Why Indian Testers need to Wake Up, Come Out and Interact?

I mentioned in my previous post about some of the learnings and experiences I had during my BBST course. I was interacting with two of my friends (and fellow Testers) from my BBST batch, ‘Juha Johansson’ and ‘Charles Penn’. I learnt from ‘Juha’ that he is in touch with some of the Testing professionals with mutual interests in Houston and they are starting Software Testers Group there. ‘Juha’ had also registered for ‘CAST 2009’ which began on 13th July in Colorado. Meanwhile, ‘Charles’ is one of the organizers of IWST (Indianapolis Workshop on Software Testing) which conducts regular Testers meets and discussions etc.

I was wondering, How many Software Testing Groups that we have heard of, are in India? Even though, India is supposed to be a Software Testing Hub. How many Indian Software Testing Groups are here, which are active or doing some significant contribution towards the Software Testing community. Hardly any…

But you might find many Indian Testers being part of Testing Communities outside India. I am not trying to say it is bad, don’t misunderstand me. The point I want to make here is, when there are so many Indian Testers who are part of many good Testing Communities hosted abroad and they have interaction with many Good Testers across the world, then why are we unable to come up with Testing Groups of our own. Why can’t we have the Groups where we can share the learnings, project experiences, hold workshops, come up with new ideas, experiment with new and existing ideas, talk about innovations, debate, argue etc. Why can’t we come up with Testing Conferences like ‘CAST’ of our own? When will we have the Software Testing Experts whom the entire world recognizes? When will we have our own Jerry Weinberg, Cem Kaner, James Bach and Michael Bolton?

I have seen and learnt about some Software Testing Groups within companies, but they were hardly active or doing anything noteworthy. To begin with, we should atleast try to make use of such groups which are already in place and make them functional. If we (Indian Testers) are only concerned with what we are doing in our company and think only about ourselves and our survival, And are not actually coming out and interacting with other Testers, then we are seriously missing out on an opportunity of mutual learning and improvement.

There are some initiatives which are being taken in this direction though, and one such initiative was Bangalore Workshop for Software Testers – 1 which was held in May this year. But what we really need is - to have more and more Software Testers getting together and interacting frequently, and more such events/workshops happening in India.

It is high time that we (Indian Testers) wake up to challenges like this, this, this, this and this, which is staring in our face and begging us to come out of the comfort zone and show to the world that When India is getting Software Testing projects – it is not just because of the cost/currency advantage.