The Rise in Vlogging—Why Testers Should Care
As a blogger, one of the recent exciting trends to me is vlogging—video blogging. Vlogging has existed for a few years now and is increasingly catching the industry’s attention. There has been a surge in the number of vloggers, discussions about blogging vs. vlogging, and vlogger fairs—all of which indicate that we will see more of this trend in the near future.
It is a known phenomenon that pictures and anything visual have the potential to be more effective in delivering a message than mere words. Vlogging has a wide scope—from mere personal and fun vlogs to the more professional ones, such as the powerful videos from the Khan Academy or even in software development and testing disciplines explaining concepts and techniques through short videos.
In addition to its ongoing educational videos, Khan Academy promotes some core concepts through collaboration with prominent personalities—for instance its collaboration with LeBron James to explain the mathematical concept of probability using a sports appeal.
The surge in web and rich Internet application technologies, the large presence of the Internet, recording-enabled phones, social networking applications, and video sharing platforms—especially YouTube—make vlogging increasingly popular among vloggers and the vlog-viewing communities.
Anyone can start vlogging, and the steps to create a vlog are not rocket science. While bloggers are cautious in taking to this new trend, it is not going unnoticed given the potential of a rightly created vlog.
As a tester, I see this trend taking varied shapes and forms among software makers with increasing availability of video content, video supported platforms, and rich content on mobile devices across domains.
Typical areas that might come in handy when testing for the video domain include understanding and using video editing software, testing for media encoders and decoders, experience in testing video publishing solutions, and understanding component dependencies, including technologies such as Flash, Silverlight, and HTML5.
From a testing scope standpoint, in addition to the functional testing areas, compatibility including device, screen resolution, rendering, usability, accessibility, and performance—especially with heavy video streaming—will all become relevant.
Accessibility testing for videos would be especially complex from a visually challenged standpoint because several aspects of content delivery—including tags, captioning, the right amount of audio to make it effective for challenged viewers, and compliances around Section 508 and Web Content Accessibility Guidelines—will all need to be accounted for in the testing strategy.
Although the effectiveness quotient of vlogging and the video industry appeals greatly to end users, the scope for growth is still large—making streaming and the user experience more consistent even in cases where the bandwidth is not great, searching and indexing within the video content, leveraging data within videos in big data computing, semantic web interpretations, etc.
The potential is huge, and it is exciting to see the industry embrace this trend. As testers, if we can embrace it too, we can certainly carve a niche for ourselves.
