Five Questions With Pradeep Soundararajan

Pradeep Soundararajan is one of the shining and rising stars in the Indian testing community. I find Pradeep's blog Tester Tested a fascinating read; while his viewpoint is in many ways quite similar to mine it is also completely different. His passion for testing, learning about testing, and learning about himself seems boundless. He currently represents Satisfice, Inc., testing, consulting, and coaching; he is also the founder of the Bangalore Skilled Testers Community.

Michael Bolton says "Pradeep's first language is not English--his first language appears to be testing." Here is what Pradeep has to say:

DDJ: What was your first introduction to testing? What did that leave you thinking about the act and/or concept of testing?
PS: The first time I heard and saw testing being done was in a movie "Edison - The Man" I watched in my teen age years. Something that caught my attention was Sir Thomas Alva Edison's design of experiments to test each of his inventions. It took me seven years from that time to become someone whom the industry addresses as a tester. It then took me two and half years to realize that a more sophisticated tester was growing within me, thanks to people like James Bach, Jerry Weinberg and Michael Bolton who introduced me to skilled testing. Since then I have been focusing on skills and each day I feel I am being introduced to something new in testing. Every day seems to be like a first introduction to testing!

DDJ: What has most surprised you as you have learned about testing/in your experiences with testing?
PS: The different ways in which it makes me think.

DDJ: What is the most interesting bug you have seen?
PS: I was testing speech recognition program that runs on a mobile phone. On exploring the program, I became aware of a language pack that resides in the program. There's a different pack for each country. I do not have an American accent and so I was a bit hesitant to test it. However, I had to do it. The program was inconsistent in responding to my accent. In one of out every ten trials, I saw a response from the program and logged it as an issue. The developers (who were in another country) came back saying that the issue could have been my accent, because none of them was able to reproduce the problem. We had a teleconference and the developers recorded my voice samples and tried using those as test files to reproduce the issue that I logged. Meanwhile, I was forced to complete the test cycle and I was uncomfortable doing that. I came back to my cubicle, took the phone and let out my frustration by keeping the phone near my mouth and shouting "&$*^ &%$#".

Line 556: 30678 popped up on the screen. It took me a couple of seconds to realize the program had crashed. I tried reproducing it and each time it showed Line 556: 30678.

How could I report this crash? Would I need to mention that I said, "&$*^ &%$#"?

I tried investigating it and I finally found the reason. It wasn't the words that I mentioned that had crashed it. The problem was the audio gain. The program crashed when it received an input signal above a certain limit. I then showed a magic trick to my colleagues using the same phone and software. I told them, "My name is very powerful to produce a crash. I asked them to hold the hold the phone and to shout my name. "That's why PRADEEP is a GOOD TESTER!"

DDJ: What do you see as the biggest challenge for testers/the test discipline for the next five years?
PS: On the Indian sub continent—maybe in other places too—a tester tends to stop testing after five years of experience; he or she gets promoted to Test Lead or Senior Tester, or to some other role like development or product management. Remaining as a tester itself is a big challenge in such places over the coming years.

I see what Michael Bolton suggested me to see. “Note that when testers migrate to other roles, they do less testing, but there's also a draining effect on the testing community; we lose experienced testers and replace them with less-experienced testers.”

DDJ: Is there anything else you would like to say?
PS: Oh yes! I want to say something about the importance of testers writing blogs. Blogs allow a novice tester to understand how an expert is thinking and to become inspired to write their own blogs. I would request all testers to blog the experiences that they feel could benefit the testing community. We are unfortunate that we don't have same experiences in life and it would be great if the community had a lot of stories and experience reports to read and learn from. Perhaps I came to know you through your blog Michael!

Posted by The Braidy Tester at 07:30 AM  Permalink