A Brave New World of Testing? An Interview with Google's James Whittaker

The increasing pervasiveness of cloud computing is changing the state of the practice in software testing. In an interview with James Whittaker, an engineering director at Google, editor in chief Forrest Shull explores some of the important trends in cloud computing and their implications. The conversation covers key technology changes, such as more pervasive access to monitoring frameworks, the ability to aggregate and act on feedback directly from massive user communities (the "crowdsourcing" of quality assurance), and the ability to know the exact machine configuration when bugs are discovered. All of these changes are having concrete impacts on which skills are important—and which no longer so—for software testers. An accompanying audio interview provides a complete recording of the conversation and more details on points such as privacy testing.