[Video] Interview with Vallalarasu Pandiyan - Vallalarasu_P

[TanyaYatskovska]

Greetings Community,

I'm happy to share with you the newest, exclusive interview with the TestComplete expert and SmartBear Community Leader - Vallalarasu Pandiyan ( aka @Vallalarasu_P ). Valla has 12+ years of expertise in software testing. He does API and UI Testing. However, Valla thinks that UI Testing is his calling 🙂

Here are some insights you might find interesting: "Every beginner should connect with an expert", "TestComplete is one of the best tools for beginners to start", "UI Testing is much easier for beginners to learn", "Community, write more articles!"

Watch the interview, give us Kudos and leave your questions here.

Time stamps:

00:38 - about Valla

03:08 - must-have skills for beginners in QA

04:54 - TestComplete or SoapUI - what is better?!

07:46 - API Testing vs. UI Testing

08:40 - the future of testing

10:16 - a message to the Community

You can contact Valla directly here:

LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vallalarasupandiyan/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/vallalarasup

My blog: https://vallatestcomplete.wordpress.com/

The text version of the interview:

Tanya:

Hello SmartBear Community! Today we're talking with Vallalarasu, one of our SmartBear Community Leaders. Valla is actively participating in TestComplete and SOAP UI Communities, so, let's learn more about him. Hello, Valla, how are you?

Valla:

Hi, Tanya, I'm good, and I'm very glad to be part of the SmartBear Community Leader interview, thank you.

Tanya:

That's good! Thanks! Could you please start with a short introduction of yourself? Where are you from? What do you do in your spare time?

Valla:

Okay, so, I am from India, I live in Bangalore in India, and I have close to 12 years of experience in the testing industry, and I work with various functional testing tools, performance testing tools, REST service testing tools, and to answer your question about what I do regularly - whenever a new tool comes up or when a new technology comes up, I start learning it by myself, and I just get help from someone from an Internet community, like the SmartBear Community. It has been a regular practice of learning and teaching people because I was once working as a freelance trainer and also as a consultant so I meet lot of young people whom I trained sometimes, so, like, I have to be aware of what is going on in the market, so I read all the new stuff. That is the thing I do regularly.

Tanya:

Teaching people is always a good thing. We will return to this question a bit later, but, firstly, I'd like to ask - how did it happen that you chose the software testing field? How did you start your career? Why software testing, why not development?

Valla:

Okay, so, I started software testing because initially I was not so good at programming so I thought testing and getting into manual testing is the easiest thing to enter into the proper industry, so that was my initial perception, and, yes, that helped me get a job. Then, later, I had enough time to learn all the coding languages (C#, Java, JavaScript), and then I scaled up myself based on the requirements by frequent learning.

Tanya:

So, you had to learn coding anyway 🙂

Valla:

Yeah.

Tanya:

Okay, as you are an expert, you teach people, could you please recommend the skills that each new software tester should learn first? What can help them to start their career? And, what will be useful for their career in the future? What do you think?

Valla:

So, while being in a college, first, they should learn any coding language or scripting language for them to understand the basics of how you're looping and how all the stuff works, to understand the basics of that. That is important, that’s what I would suggest. Then, they should see what is at the top of the market now that can provide them with a job, and they should move towards that by learning that, going through a lot of tutorials. There are a lot of support websites, there are a lot of training websites available on the Internet. Here’s very important advice - every beginner should get connected with an expert. They can find them in a community, or on social media, or among their relatives or their friends. They should be connected with an expert so that they can get advice which they cannot find in the Internet. So, that is the most important thing I would say.

Tanya:

Okay, thanks, that's very interesting - finding an expert who will help you. This is one of the major things right now. So, like, find a mentor or find an expert who will help you. Yeah, that's very interesting, that’s very useful. Thanks. I see that you are actively participating in the TestComplete Community, and, recently, you have posted a great framework video about SOAP UI. What is your use case? Do you use both of these products?

