Our plan for the December LogiGear Magazine was to have a forward-looking Trends and Challenges issue. However, whilst assembling our September issue on SMAC, we realized the momentum SMAC was gaining in the industry. We had a large amount of content on our hands from a range of excellent contributors. Thus, we decided to split the SMAC stack in two parts: Part 1: Social and Mobile in September and now, Part 2 Analytics and Cloud in December.
We are delighted to announce we will make a one-time, special “Year Ahead: Trends and Challenges Issue” for January. We are very excited about our first Trends issue. Let’s see what it has in store for us!
The SMAC stack is so important to the future of software development, we chose to close out 2016 covering its four aspects. The expectation that SMAC will have a large business impact is real. Though many predictions say implementing these systems has already begun and are getting larger, most say the biggest period of SMAC development lies ahead. Enterprises, products, brands, B2C and B2B companies or even any organization wanting to interact and engage with its user and customers will be using the SMAC paradigm. Every enterprise from media, games, retail, banking, finance, insurance and so many others has already begun this transformation.
What are the important parts for test teams? Analytics and Cloud are all about the data. In the past, test teams often divided between teams that focused on functionality, web and app server performance, UI, user experience and test automation. A different team focused on data, data security, database access, security and performance. These separate sub-domains in testing are merged in the SMAC world. The analytics are tied to the social and mobile aspects so tightly they can’t be separated. Frankly, with product development so rapid and teams so lean, there is a tremendous career growth prospect for testers to dive into these areas and be more fluent in all four aspects of SMAC.
In analytics now, there are testing needs throughout. This is due to a rise of data science and data scientists generating massive amounts of data. That data is then spun into metadata to be used by product and business teams.
All this is predicated on cloud solutions for storage and easy access, as well as data infrastructure that also needs testing
The new field of data science is a lot more complicated than our old, basic testing of CRUD. ETL is now the buzzword. CRUD (create, read update and delete) is the foundation of data testing. Your ability to use a tool, often simply a SQL query analyzer for CRUD testing was the first entry point in data testing. Now ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) is the entry for your data storage system testing.
In this issue, we will kick off with Analytics and the Cloud of SMAC. Software testing specialist Deepanshu Agarwal will be sharing his insight about Mobile app testing in the cloud and with analytics. We are pleased to announce the Blogger of the Month, Evgeni Kostadinov, who will guide us in testing data warehouses.
Our 2017 editorial calendar has been released. Please find it at: [**link]. We welcome submissions for publishing on these topics. See the submission guidelines at [**].
Keep an eye out for our special one-time annual Testing Trends issue in January.
Happy Holidays and all of us at LogiGear Magazine wish you a New Year with growth, opportunity, learning, health and happiness!
