“Certifications are a farce – they simply test your ability to cram for an exam,” cries one tester in a recent uTest forums exchange. “No way – certifications are extremely valuable and establish credibility to the testing world,” replies another tester.

And it goes on and on… As a witness to the ongoing debate, it’s clear that there may never be a meeting of the minds when it comes to certifications. It’s certainly been thought-provoking and entertaining to read through the vicious cycle of pros and cons supporting both camps. Here are several to spark more debate!

Pro-Certifications Camp:

• They provide a base level of knowledge for those interested in the field, including terminology, processes, etc.
• They help testing newbies get their foot in the door of the testing world
• Certain organizations prefer to (or only) hire certified testers
• Passing a certification means that one is serious about testing
• Having a certification differentiates you from the crowd of software testers

Anti-Certifications Camp:

• Certifications bodies take in top money to create certs that simply test your ability to cram for an exam and at best possess knowledge – as opposed to your problem solving skills and how to test
• Passing such exams does not prove anything about testing skills & should not get your foot in the door for a job
• Organizations that prefer certified testers are simply lazy about their interviewing process – looking for a piece of paper or label on the resume vs. looking at the candidates skill set
• Passing a certification simply indicates that you are willing to take the time and money to complete a task
• There are so many certified testers – so what differentiates one from another? More advanced certs? Where’s the limit?

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Imagine a world where software testers are courted and wooed like LeBron James; where online job boards are littered with “Testers Wanted” posts and where everyone can finally spell “QA” correctly. In other words, imagine a world with a shortage of software testers…

“Nonsense!” you say. “There’s plenty of software testers to go around.” Not for long, says SiliconIndia, who posits that a shortage of skilled software testers is only a matter of time. Citing various facts, figures and estimates from a recent Gartner study, the author examines the reasons behind this coming tester drought.

Pradeep Chennavajhula explains:

This shortage is now a major concern for the IT service organizations, considering that the academia is not geared up to support the program, and many of the training organizations are not geared up to meet the demand of the industry. In this scenario, the question still remains as to how is the industry planning to tackle the shortage of software testers?

Good question. Of course, we’ve dealt with these issues many times before on The uTest Blog. Here are a few posts with some answers:

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New Englanders aren’t known for doing well in hot weather, and a recent heat wave has kept us all inside in the air conditioning. Since our engineers can’t go outside without melting or vaporizing, they’ve been inside keeping busy creating some cool new features. Let’s take a look:

Attachment Viewer
Our testers love uploading attachments with their bug reports.  Whether it’s a screenshot or a video, testers know that an attachment can make a bug report easier for our customers to understand and visualize.

Until now, customers have had to download every attachment individually and then open them on their desktops. To make this process faster and easier, we have launched a nifty new attachment viewer that works inside our platform. Now customers and testers can view video and image attachments with a single click, toggle between them easily, and download the ones you want to keep. And for non-multimedia files like spreadsheets and documents, we still make it easy to download the files and open them from your desktop.

Take a look at this short 30 second video showing off the new attachment viewer:

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This past weekend, Vietnamese developer, Thuat Nguyen, hacked into 400 iTunes accounts to catapult his apps to best seller status. Nguyen accomplished this by buying his own Books apps — using the hacked iTunes accounts — which boosted his app ratings and launched his apps to the top of the list. The result? 42 of Nguyen’s apps were among the ‘Top 50 Books’ and up to $500 was deducted from each iTunes account.

After tracking down Alex Brie, a developer who first discovered the issues, PC World reported:

“After Brie’s calculations, Nguyen would have needed at least 3,000 hacked iTunes accounts to reach the ranking he had on Sunday in the App Store…[and] Brie speculates that to achieve such high ratings for his apps, Nguyen had to hack into Apple’s iTunes servers and skip the normal security steps, or run an automated scripted program.”

According to Engadget, Apple responded last night:

The developer Thuat Nguyen and his apps were removed from the App Store for violating the developer Program License Agreement, including fraudulent purchase patterns…

I was under the impression that the App Store approval process was brutal. So, how did this rogue developer get through? What additional security measures and tests need to be put into place to prevent account fraud?

Safe to say that mobile app development has greatly outpaced mobile app testing over the last few years. In other words, while the applications and platforms have seen tremendous technological advances (iPhone 4 bugs notwithstanding) the same cannot be said of mobile testing methodologies.

