2004: QFS’s CeBIT experience

Logo CeBIT 2004 QFS at CeBIT Hannover 2004

2004-03-18 – 2004-03-24, Hanover, Germany - Exhibitor and SUN-iForce Partner at the SUN stand. For the first time, Quality First Software GmbH was taking part in CeBIT 2004. The world’s largest IT trade-show with more than 6500 exhibitors was held in Hanover from March 18th through March 24th.

Even after a week in action, always friendly addressing unknown passers-by (“Do you speak Java?”) and continuously presenting qftestJUI, the enthusiasm of our team didn’t wane.

Drawn by our team or attracted by our qftestJUI flyer, many interested parties visited our stand, leading to more than 100 new business contacts and much valuable input. We also enjoyed the chance to meet some of our existing customers in person.

Besides the live-tests and demos, the discussions about Java, testing and quality assurance in general were extremely interesting. It is good to see the increase of importance that is ascribed to quality in software development.

A topic that came up very often was unit testing and its relation to qftestJUI. Of course, unit testing and functional GUI testing ideally complement each other, approaching the topic from opposite sides. The combination of both techniques, using qftestJUI to drive the application as a whole and set up a realistic environment for complex unit tests can result in extremely powerful tests that go way beyond what is possible with either unit or GUI tests alone. Thanks to the Jython interface, it is already possible to integrate unit tests into qftestJUI, but the topic is of such interest, that we will look into providing a much better integration.

Another topic of interest was SWT (the Standard Widget Toolkit from Eclipse) as an alternative to Swing. We’re going to review whether extending qftestJUI to support SWT tests appears feasible and desirable.

Thanks again to all our visitors for the inspiring discussions!

And a big “Thank you!” also to SUN for the opportunity to present QFS as an iForce partner under their roof. The friendly SUN-team, optimal cooperation and – last but not least – an excellent catering all contributed to the positive experience.