The Hindu Business Line : Be not clueless about the wireless world

THOUGH much of SMS may be for fun and gossip, it may surprise you that the traffic generated revenue of $333 million in 2003 to operators and content players in China.

Estimates for 2004 are at $533 million, informs Lunita Mendoza in Asia Unplugged, a book that she has jointly edited with Madanmohan Rao, from Response Books (www.indiasage.com) .

"In the first 10 months of 2003, the volume of SMS in China reached 108.7 billion messages, 14.4 billion more than that in all of 2002."

A recent report on www.w2forum.com talks of 2004 statistics: 217.76 billion `pieces', "increasing 58.8 per cent year on year, equating to revenue of around $18 billion."

Another paper in the book is on GSM competition in Thailand, written by Srikanya Mongkonsiri. There, teens seem to love sending MMS and melodies, not just SMS.

The wireless market is dominated by AIS or Advanced Info Services Plc founded by the country's Prime Minister, Thaksin Shinawatra. Politics may well be the side business!

In Japan there's the `IT Basic Law', on the `formation of an advanced information and communication network society,' informs Shinichi Saito's paper.

According to numbers from MPHPT, the country's ministry of public management, home affairs, and post and telecommunications, more than 54 per cent of the population is connected to the Net. The year 2001 was declared the `First Year of Broadband'; and "wireless LAN service in public locations known as `hotspots' was launched in April 2002," to cover places such as railway stations, hotels, restaurants and so on.

Statistics from the Internet Association of Japan shows that 15 per cent of total Net users are accessing from laptops, PDAs (personal digital assistant) and other mobile equipment.

South Korea is a `broadband pioneer' extols John Lee's chapter on `the wireless way of life'. Wireless data-related revenues have been on the upswing. A forecast from the country's ministry of information and communication is that the wireless Internet market is bound to nearly treble to 7 trillion won (or $6 billion) by 2007. "Subscription-based services that are proving to be very popular are colour ring services (muzak-like answering service), location-based car navigation services (via base station triangularisation) and TV services (e.g. view television channels on your phone while commuting home on a subway)."

There are papers on major themes: such as `Wireless in Local Loop' by Ashok Jhunjhunwala, m-commerce by Sunanda Sangwan, Wi-Fi by Subha Rama, legal issues in the Net arena by Tan Min-Liang, and radio communications by T.H. Chowdary.

Useful inputs to plug into, unless you intend remaining clueless about the wireless world.

Testers should become component spies!

SOFTWARE can be tested by anybody. No, that's a myth, point out Scott Loveland, Geoffrey Miller, Richard Prewitt Jr and Michael Shannon in their book, Software Testing Techniques: Finding the Defects that Matter, from Shroff Publishers (www.shroffpublishers.com) .

There are tester traits that the authors list out, such as being curious, sceptical, restless, upbeat, diplomatic, insatiable, generous, empathetic and resilient. Check if you have these qualities.

Software that makes the world go round has to be of `industrial-strength', as for example, software that makes people draw money from the ATM, delivers overnight package to the right place on time, and so on.

Such software is "not a science project," emphasise the authors. "In a classroom environment, getting a program to run once is often the end game: once it works, you hand it in and celebrate. In commercial environments, once a program seems to work, the game has just begun."

The program will have to keep adapting to changing requirements, as an analogy explains: "This is similar to how San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge is kept golden. A paint crew starts at one end and works its way to the other; when the painters finish, they start over again."

Thus, commercial programs go through multiple release cycles, taking into account compatibility with earlier versions and also making it easy to migrate.

Should developers test their own software? While it is normal to allow them to perform UT or unit test, keep them out of FVT, function verification test, and SVT, system verification test, advise the authors. The Reason? Developers will only test the paths they know the code is designed to handle.

"This trap of testing only what you know should work is sometimes termed, `happy path testing'." While developers are intent on making things, testers are breakers and they "live for bugs".

Remember that software development is `a team sport'.

As complexity increases, it will become impossible for any single person to know everything and check all interactions.

An effective approach, as the authors counsel, is for individual testers to take ownership of different components of the software, by becoming a `component spy'.

What does this spy do? Not just dig deeply into the component he has been assigned to test but he'd "explore the entire component".

Once you accept the premise that all software has bugs, and also that testing will never remove them all, you'd concur with the book's suggestion to create "self-healing software that anticipates and recovers from errors".

Since somehow `Murphy' shows up "to toss in the proverbial monkey wrench," plan for trouble.

And also plan to read this well-written book, so your testers can have a tough time trying to locate errors in your code.

Tailpiece

Overheard at the Bombay Mouse Company:

"Boss, we've received a notice from the FDA!"

"But, we don't make any baby oil!"

"No, sir, they say there's a case of misbranding with our mouse, since mice may find it unsuitable."

Books2Byte@TheHindu.co.in

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