Last week, I wrote about technical services and why they are crucial to a technology company that produces both software and hardware. Today, let’s talk about testing services. Testing new software is a critical part of any new software, says Ms Sumitra Gomatam, director and practice head, testing services, at the Chennai-based Cognizant Technology Solutions. Ms Gomatam holds a big job in Cognizant, heading a 2,000-strong team of software testing professionals.
"Any new software that is developed in-house or outsourced, needs to be verified and validated. Essentially, what software testers do is break down a piece of software and then build it up again, ensuring that the software is indeed doing what it is designed to do, and has the robustness to be scaled," Ms Gomatam said in an interview, explaining the basics of software testing.
And, apparently, it’s a good business to be in. According to her, the margins for testing software for third parties, that is clients, are substantially higher than in software code writing. That’s a view echoed by Mr Sashi P. Reddi, CEO of AppLabs Technologies.
"The margins are higher because we charge up to $3,000 per engineer for some testing jobs," he told me in an interview earlier this year. I am great fan of Mozilla’s Firefox Internet browser. It’s more robust than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. While I have great regard for Windows, it’s web browser that sucks.
Sometimes, at least, hanging up at the most inopportune moment. The browser hung up again when I was trying to download IE7, but that’s a different story. Anyway, the Firefox, too, has been having its share of trouble. Mozilla now says it will not be including the Places feature in Firefox 2.0. "As we have been preparing for the FF2 Alpha2 on May 9, it has become increasingly clear that we do not have time to complete an implementation of Places that lives up to our standards of user experience and quality. Places is a complex and exciting feature which changes the way people use bookmarks, history and navigate through their private space of the web. Rather than rush it to market, we’d prefer to spend the time it takes to get it right," says Mr Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla’s director of engineering, in a message on a developer’s message forum.
"Thus, we are going to disable Places on the 1.8 branch and continue work on the feature on the trunk for inclusion on a future release. This is a difficult decision, but doing it this early in the release cycle gives us the time to focus on delivering an extremely high quality FF2 in Q3 and gives Places the room it needs to develop into a truly innovative feature," Mr Schroepfer says.