Nishant Verma

Friends read my new post on "I am lucky to have found Co-founders". Link here Excerpt from the post below:  Most of us who think of starting their own company are generally very confident. Confident of taking the plunge, confident of the idea we have, confident of how the execution should be, confident about what to do when things might not work out. When I thought about why I co-founded a company ( TestVagrant Technologies ) with two other folks, it was an interesting thought process which revealed quite a lot about my thought process. So when I actually look back, this whole idea was there from quite a long time (almost 3 years). All three of us used to work together in the same company so we had that advantage of knowing each and experiencing what it feels like working with them. Also there were instances where their approach and problem solving skills highly impressed me.

TestVagrant Technologies has released two free Ebooks on Gitbook.io and couple of projects in github which can help you get started with Appium and Cucumber-JVM. Both the books are for beginners and have detailed steps on how to set-up and goes till how to execute your first test. We did find lack of good documentation on both the subject in terms of starting up so we tried putting one hand book for the same. Happy Reading !!! Appium for Android A quick reference book on how to use Appium for automating Android Application using Java. This would detail each and every practical aspects right from setting up Appium to running the test on actual devices. Ebook link:  http://bit.do/TfhQ Github link:  https://github.com/testvagrant/AppiumDemo Building a Test Framework Using Cucumber-JVM This book talks about building a cucumber-jvm based functional test framework with selenium in the background. Ebook link:  http://bit.ly/1xrv1Oq Github link: ...

Today I was having a discussion with one of my long time friend who is in a senior role in an IT industry. We touched upon a lot of topic but one thing which makes me write this blog is Culture, Quality (by quality I mean the quality of people) and Growth.  For once it does look like 3 different topics but it's actually interrelated and bringing up one invokes other. So you can't have discussion on Culture in silo or for that matter either Quality or Growth. Relating from my experience of hiring in one of the companies I worked with, had three rounds of interview with two people evaluating the person in each round. So if a candidate has gone through all rounds there would be six different opinions and a higher chance that people might have mixed opinions. The only situations where all six of them would have readily agreed was when the candidate is really poor in knowledge (mostly they wouldn't reach next round ) or really outstanding where in people reach consen...

Exactly that's how my life has been from past 2 months since I left my full time job ! It's more peaceful and lot more focussed on what I want to do for myself and definitely the big picture for which I envisioned and left my job. Working full time in an IT company is a bit competitive in terms of work pressure, the desire to perform better, the desire to stand by the faith of people who trusted you with the opportunity. Believe me working in IT for 8 years did leave some traces of competitiveness in me as in I miss competing with a bunch of intelligent people and try everything to stand out as in a healthy competition. Aaah I miss that really! And I see there is nothing wrong with that, that's how our pay system or appraisal system is designed as well. Less of caffeine trust me is a big favour you are doing for yourself. You don't need that much of caffeine. There was a time when I was having close to around 15 cups of coffee in a day in one of my  previous organ...

I am very happy to announce the first book I have written. It's a technical help e-book written on Appium and targeted for fellow testers who are looking for a guide that can help them use Appium for Android app automation. Snippet from book: Appium is an Open Source tool for testing native or hybrid mobile apps. It uses WebDriver JSON Wire protocol to drive both iOS and Android apps.There is descent documentation mentioned on the Appium site but somewhere it lacked to produce a guide, which can help you get rolling.This book is an effort to consolidate all the knowledge and resources to help you successfully use Appium to automate the android application. It will also help run the automated suite on real devices.   You can download the book and read it online here .  Happy to welcome your feedback and reviews !

Lesson 1: No matter what you do, few things will go at it's own pace ! When you can't influence them, bear them and be happy ! When I planned with other two friends of mine to leave ThoughtWorks and set up a company of our own, we had no much of idea of outside world. We were starting on getting the company name finalised, registering the company. Reading mostly on web we found out that it would take around 4 weeks to register a company. We thought we have around 4 weeks of notice period and started the procedure. Believe me if it's a government work you are bound to repeat the task at least once. It took us 8 weeks to register the company and get all the documentation done and a ton of patience, there are still couple of filing under progress which are more like nice to have. Plus the whole government functionary is black box. So in case you are registering for a new company you would need to submit four names as a potential choice for company name. Ahhh yes 4 na...

Ever felt the need to have a projection of your mobile screen right on your car wind shield ? Yes I did imagine at times that I should have option to project my mobile screen on the car wind shield and I could read my emails or reply to someone on chat while I am standing on a signal ! But looks like someone is just thinking in this direction and has created something which just blew my mind ! The only difference is that it's not the projection on the wind shield but it's a smaller screen which gives you the same feel !  Added advantage you have is that of a gesture support! Sounds pretty cool and futuristic ? Look at it yourself ! Thank you Navdy for coming up with such a cool product ! 