Case in point: The majority of mobile app developers remain overwhelmingly reliant on internal beta testing.

Here with proof is VisionMobile, who recently published a fascinating report on the growing mobile app ecosystem – a must-read for anyone involved in the space (developers, marketers, users, etc). From a QA point of view, the report further establishes that although testing innovations will ALWAYS trail those of development, the gap need not be so wide.

Here’s an excerpt that sums the whole thing up:

Internal beta testing is the most popular technique used by the vast majority (nearly 70 percent) of respondents, with beta testing with users and peer reviewing the next most popular techniques. Only 20 percent of respondents use focus groups or research of their own. Overall, North American developers are somewhat more sophisticated in their application planning, with 97 percent using beta testing as a standard part of application development and with broader use of a portfolio of planning techniques as well.

Yet, small development firms have limited means today to beta test and peer review their applications with a crosssection of representative users. Given the hundreds of thousands of mobile apps, we believe that efficient (crowd-sourced) testing of apps in a global market of users is considerably under-utilized. This presents an opportunity for the few solution providers in this segment – Mob4Hire and uTest.com, for example – but also for network operators, who can generate a channel for testing applications with end users, and provide an open feedback support system back to developers.

Other notable findings included:

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So maybe it wasn’t AT&T’s fault after all.

Apple recently revealed that there is a fundamental flaw in their method for calculating how many signal bars to display.  And we have the iPhone 4 (and its “learn to hold your phone the right way” fiasco) to thank for bringing this software snafu to light.

CNN Money shares the following details from Apple:

“Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong,” Apple wrote in a statement posted on its website. “Our formula, in many instances, mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.”

That means, for example, that iPhones sometimes display four bars when they should be displaying two. Apple said users reporting a significant drop in bars when they hold their iPhone 4 are probably in an area of “very weak signal strength” but were unaware of that because the phone displayed four to five bars.

“Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place,” the company said.

Perhaps most surprising, Apple disclosed that the problem is not confined to the iPhone 4.  The faulty formula has been present in every iPhone model since the 2007 original.  Questions remain about whether the issue is strictly software-related, or if it also involved hardware problems.  However, Apple has said it will release a free software update in the next several weeks to fix the glitch. It will use a new formula recommended by AT&T.

“They want to know if the 91-shot Saturn Missile Battery really fires 91 shots,” writes Cory Matteson of the Lincoln Journal Star. “And, they want to know if 96,000 firecrackers in a pile the size of a bean bag chair will leave the lawn looking like burnt toast if they’re set off all at once.”

Much like software users, fireworks enthusiasts (like the guy in the picture) want a product that functions as expected; that works safely and without any unnecessary complications, regardless of the environment it is being used in. In short, they want a product that has been tested extensively before it was launched released.

So, seeing that it’s Forth of July weekend here in The States, I thought I would direct your attention to some testing fireworks – literally, in the form of this manual from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and figuratively, in form of these recent (and provocative) software testing blog posts. Enjoy.

How Challenging Each Other Helps the Craft – James Bach
“Regular readers know that I’m dissatisfied with the state of the testing industry. It’s a shambles, and will continue to be as long as middle managers in big companies continue to be fat juicy targets for scam-artists (large tool vendors, consulting firms, and certain “professional” organizations) and well-meaning cargo cultists (such as those who think learning testing is the same as memorizing definitions of words and filling in templates).

What I can do about it is to develop my personal excellence, and associate myself with others who wish to do likewise. Someday, perhaps we will attain a critical mass. Perhaps the studious will inherit the Earth.”

The Heart of a Tester – Pradeep Soundararajan
“In 1954, when software testing was just about taking birth, there were two groups that started to form. I was as curious as you are right now, to know what those two groups stood for. One of the groups christened as, “Kuzusu”, had a thought that good testing would reduce the number of billable hours to deliver a good enough product and hence had to be avoided. The other group christened, “Shidachi”, stood for good testing that can save a lot of stakeholders time and money to deliver a good enough product. Things started getting hostile. People from the two groups tried killing each other.”

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Quality (pun intended ) software testing events are hard to find, but we’ve not only attended and spoken at some fantastic conferences around the world, but we’ve also simply asked around and received some great feedback in order to compile the Top Ten Testing Events.

