Community, Innovation, and Testing: Maneesh Sharma [Testμ 2022]

After two successful sprints, we were back on Day 3 of the Testμ 2022 conference. The event started well with a great keynote speech by Maneesh Sharma.

Maneesh Sharma, COO of LambdaTest, is a popular name in the Indian tech ecosystem. He shows his expertise among emerging startups as an investor and advisor. He has over two decades of experience and is passionate about technology and software innovation. Previously, Maneesh was the country head and general manager of GitHub India, making it the world’s fastest-growing developer market.

Mudit Sigh, Marketing Head of LambdaTest, thanked Maneesh for the absolute strength he provided as a mentor.

Next, Maneesh started speaking about community, innovation, and testing.

Maneesh shared his admiration for the last two days. He then conveyed how developers are viewed in movies as someone sitting in a basement or a corner with four or five screens, eating a pizza, drinking coffee, and coding away. He spoke on how things are much more profound than pizza or coffee in real life. He spilled beans on how the software industry is all about the community coming together to solve user problems.

There have been instances where people write code and share it with others to solve a specific use case or a test case. Then they share it with the world.

He then shared his experience as a quality engineer for Netscape web and the proxy server. His experience working with testers and developers across the globe and looking into their use cases has given him a clear understanding of what the community is all about.

Maneesh then spoke on how apart from operating systems like Linux or Cloud frameworks, Kubernetes and dockers are also driving the whole force of the developer community.

Projects like Selenium automation, Appium mobile testing, and Cucumber framework are also used daily. He then explained how privileged we are to use these open source solutions on a daily basis.

He spoke on how when we talk about mobile to hybrid to cloud, we’re not talking about Agile DevOps in automation testing but speed and agility to execute digital acceleration. According to him, digital acceleration is not just directly proportional to the toolchain to solve specific use cases and accelerate the entire DevOps process. His views on the topic are that it’s the slowest component of the Developer toolchain but will define the speed of this whole toolchain. He further spoke about AI-led code authoring tools like GitHub co-pilot, Amazon code whisperer, or Salesforce cloud.

Maneesh believes these tools are accelerating software development and code writing by a factor of 100 to 1000x. Even when we look at the testing world, our partners, like AccelQ and Katalon, are helping testers write a lot more code using their code-authoring tools. He believes this will put a lot of strain on the entire CI/CD pipeline, thus slowing down the execution if integrated for continuous DevOps pipeline testing.

When your execution is not fast enough, it slows down the entire DevOps pipeline.

Talking about shift left, Maneesh spoke on how we talk about API testing, integration testing, and end-to-end test cases right now. While speaking about how extreme the gravity of this complex problem might be in the large landscape of DevOps, he believes that we need to execute all of these factors reliably, scalably, and securely without compromising on quality.

According to Maneesh, this is where digital adoption or digital software testing comes into the picture.

He further gave insights on the open-source support offered by LamdaTest. He then announced the launch of a $250000 open source grant that will support projects and developers working to solve testing problems. He then spoke about his zeal to help the student and developer community enter the industry to learn more about these testing frameworks.

Mudit then put forth a few questions to Maneesh. Here is the QNA:

You have been in the industry for quite a while. How have you seen the open source initiatives impact the idea industry?

Maneesh: The whole world is itself built on open source. Every software today has open-source embedded, including this live stream that we’re doing on this platform. There are so many testing frameworks that testers worldwide have been using to solve real-life business problems. One of the best open-source projects is Hoppscotch. It’s around API testing. We’ve seen developers across the world adopt Hoppscotch as well. This will also help students learn to code.

What are some of the open source projects and companies in the test automation space that you find exciting?

Maneesh: Tricky question! It’s like asking which of my two daughters I love the best. I can never choose between them. I love them equally. Maybe I can go and create a collection on GitHub and just consolidate all the testing open-source projects out there.

How do I spot opportunities for innovation? Which customers to target?

Maneesh: I think you don’t have to overthink. Innovation should offer solutions for problems like what’s the problem? Can I solve it differently? People are already solving problems today, but is there a better way of innovating? How can you push the envelope? Instead of making something better, it could be an existing process or solve a specific problem. Remember when I talked about the toolchain? The dev toolchain might be slow, so can you innovate in that toolchain to make things fast? When you can solve the problems at scale, that’s when it becomes innovation.

Mudit also conveyed how someone from Accenture wanted to share their happiness sitting at their home in a rural village and being able to listen to the prominent speeches.

We are incredibly grateful to everyone who joined us for Day 1 and 2. Hope this conference acts as a strong milestone for the testing community.

Happy testing!