The evolution of dev

Transcript of discussions with

(In this SmartBits, Srinivasan Desikan outlines “The evolution of dev”. The video is at the end of this blog)

If you look at industrial evolution, you can classify this into four dimensions. The first evolution that happened is on the infrastructure side where individual people used to have their own PC’s and they wanted to share those individual PC’s. That’s when the Test lab was created. if you really see that dimension was really initiated by test engineers, they did the consolidation of all the machines and that was called a test lab, then over a period of time, they added some compliance requirements to it became data centre when they added to the data centre, they wanted to have more operating systems than what they have, so they created virtualisation. 

The testing folks said, let us have a quick control of all these resources, whether it is virtual or whether it is real and that became data centre. Then looking at the reliability of the test lab data centre companies decided let us host our services on those data centres so that our customers can use it using the very own processes which were created by the test engineers. That became the industrialized data centre and then cloud evolved from it. 

The cloud is nothing but something which is elastic, you put a small data centre somewhere and then you keep elongating it based on the needs based on utilization. Elasticity does not mean only expanding but also whenever there is no load bring it down that is what is cloud and after Cloud now people are actually talking about, having virtual images within virtual images which are called Dockers, containers and Kubernetes that’s one side of the dimension. That is the dimension one, which was initiated by the test Engineers. 

The second dimension which obviously was not created by the testing teams, but it has evolved over a period of time. Those days we used to have desktops then it became laptops, smaller in size then it became palmtops even smaller in size. Then it became mobile and today we are actually talking about IOT devices which go and sit in each and every appliance at home that is a second dimension of the evolution. 

If you look at the third evolution of dimension- the process delivery model,  waterfall model where strict coding is completed and only then testing was done and after that people wanted to parallelize testing and development team then became V model and V model became spiral model then spiral model became agile model. Then the agile model is becoming super lean model, which is called lean development, processes and  related things that is on the process delivery model that is the third dimension to it.

The fourth dimension to the evolutions what I have seen in the last 30 years is the customer payment model. Initially when all the desktops and other things were available in the office, they were all purchased by paying full cash. Which is a hundred percent Capex and 0% Opex. The electricity was paid by the same company. The maintenance was paid by the same company. There were no operational expenses. Everything is a capital expenditure and slowly they moved into optimal capex and Opex, they wanted to outsource some of the maintenance part of those machines therein they brought in some element of operational expenses other than a capital expenditure. Then  went to another model where there is less capex but more opex they want ,started renting out the machines from outside and after that consumption-based volumetric model evolved where , you buy a product from us and depending on the number of users you have or depending upon the number of amount of utilization those users can, we will charge you that became the consumption-based volumetric model .

The last one which is becoming predominant, now is pay-per-use ,you do not invest anything that is zero cape and everything is opex.  It is going in Uber or Ola and now the insurance is paid, the car is bought by the company and you just go use it and for the amount of time or amount of a distance you have used, you pay them.  Whenever you want, you can do it you can rent out a Mercedes today, use it as it is your own vehicle but you still need not own it.

These are the four different dimensions in the industry has evolved in my opinion.The intersection of all these four is the sweet spot all the test engineer should work on. The dimension one and the fourth the infrastructure as well as the process delivery model. Both of them are invented by the key engineers. Moving to the waterfall model to V model is actually done by key engineer. Moving from the individually kept machines to a test lab was actually initiated by that testing teams Majority of the evolution what you see in the industry. The starting point is testing and the sweet spot for the test engineers is to look at all these four dimensions and how they are going. What I told you is only the 30-year story it will continue for another 30 years or another 60 years, but these dimensions will stay but the evolutions will continue to happen. The sweet spot here is which tells you how fast we should evolve, so speed is very important.

The second thing, no investment. Everything is becoming virtual, companies will become virtual, the offices will become virtual, people can work from home and people can take jobs workloads which you call it as work load from the internet and you may not have any manager. You may not have any infrastructure your capital expenditure, maybe zero sitting at home and you will be still delivering the products and most of it what you do sitting at home would be apt testing. That is  where I think the industry is evolving.