Huy Zing

The 2008 Google Test Automation Conference was keynoted by the entertaining speaker James Whittaker from Microsoft.

Key takeaways from the Google Tech Talk video were:

• Insourcing → Outsourcing → Crowdsourcing →  Testsourcing
  • Some companies are already doing crowdsourcing of testing:
    • utest.com pays the internet community to find bugs in software. (Companies who want their products tested credit their account with at least $2000, with which they pay for discovered bugs that they aprove.)
  • The speaker believes that in the next phase of evolution, we’ll have “testsourcing” where vendors are providing tests themselves.
• Virtualization:
  • Virtual machines and their environments are going to be key for wrapping up and reproducing bugs as they happen.  They should run not only on testers’ machines but also users’ machines.
  • Market of the future: virtual test machines
    
• Visualization:
  • Microsoft testers use a tool to visualize their codebase (see image below) and focus their testing
    • 
    • Size denotes lines of code
    • Darkness denotes complexity [can't hear what he mumbles there]
    • I wish I knew what this tool was
  • Game testers use numerous GUI tools:
    • displays where they are in the application itself (in addition to the usual game screen) as they play the game
    • displays surrounding testable objects and allows them to teleport to them
    • displays objects that need to be tested because the code has changed
    • displays the degree of testing that has been done for each object