Valla:

I have been working in multiple roles, and I mostly work as an individual contributor, so I have to get into a project, start immediately, do POC, deliver it to the client, and train the people to do it. I don't get a single tool that I will be working with, so I work with multiple tools based on the client’s requirements. When I get requirements, I start learning them, and I start implementing them, and then I am showing a demo to the client, and then I am improvising. So, speaking about TestComplete and SOAP UI, I have been using TestComplete very actively recently. As for SOAP UI, the video which you were taking about, is one of my old videos which I recorded, but it was really good and I see a lot of people are interested to know that. I think that SOAP UI is really good for web services because I used other tools also. And, TestComplete, I would say, is one of the best tools for any beginner to start. I mostly suggest my customers to go with TestComplete or any other paid tools so that they improve ROI very fast, instead of going to an open source tool because of the advantages that we have in TestComplete. We already have reporting, we already have project variables, the integrations, plug-ins are already available, so it will reap you the benefit of whatever you are investing in the tool cost. That will make your ROI better and your delivery faster, so, that's why, I got so impressed with TestComplete and SOAP UI.

Tanya:

Yeah, thanks, a great review of TestComplete. I liked it, but what I wanted to ask is - TestComplete and SOAP UI do different types of tests, UI testing in one case and API testing in the other case. In your opinion, is there a big difference between UI testing and API testing? I mean, maybe, doing API testing is easier because perhaps there's no need to prepare some testing frameworks or something like this, and doing UI testing is more difficult because of setting up of all these environments. What do you think? Just your short opinion on the difference between API testing and UI testing.

Valla:

I feel like UI testing is much easier for a beginner to learn because you can understand what happens really, and you can see the output and stuff, while API testing requires you to be an expert and also to interact with the developers to know your SOAP, your WSDL to do it. As I feel, UI testing is easier than API testing, but I like SOAP UI, too, so I don't say that TestComplete is better than SOAP UI.

Tanya:

Okay. I won't say this to our product teams 🙂 API at the moment is all around the world, so it is possible to see applications which work with services, and you'll need to test them, I am sure there will be, like, different artificial intelligent applications created, and they will work again with API services. Actually, what I wanted to say - what do you think about the future of the testing area? Will we test more, and, maybe, concentrate more on one error? What do you think we will be doing in 10 years?

Valla:

Okay, so, from my understanding, we will be getting more testing opportunities in the future, and their amount is already increasing. The only difference is we were testing in a different environment or on a different platform before compared to now, and, in the future, the environment and the platform are going to be different, but we will have more testing opportunities in the future because IOT's coming up, AI’s coming up, ML is coming up, and we also see the block chain is coming up, so all these new technologies are coming up. We will have more testing opportunities in the future. The question is - are we going to scale up ourselves to test in different environments? I see how Alexa testing can become a specific testing skill. We have an ML testing and all these things. For that I see there is a big future. Big division in testing is coming so we will have more opportunities for testing.

Tanya:

Okay, thanks. Anyway, we will have something to test, and this is good. Thanks a lot. That was a pleasure to talk with you, to learn more about you. Do you have anything to add, or, maybe, you have a message to our community members? It's your time!

Valla:

So, I want to thank every member who is active in the Community, and I want to specially thank all my senior Community Heroes and Community Leaders who were a motivation for me to become a Community Leader, and that has given me a chance of learning a lot. And, I encourage all the beginners who are coming into the Community to be more active so that there will be a set of people who are ready to help. And, one special request for all the community members is - write more articles! We have very good documentation in SmartBear, but even then you can write your own articles more, publish them in social media, and that will be good for the entire testing community. That's one request I have for everyone in the Community.

Tanya:

Ok, thanks a lot. So, prepare more articles and big thanks to all of our community members, Community Heroes. That's great! That was very interesting to talk with you. Thanks a lot and see you in the SmartBear Community.

Valla:

Thank you, Tanya.