Its a different fun and as well as a challenge to write on something as basic as SDLC. SDLC stands for ‘Software Development Life Cycle’ and is the term which contains the different stages which happen when we develop a software.

I am sure that if you are in software development then this term wont be new for you but I am not sure whether we understand this in simpler terms. So I would explain this in brief with the help of a case-study.

Imagine that we have to develop a website for a ‘Taxi booking’ website. This taxi-booking site would offer its users the services of booking a taxi right from anywhere through internet. A user can just visit the site, fill the necessary information like source, destination, kind of taxi and be done with it. If you have to develop this website, you might get tempted to think that you can do it in jiffy since you know the requirements. Its a very simple problem to solve. Well, not really and that is why the first step in SDLC is the most critical and people who have been around would vouch that if we could do this first step really really well, rest of it is more of execution.
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For a while I was looking at a way to change the photos on my travel experience site with least effort. Not that I finally found a good answer but I did find a WP Plug-In which seemed to be doing the job. This plug-in is called “Header Image Rotator plugin for WordPress!” and here’s the website of the author.

So I quickly downloaded and set it all up but it didn’t work. Then I put a post at the forum but unfortunately I didn’t hear back. I searched around and I could not find any answer.

At the same time my brother-in-law and myself were thinking about it, not the plug-in but about the fact that we should write the necessary code to change header-photos on its own. So recently both of us sat together and thought that before we write a new piece of code,lets see if we can fix this wp image rotator plug-in. We were doing everything as per manual but somehow it was not working.

Let me give a brief of how this plug-in works.

1. Normally any WP template, worth its salt, would have a style-sheet.
2. Typically they would have a header-image.
3. Header-image will have its own div or its own descriptor in the .css file.
4. Normally, header.php file would be using this div to set the header-image.
5. When we use this plugin we copy certain photos at a location and then tell the plugin the div which the header.php is using.
6. Ideally, the plug-in would replace the div with its own code.

After not making any headway, we though about looking at the executed code which the browser was getting. So we loaded the home page on a browser and did ‘View Source’. What we found was that the plug-in was indeed setting the right div to a random image but after that statement, the original template was again setting the same div to what it usually sets, so what was indeed happening was
1. Plugin sets a random image from your collection as header-image
2. Then, the original template sets the default or what-so-ever header-image to that div.

End result is that for a user, the world is all same.

Here’s how we fixed it
1. We copied the style-sheet div section of the header-image in the .css file and created another one with a different name. In my case the header-image css was . I created another called .
2. In plug-in settings, I mentioned as my css id for header-image.
3. In header-php, we used instead of

And Voila it worked.

If you are having some problems here, you can try your luck by doing above.

I am sure using the word QA would make you think of processes we go by standard definition. But you all would certainly agree that testing and QA are quiet interchangeably used. Working in Software services since start of my career and mostly with onsite and offshore model I have worked in both SDLC and typical third party QA practices where the SDLC is being conducted in a distributed framework (Requirement and Design is done by one company, Coding and Unit testing by another, QA by another and final support is done by some other company). 10 years back I felt a dearth need for an end to end test management tool which would reduce confusion and chaos during the QA\ Testing process. To fulfill this I feel Quality Center is a perfect tool. I have implemented and used Quality Center (earlier called Test Director) in various projects across different organizations.

HP Quality Center is basically a web based test management tool which if used and implemented correctly would help you right from specifying testing requirements, planning tests, executing tests, and tracking defects.
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“Test 2008″ is the first testing conference organized by ‘Pure Conferences’. I happen to know the people behind this and these are the same folks who run ‘Pure Testing’, a testing consulting company, so when I got the invite for being there, I was not surprised.

Vipul, founder of Pure Testing, worked with me earlier at Adobe and while I still continue to test more software out here, he has moved on to pursue his dream of making the world better at doing ‘Software Testing’. After reading the invite and the envious list of speakers, I could not stop myself from writing this small post on the conference.

Test 2008 would be held on Oct 15-16 2008 in Delhi and the theme for the first conference is ‘Agility in Testing’. Speakers from around 10 countries, such as USA, UK, France, Sweden, Canada, Italy, Netherlands, including India will deliver keynotes, tutorials and papers during the conference. Apart from this, the organizers are also trying to make Test2008 a ‘green’ conference as far as possible.

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As software developers, you must have encountered this term at least once. Since most of us work for profit-making companies, this phrase ‘Open Source’ sounds like a dangerous word. While many of us may not understand it fully but probably most of us would associate this phrase with ‘free’ or ‘non-commercial’ or a sort-of ‘free tools’, ‘utilities’,'linux’, non-microsoft and many other things. To share honestly even I just discovered that I knew so little about it. So, may be a good enough topic to write on it.

‘Open Source’ at core is about making the ‘source code’ open or accessible to all. Since the code is open, it can be modified (with some conditions) and can be re-distributed. It can be a commercial activity (look at vendors who are distributing Linux) and it has been there for a long time.

The above definition is what I could make after reading at many places. If you look at the definition by the organization called ‘Open Source Initiative‘ (OSI) then its much more laced with adjectives and euphoria. Here’s what it says, for your quick reference

“Open source is a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.”

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