Quality assurance (QA) activities are often seen as a necessary yet time-consuming and expensive process. This outlook can often limit the potential and impact of good QA. In reality, QA is not just about finding and fixing bugs; it’s a strategic value-add that can drive innovation, improve product stickiness, accelerate time-to-market, and enhance overall product quality. Yet, finding the balance between a necessary task and strategic impact can be challenging for many organizations.

Quality and functionality are critical factors in software development. This is where testing methodologies like smoke testing and functional testing come into play. Smoke testing is a high-level, preliminary testing process to ensure that a software program’s most critical functions are working correctly. In contrast, functional testing is a more detailed and thorough testing process.

An IllegalStateException is a runtime exception in Java that is thrown to indicate that a method has been invoked at an illegal or inappropriate time. To use an analogy, invoking a method in Java when the system is not in the appropriate state is like trying to start a car while it is in "Drive". Just as the car will not start because it is unsafe, a method call results in an IllegalStateException when the internal conditions necessary for its execution are not met.

Defect management is the systematic process of detecting, documenting, and resolving defects within software applications. A defect refers to any flaw or deviation from the expected behavior, which can arise from coding errors, incorrect logic, incomplete implementations, or unforeseen interactions between software components.

Over the past two and a half decades, Java has consistently been ranked as one of the top 3 most popular programming languages in the world . As a compiled language, any source code written in Java needs to be translated (i.e., compiled) into machine code before it can be executed.

Data fabric is an architecture that integrates different data systems and tools. It provides unified access to data stored across various locations to organize, manage, and govern it without moving it to a central database or data warehouse or changing its format. Data fabric relies on metadata to ‘understand’ the data’s structure, lineage, and meaning across various sources. This information enables informed decision-making and optimized data usage.

In this latest entry of our captivating interview series that focuses on major players in the global tech arena, we welcome Software Engineer Shaman Bhat. We will explore his career development, provide tips for aspiring software engineers, and discuss the key lessons he has learned in his software engineering journey.

Started in 2009 as a research project at UC Berkeley, Apache Spark transformed how data scientists and engineers work with large data sets, empowering countless organizations to accelerate time-to-value for their analytics activities. Apache Spark is now the most popular engine for distributed data processing at scale, with thousands of companies (including 80% of the Fortune 500) using Spark to support their big data analytics initiatives.

A balanced combination of manual and automated testing is the way to go if you want to achieve higher test coverage and efficiency. They cover for each other. Manual testing is easy to learn and do, but it is highly likely to create inconsistent test results, and sometimes it takes a lot of time and effort. On the other hand, automation testing requires a lot of technical expertise to create and maintain scripts, but it checks bugs much faster with higher consistency.