This is the first time when from coming monday I will have no office to go to. I will not drive through the busy inner ring road of Domlur (Bangalore) to reach office in Koramangla, I will be at home for few days! There is a certain amount of fear when you leave something so set for unknown. Unknown where you  for sure don't know what would be coming to you next. The moment one face something unknown, fear starts coming in, fear that it will disrupt your life, fear that it might derail all the plans you have. But this fear is more of a guiding nature and satisfying because everyday it will give you a chance to face it.  It will be worth reflecting when was the last time you faced such a fear ! Really this is what I am feeling after leaving my full time job at ThoughtWorks.  I know we can debate on the purpose of life and how you take life as ! But somewhere I feel the very purpose of life is to explore things around you, uncover new ways, uncover new paths without ...

It's been 4.5 years I spent in ThoughtWorks learning technologies and management aspects from some of the best industry practitioners. I was enjoying my time in ThoughtWorks and then one fine day I decided to move on and try something of my own with few friends at ThoughtWorks. Actually it was in discussion from quite some time which I had in some corner of my mind. But it took considerable amount of time for my irrational sense to dominate the rationality of my mind. Yeah the rational brain of mine was adamant that it's all going good in ThoughtWorks work wise, money wise, career wise, learning wise. But then it was a desire in me which was making me un-satisfied somewhere with what I had in life. Someone told me once "if you always do what you did, you will always get what you got" and this is stuck in my mind since then. Once I was telling my friend find out the reason why you are working, and they were telling reasons which wasn't able to convince themselv...

Off-late I have been thinking why do we write ? When I look back (some 7 years ago) to find a reason why I started writing, I find a different reason for myself. But if I have to generalise and convey I will say I started writing because I wanted to have a name for myself. There is a different story altogether on why I wanted name for myself :-) I spoke to a lot of people who write blog as well and if i have to vaguely categorise why people write then it would because of 3 broad reasons briefly discussed below. The first one why we write is for ourselves. We write to have a name for ourselves. We write so that someone can refer to us as a clever or smart or intelligent person. Yeah it's a bit egotistic thing but it is the truth. Sometimes we even write to express our feelings and thoughts buried deep inside. The second reason why we write is to live the moment. Generally when you write on certain topics you tend to project yourself in that situation and then write. We visua...

This blogs post is in continuation to the series in which I shared my learning from Distributed Agile project. Link of the post here :  goo.gl/xV9qfw With this I am sharing my project management learning. While being on the project for around 8-9 months, I have captured different dimensions which as a project manager you would have to think of. This is just a guideline and not the exhaustive list, different project would provide different learning. So at a high level I have portrayed the agile project manager as wearing 6 different hats.  These hats let him gain insight into the project from different angles and enables him to take better decision during the course of the project. Also it helps the agile project manager to optimise the budget and other factors which influences the delivery of the project. Slideshare link:  http://www.slideshare.net/NishantVerma3/agile-project-management-33732966

Recently I came across a production issue for the project I am working on. The error was that the page shows the loading icon and stays in that state when the internet speed is slow. On analysing the issue developers found that when the network speed is slow and the page is unable to download the js file with 7 seconds (specified time out), and it goes into that load state. Probably one tip here would be test out your application on a slow network speed. Generally while we test the app, we are on the best of the internet speed. So this post is about how you can simulate the low network speed and test your app on browser.  There is a tool called Charles ( website link ) which will let you simulate the slow network speed. By the way it's a paid tool which has a trial version as well which runs for good 30 minutes. Trial version solved the problem for me so I would recommend using that first. Step 1: Download and Install. This is clean and wouldn't have any issues. Ste...

It's been quite some time that I am involved in a project, which involves distributed agile team. There is a lot I have learned being the project manager on the team and I would want to share here. The project is distributed across Bangalore and Cincinnati. By the way a distributed team is the one, which is constrained from collaborating in person or face-to-face. Typical set up I am in is, smaller team onshore and a larger team offshore. Smaller team, which is onshore, has the advantage of being closer to Product Owner. This post is mostly to share my experiences and learning from managing such a team and helping the team to deliver. One thing for sure is it's not easy to implement, it has its own challenges. Below are some of the items, which we need to take care a lot in a distributed agile mode: Communication : As I mentioned earlier that there is a small team, which is present at onsite gets the advantage of sitting next to Product Owners. A...