Tags: Java
I've written a couple posts about my trip here to Bangalore. I've been talking about the life in India, as seen through my western eyes. While there's such a wide variety of stuff like that I could talk about ... I also want to talk about the Java Quality Team here in Bangalore. It's these people I've spent the last two weeks with.
We have perhaps 30 people in Bangalore, and one more in Hyderabad. Unfortunately I could not meet him, unless I were to have traveled to Hyderabad. So far as I know the Quality team has been here for around 5 years.
The bulk of the team members are in SQE, that is, Software Quality Engineering. We have a distinction between QE and QA, where QA is more focused on executing tests while the QE is more focused on creating tests. Our product is Java, and the user interface to that product is the Java API's, hence the test suites we write start from the API's, and hence the QE team is largely equivalent to software developers. The difference is the software we develop is tests meant to exercise and test the Java platform.
The QE organization is divided by the functional area of Java. So we have a team to cover Swing, another AWT, another 2D, another the libraries, another the tools, another the VM, another for JDBC, and so on.
The SQE teams represented in the Bangalore office are Swing, AWT, 2D, DragAndDrop (DnD), libraries, tools and networking.
There are two other teams here to discuss besides SQE.
The first is the Update Release team. You may or may not know this, both 1.4.2 and 1.5 are in maintanence mode. In Sun's product life cycle model, they are in the "sustain" phase where active development has finished, and there is a sustaining engineering team working to fix bugs.
Both 1.4.2 and 1.5 have an update release every 2 months. I see that 1.4.2 is at update 10 (a.k.a. 1.4.2_10) while 1.5 is at update 5 (a.k.a. 1.5.0_05).
The fixes that go into the update releases are developed by the Sustaining Engineering team. Sustaining is not part of the quality organization, and in any case there are some Sustaining Engineering team members here in Bangalore.
The Update Release quality team works with Sustaining Engineering, and they test the update releases before being shipped. To do so they use the test suites QE created for earlier releases.
The last team to discuss is the team I am a part of. That is, the Infrastructure Team, and the Tools team. Together we create and maintain the infrastructure used by the rest of the quality team, and our charter is creating efficiency and effectiveness in the rest of the organization.
These are the people in Bangalore. We have team members in other cities around the world including Beijing, St. Petersburg and Dublin Ireland.
Source:
weblogs.java.net
Comments
i'm just a college sophomore, and my core interest in java only. the post is realy v great. i have never come across a person from sun who has written on bangalore's sun office. what other things this guys do at bangalore, do they do any development besides testing, what are tools they use for testing?
Posted by: yatinkumbhare on November 20, 2005 at 11:11 PM
The Bangalore office has grown a lot and has over 700 engineers working on a wide array of Sun's software portfolio. There are both development and testing roles here. As for testing tools, keep an eye on this blog as I will be discussing them in the future.
Posted by: robogeek on November 21, 2005 at 12:55 AM
