Why Virtusa supports QA teams volunteering on OLPC?

Virtusa has been applying and contributing to Open Source R&D for quite a long time now, from Apache contributions on Web Services, to the Sahana Disaster Management project in the wake of the Tsunami and most recently to OLPC. In the case of OLPC through with our experience with Open Source, we realized that there is much opportunity to contribute to Quality Assurance (QA) as most often Open Source volunteers are motivated rather by the research and development side of the project and there often is not enough focus on QA. Yet projects like OLPC and Sahana have a global impact and in the latter case needs to be mission critical, thus the quality and stability of the system should be a very important part of the project.

Why OLPC? Well despite the challenges OLPC foundation has had based on their policy for deployment (e.g arrangements only with Govs and not with the private sector for deployment), their mission to empower children is certainly very honorable and something that should be supported by all of us to help bridge the digital divide. It also has to be noted that some people have mis-understood the OLPC. It is supposed to be a tool that will supplement (and not replace) existing education systems and empower especially children in rural communities, who otherwise would not have access to IT or IT teachers for learning, enabling them to learn for themselves. OLPC also has had a much broader indirect impact, as it has been a flagship product that greatly helped bring about the netbook revolution and simply the existence of the OLPC and it’s $100 target has certainly helped drive down costs and have got people thinking about other low-cost solutions for educating children in rural communities. This competition is healthy and it will certainly progress further with the upcoming releases of the OLPC 1.5 and OLPC 2.0 (touch based, iPad like laptop), embodying a lot of lessons from the deployment of the first OLPC 1.0s.

Overall Virtusans volunteers have spent about 40 man months on the project so far delivering about 800 test cases. A good deal of time was spent learning how the system is supposed to work, especially as Open Source projects typically do not have well defined requirement specifications and Use Cases, which are normally used by our teams to derive test cases in client projects. But now we do have sufficient knowledge to quickly nurture new contributors and we presently have volunteers in India and Sri Lanka contributing off our spare QA capacity on the project. One area we are specifically looking at now is test automation on the Redhat based sugar operating system as a mechanism for providing more efficiency for testing new builds.

Virtusa and Virtusans will continue to help OLPC achieve their goals by supporting the team with QA contributions as part of our Corporate Social Responsibility in a initiative we call Tech Reach.

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Sri Lankan President Launches OLPC program

I was invited to the Sri Lankan President's residence at temple trees today for the launch of the OLPC program in Sri Lankan. 1300 laptops are to be distributed to 13 rural schools. A lot of partners were involved in getting this off the ground including many members of the FOSS community. Virtusa specifically sponsored the server machines for the schools as part of their CSR "digital reach" effort. We wish the Ministry of Education, who is at the center of this effort the best success as it certainly will do wonders for kids in rural areas. I remember the amount of keen curiosity and interest the kids had when we did our field tests in the schools. Apart from that, it was an great opportunity to see the president up close, as he was sitting just two chairs just in front of me. I am generally a fan of our president as whatever said and done, he lead this country out of a devastating civil war, the magnitude of problem, militarily, economically, socially and politically (particularly international politics), which no other president before had to face or ever had firm a resolve to overcome. All our kids have a chance for a future in this country because of the end of this war, that deteriorated our nation for decades. So the president can rest on his laurels as far as I am concerned at least for now, as he delivered on this important promise to his fellow Citizens only just few months ago. Now it is time for all of us to contribute to heal the wounds left behind after the civil war and ensure that the reason for the civil war does not rise again.

Ref Article: http://blog.laptop.org/2009/12/10/sri-lankan-president-launches-a-national-xo-program/