What makes an iconic car? That was the question posed by Mercedes boss Dieter Zetsche at the recent launch of the new G-Wagen. Mr Zetsche had his own views, and it was hard to quibble with any of them. Firstly, he said, an icon had to offer 鈥渘o compromises鈥?in its performance. It should also be instantly recognisable, having defined a look. And finally, he mooted, there had to be what he described as 鈥渁 built-in story鈥? Alongside the G-Class, four models which he felt ticked the necessary boxes to be considered icons were the Porsche 911, Jeep Wrangler, Ford Mustang and his own company鈥檚 300 SL. I鈥檇 struggle to argue with any of that quartet. To that list, I would tentatively add the Fiat 500 and Mini/MINI, which continue to thrive in their own respective areas of the market, despite ever-changing fashions. However, one thing that all these cars highlight is just how difficult it is for a manufacturer to move an icon on design-wise.
That鈥檚 the reason the MINI hasn鈥檛 changed all that much since its 2001 rebirth, and why I鈥檓 sure the next Fiat 500 will be a very close copy of the current one. Because make no mistake: while achieving iconic status is incredibly difficult, losing it is fairly easy, a mere design mis-step away. As evidence, I鈥檇 point you towards the current Volkswagen Beetle, which to my eyes at least, is a cartoonish pastiche of the much loved original. Of course, there鈥檚 one other car that鈥檚 impossible to ignore in a debate about motoring icons: Britain鈥檚 own Land Rover Defender. The fact that two years later we are still waiting to see its successor suggests that Land Rover knows only too well what a fine line it has to tread to produce a design that lives up to the legend. Britain has built plenty of motoring icons, but which ones make the top 50?
What are the different ways Testing could be moved on to the cloud- Public cloud, Private Cloud, Hybrid clouds. Explaining the Fundamental shift from the testers owning Physical machines to test Software applications traditionally to now testers owning raw computing power. All this made possible with Virtualization. How could Cloud's elasticity be used effectively in Software testing ? How does cloud amount to Green Software Testing ? How can Snapshot features help the Software Testing ? How is the Virtual lab automation make Software Testing effective ? Test Management on the Cloud. Test data generation on the Cloud. On demand usability testing using Cloud. Followed by presentation around the Security and Availability concerns around Cloud and some perspectives around that. Overall it went good and flawless to an extent. Post presentation there were quite a few offline questions. One of the Intriguing questions from a participant was- "When i use Virtual test environment, i am not seeing some of issues that my customers are seeing on the Physical hardware". Upon Investigation, it appeared that the code base of application under test was more than a decade old and that might have some dependency on the results that were seen/not seen.
However, i will be exploring this question in a bit more detail and would like to blog about the same in the near future. I liked the Panel talk involving Quality heads of Companies such as Tata Global Beverages, BIOCON, Mahindra Reva Electric Vehicles, and moderated by T.Ashok from STAG Software. This was one of the unique session in which people from Non-Software fields discussed their experiences around Testing as it relates to their Industries. I am surprised (having attended many conferences) nobody thought of engaging such a panel in the past. The discussions were enriching and most of the non-software people agreed to the fact that there is much more focus on prevention than defect detection as is the case with most of Software Testing. Also, there was stringent focus on Design and testing the Design itself. I quite liked the session "Software Fault Patterns - A Narrative from the Operation Theatre " by Dr. Sukanta Bhatt.
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