ICST Paris 2010 – Innovation in Test

Last week, the ICST Wednesday morning keynote was given by Patrick Copeland, senior director of engineering at Google. The talk was about testing, culture, and what Google is doing to improve TTM and quality through innovative approaches to testing. Productivity and Innovation in a hyper-competitive cloud computing world were the key themes of the talk.

Innovation
There are those who are changers and those who are maintainers. Changers are people who are more likely to innovate. Maintainers will keep the existing running well. Innovators are changers who can take ideas and make them work in the real world. To innovate however, you need feedback mechanisms that let changers test ideas. Failing fast and early is the key. Mr. Copeland introduced the idea of “pretotyping”. A pre-prototype can give you early feedback. One example he cited in his talk was about voice recognition and dictation on a computer many years ago. You talk, the computer writes. The first demo of it was done with a microphone and a screen and as the subject spoke, the text would appear on the screen, but the text was being typed by a human who was listening in another room. What they learned from this is that talking into a computer is tiring and natural speech does not render well as written text. It provided some feedback that would have been obtained much later if a real prototype been built.

Read more of this post