Facebook Connect

Facebook Connect is the new step in the Facebook promise for beeing web operational system. Facebook was the first to start providing facebook applications development platform and now it launches the next step .

Facebook Connect is new standart allowing web site owners to connect their existing or new web sites into the Facebook social network. It was a highly anticipated release that is allowing the website owners to do social activities on their web site. Facebook Connect is introducing strong tools for making your web site popular and providing social activities.

Facebook Connect development

Facebook connect is still new to most of the IT companies and therefore it is mostly used by freelance developers and inovative researchers in some companies. But it sure that Facebook Conncet will be widelly used in the near feature when the pilot websites using it prove everyone that this can bring huge trafiic and earn good popularity for the websites.

Facebook Connect outsourcing

Due to the specifics of the way a web site is build using Facebook Connect I advice companies to outsource the Facebook Connect parts of the website development to companies or organizations with gib experience in this area. This can save you a lot of effot and time.Offshore software development comanies can help with Facebook Connect development and Facebook Applications development.

Orkut

Firstly when Orkut has started working it was possible to make an account only if someone sends you an invitation (just like it was with gmail), but since October 2006 the Orkut social network is open for everyone to register. Initially the social network was targeted to get users from USA and Canada, but so far this web site is not very popular in USA. About half of the users of the social network Orkut are from Brazil. The Orkut platform is also very popular in India.

Orkut Applications

Orkut is adopting the OpenSocail platform for creating of social application for Orkut. On 16-th April this year Orkut has allowed the creating of Orkut applications by using OpenSocial platform. This move is definitely a follow up on Facebook announcing the Facebook application. Which today has huge impact on the Facebook social network.

OpenSocial applications

OpenSocial platform is an open platform for the creation of social applications. The difference is that it is intended that the OpenSocial platform will be one platform that is used for the creation of social applications on many social networks.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is the biggest professionals social network. In Linked in users are getting together to find professional opportunities. The social network is used by companies to find talent and new hires. I was even approached by Google recruiter who has seen my LinkedIn profile and I was offered an interview. All this is making LinkedIn a completelly different social network. And keep in mind the 30 000 000 users who are already using it.

LinkedIn applications

LinkedIn has tested their systems for a long time in order to integrate OpenSocial and last week it was announced the official release of LinkedIn applications. Now developers can start developing LinkedIn applications and functionality that can be added on the user profile and providing additional functionality that can help the user. The main idea is that companies would be able to provide useful functionality and that way they would be able to promote their business trough the professional network of users.

Applications development for LinkedIn

How do you develop and application for LinkedIn ? Well I started reading about this but I haven’t developed anything yet. I know that the OpenSocial platform is used but I will keep you updated and lets hope that soon I will be able to show you my first LinkedIn application.

I don’t quite remember the time line but it was some time around the year 2000 that Bill Gates stated that the software products are evolving and everything will be based on services. As I remember Bill Gates stated that the office will be web based and the users go into office with their browsers and use it as a service. Basically what Bill Gates has said was that software will be used as a service on the Internet. Back then all this doesn’t happened. But Bill Gates was just a bit early because what we are seeing now is exactly that. The world is migrating into using the software as a service.

Azure

Being sure in that the software will continue to evolve Microsoft has created an operation system for the creation of Software as Services. The name of the system is called Azure and is combing a lot systems that helps you develop stable software services and don’t worry about load balancing, system failures or scaling.

Windows Azure is still not officially released but there is only a technical preview. Being still in development this incredible operation system will be fully available some time in 2009. Of course the question who everyone is asking is how expensive it will be. I guess only Microsoft knows that. But anyway it is definitely a great new system.

Stay tuned I will keep you updated.

The feature of applications development

Software application products are evolving. If you look 10 years ago the web development was just kicking off. Before that everything was desktop products and client/server technology. And now you can see a lot of the functionality that we are all using is placed on a web sites. We can see web games, web translation, web dictionary and many more. And all this does make sense. Why having only one computer that you can use to do whatever you need when you can use whatever computer you like. Web products can be used from home, the office or just a internet cafe computer. No installation of software products is needed and you have everything you need just in the Internet browser. But wait that was 10 years ago. Now what is the new? Where is all this going?

Now software products are going to a new significant change. Many of the big web sites start providing API functionality for interacting with their web site. The examples are a lot. Amazon provides web API for working with the huge database of books. Social networks like Facebook provides API for enriching their functionality and this functionality can be used for interacting with the social network huge users database. Google Maps provides API for interacting with their huge maps and satellite pictures database. Other huge web sites providing API for interaction with their database include YouTube, Flickr, Google Checkout and many many more.

