilla's SQA team. Before joining Mozilla, Tim managed teams testing high security operating systems and J2SE JRE/JDK at Sun Microsystems, as well as other test teams.

The highlights of the talk includes:

    - What it takes to test Firefox, Thunderbird, etc
    - Interesting very popular open source project testing challenges
    - Pre integration testing requirements
    - Importance of code reviews (yes, they are still important)
    - Important software engineering tools like tinderbox, bugzilla, etc.,
    - Very interest test automation tools like buildbot, mochitest, reftest, xpcshell, etc

Tim is a great speaker and very passionate on software quality subject. The slides will be posted here. Certainly, Mozilla is a pioneering example of how to create and maintain a great quality community around an open source project. It was a good inspiration for us to start GlassFish Quality Community for our popular open source GlassFish project at Sun. We will share GlassFish Quality Community later.

I have been in the software quality field for over 16 years. I lead quality effort for several cool products and technologies like real time operating systems, Solaris, Java Standard Edition, Java Enterprise Edition, GlassFish Enterprise Applications Server, Sun Java Enterprise System etc., I created test teams at India, Prague, Israel, France, Russia, China, and US of varying sizes (75+) and made them really successful.

I think that now I have some thing to offer to the broad Software Quality Community. So I started taking active role in local Silicon Valley Software Quality Association(SSQA). SSQA is a chapter of Americal Society for Quality. SSQA meets monthly(every 2nd Tuesday) to discuss topics of interest to software quality engineers, testers and developers. In particular, I am helping SSQA with monthly speakers. I am also Vice Chair of SSQA and I will conduct SSQA sessions when the Chair (Ken Doran) is out. Ken is working at Stanford University.

I am planning to share some of SSQA discussion topics in this blog.