Much like our Top 20 Software Testing Tweeps post, we need your help in letting us know if we’ve accidentally missed any good ones. Here they are in order of occurrence:

1. QUEST-Quality Engineered Software & Testing Conference (Apr 19-23, 2010: Dallas, TX)
2. Rapid Software Testing-By DevelopSense (Jul 5-7, 2010: Amsterdam, NL)
3. STANZ-Software Testing Australia/New Zealand (Aug 23-24: NZ & Aug 26-27: AU)
   
4. CAST-Conference of the Association for Software Testing (Aug 2-4, 2010: Grand Rapids, MI)
5. STAREAST (passed) & STARWEST-Software Testing Analysis & Review (Sept 26-Oct 1, 2010: San Diego, CA)
6. iqnite events-Next one in UK-formerly Software & Systems Quality (Oct 4, 2010: London, UK)
7. STPCon-Software Test Professionals Conference (Oct 19-21, 2010: Las Vegas, NV)
8. GTAC-Google Test Automation Conference (Oct 28-29, 2010: Hyderabad, India)
9. Expo: QA (Nov 16-18, 2010: Madrid, Spain)
10. EuroSTAR (Nov 29-Dec 2, 2010: Copenhagen, Denmark)

Have we omitted any noteworthy testing conferences you’ve recently attended? Please add your recommendations in the comments and they’ll be placed in the running to join the top events list. Maybe we can make this list a Top 15!

UPDATE: So far, some really great recommendations from our community include O’Reilly Velocity, Bangalore Workshop on Software Testing and VISTACON 2010 (the first Vietnam International Software Testing & Automation Conference).

This month’s installment of ‘This Week In Testing‘ takes us waaaay back to 1962 when the Mariner I space probe, America’s first planetary flyby that was supposed to go to Venus, went completely off course and had to be immediately destroyed — a mere 293 seconds after launch.

The Cost? $18.2 million (in 1962!)

The Bug? Omission of a single overbar

The Mariner I was the first spacecraft of the NASA Mariner program that “launched a series of robotic interplanetary probes designed to investigate Mars, Venus and Mercury (Wikipedia).”

The bug that brought the mission to its speedy end was carried out by a programmer, who while transcribing a handwritten (in pencil no less) formula into code, missed one single overbar (or as it’s less-technically known: the hyphen).

NASA’s public account of the software glitch is written as follows:

The Mariner 1 Post Flight Review Board determined that the omission of a hyphen in coded computer instructions in the data-editing program allowed transmission of incorrect guidance signals to the spacecraft. During the periods the airborne beacon was inoperative the omission of the hyphen in the data-editing program caused the computer to incorrectly accept the sweep frequency of the ground receiver as it sought the vehicle beacon signal and combined this data with the tracking data sent to the remaining guidance computation. This caused the computer to swing automatically into a series of unnecessary course corrections with erroneous steering commands which finally threw the spacecraft off course.

Fortunately, the mission was successfully completed by Mariner 2 five months later, but it’s hard to ignore the significant costs brought about by a mere hyphen. Do you have any bug stories like this one? Has a missing bar (or something equivalent) ever led you to a messy debacle?

Considering that a World Cup ref is once again under police surveillance (next stop, Witness Protection) as the result of a blown call, perhaps it’s finally time for FIFA to consider a long-overdue technology upgrade. May I suggest instant replay.

Or, if you’re one of those soccer purist types, maybe you’d prefer a ball that lights up like a slot machine when it crosses the goal line. Since my eyes still hurt from the NHL’s FoxTrax puck, I’m inclined to opt for the former, but what do I know?

Apparently very little, because a Mexico City-based development team is hard at work on a ball that would do just that. Aside from the aforementioned light show, it would also be able to “beam out TV replays” to prevent further refereeing gaffes. They have a point. I mean, if you somehow miss a TV replay of a DISCO BALL lighting up behind the net, perhaps refereeing isn’t for you.

Of course, many players are not too thrilled with the current Jabulani ball, which has been “praised” for its supermarket-like quality, so one can only imagine how this one would go over. My guess: not so much.

But if such technology is introduced into the Beautiful Game, it will only be after extensive rounds of real-world software testing. Here’s what the dev team is up against:

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