Sayonara 2010 - Welcome 2011

2010-It’s been quite an eventful year, both personally and professionally. Year started with something quite probing i.e. testing a middleware application in a span of 5 days. I was asked to test the Service Layer part of the application and I am glad that I did it as I got to learn few more tools like SOAP UI for WSDL and RESTful web services testing. If 2009 was about learning RapidSQL then 2010 was about getting comfortable with DBArtisan. There has been some addition on how to use BPT or Business Process Testing using Quality Center and Quick Test Professional both from HP.

In last 4-5 months; I got to learn about iTKO LISA Test Automation tool which I found good for middleware and back-end test automation (or Automated Checks). It‘s not easy to use for sure, at first it looks like a configuration management tool and to make learning little difficult, a newer version of this tool does not provide updated version of help documents. I hope going into New Year; the tool owners will improve on help documentation because if they are looking to have a large user base they will have to help users and make them feel at ease with LISA.

Then there came Agile and for first 2 sprints I was kind of confused so I picked a book titled “Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams” by Lisa Crispin and Janet Gregory. It proved to be of immense value and helped me BIG time. So, now I have the experience in Agile environment (/methodology) as well. Few things I really liked about Agile are quick feedback and less documentation. In few weeks, I’ll put a separate post on my experience with Agile as a tester.

These are the few important things that I learned in 2010, more importantly I networked heavily and read a number of recommended books from James Marcus Bach. I hope to finish reading (& learning from) all of them by end of 2011.

There had been some disturbances as well on personal front but all is well that ends well. I am sure to start 2011 with a bang; a lot of things will change with the start of New Year on both of he ‘P’ fronts. I hope to network with lot more people in testing arena and share & learn with them. Ohh yes, I have few New Year resolutions also, I will blog more frequently then I have been doing in last 1.5 years. There are few more that I’ll not talk about.

Wishing you all, a very happy & prosperous 2011. This is Rahul Gupta signing off for 2010.

C Ya!!!