Clearly the software development is evolving to a new stage where new software products will start using this rich functionalities available online. Why creating your own map, when you can use Google Maps? And why not combining this online Map with pictures form Flickr and videos from YouTube? Then maybe you can use the huge users network from Facabook and you have a new killer application.
The applications that are combining this rich services are called Mashups.

Manual testing

First it is very important to notice that manual testing is not just random clicks on the user interface of a software application. For efficient testing of the software product you should have test plan and strongly defined test cases.  Manual testing is the process of executing trough these test cases manually.

Test automation

Test automation is a software code that is executing the same test cases or test scenarios but automatically using some kind of test automation tools or frameworks.

The development time of test automation can take a lot of time . Usually  is a huge investment of time and resources. Some software companies prefer to use offshore outsourcing comapnies for doing their test automation, which cuts the costs.

It is common believe that once the test automation is created it is working forever. That is completely wrong. You can expect some expenses for fixing the test automation. But at the end test automation is much faster than the manual testing and is the only way you can do a fast regression testing.  Test automation is recommended especially for very big software products.

My personal advice on whether you should use manual testing or test automation for your project is: Always have a small set of the most important tests automated, so when a bug fix is introduced at late stage of the project you will be able to run very quickly the most important test and after the bug fix is applied you will be able to  do a full test pass.

This is yet another indicator showing that there is need in the field of software testing and QA in Bulgaria. Universities and schools invest highly in developing the software development skills of the Bulgarian students, but there is no proper education, courses or any initiatives that directly aim in providing good software testing education. That inevitably leads to huge shortage of skilled and motivated QA specialists in Bulgaria.

Outsourcing needed

Due to the lack of any form of QA education in Bulgaria the software companies are forded to establish special educational programs for education their own QA specialists. This is very expensive and not very effective, so the demand for an outsourcing solution in this field is huge. Because in Bulgaria there is a lot software companies that educate their software testing specialists them selfs a company that can offer QA education would save not only money but also time and a lot of effort for keeping up to date the in-house education of the software testing specialists.

I was thinking about this the whole weekend and here I am sharing with you on this cloudy Monday morning. I believe this is a good niche for starting an outsourcing business. Lets hope someone would see that this is a huge opportunity for business as I see it now and hopefully we can see an educational outsourcing company specialized in software testing education. This will help us all and will help Bulgaria to develop as one of the top outsourcing destinations.

As a outsourcing company we need to constantly show great quality and good personal development. That is why we have started offering two new job positions for software testing engineers. I was personally involved in the interviewing and I can share some of the questions that we have asked the candidates.

Software testing interview questions

1.  How would you test a pen.

You are given a regular pen and you are given the task to test it. How exactly would you test it.

2. You have a small console software product that is doing only calculation of the sum of two input values.How would you test it.

3. We have asked the standard gas station question. “How many gas stations there are in your home city”. You would be amazed how many people have failed to answer anything on this question.

Of course we asked some more questions but I can’t share more since it would not be fair to my company.

The correct answers to the questions can be founded in the Internet, but I must say that we were looking mostly how creative are the candidates and how they are thinking. We are hiring new people believing that they should be able to learn really fast and apply their current knowledge in an area that might not be very familiar to them.

The project is for a UK company that needs software testing outsourcing for its products. The main goal for us is to create test automation that would run on every build of the ERP product and would measure the time for some operations. Then our software automation would provide reports on the times and compare to the system requirements for performance.

Creating a good performance testing is a huge and complicated job that require a lot of knoledge of how it can be done in a right way. That is why the UK company has made a decision to outsource to Bulgaria. This is a good way to save expenses and to use the qualified testing professionals in our company.

I am really exited about this new task. Apparently I would change the team for some weeks but I would learn new things and I would get some more knowledge on software testing.

Where to go?

Now that was a hard chose because there are so many good places to visit in Bulgaria and especially when the weather is good. Finally we decided to go in Vitosha mountain. It is close to Sofia and we decided that we do not want to spend that much time in traveling, but spend some more time in the nature.

Vitosha

There are so many good things to do in Vitosha. We decided that we want to go to the golden bridges. This is a very nice place where someone can rest and have a good beer. We took a lot of pictures (coming in my blog soon), played games and we enjoyed one of the last sunny days for this autumn.

Now is Sunday night and I should be prepared for a challenging week. Tomorrow at work we are starting a new exciting, but very difficult project. So wish me good luck