Testers: Empower Yourself to Ride the Music Wave
Consumerization of technology is one of the trends forecasted to pick up steam in 2013.
While devices and services in areas such as the mobile market, health and fitness domains, televisions, etc., are expected to be available to end users at lower costs, there is an increasing growth in the investments in the music market—especially music players—with analysts predicting expensive systems will be coming into the market this year.
At the recent Consumer Electronics Show, several vendors demonstrated their products in the audio and video space and previewed what will be released soon. Technology undoubtedly has touched every possible domain, and music is no exception.
In fact, music has been one of the early technology adopters, whether you are a musician or an end user enjoying the delivered music. Companies, including giants such as Amazon, Google, and Apple, are constantly researching to make the experience more compelling for end users through their offerings—and to surpass each other in their market shares.
AutoRip from Amazon is a recent free service that is a clear example of the ongoing investments in the domain, although there are several other players who have established a sizeable market for themselves. Whether offered as a paid or a free service, music is one of the wands that companies typically leverage to entice users and build brand loyalty.
As testers—whether or not we work directly in the music domain—it is important for us to keep track of the latest market and technology trends to better prepare ourselves to embrace them in our testing repertoire. Since music has become so intertwined with other domains, there is a decent chance we will be touching on this space in our testing efforts if we are testing end user facing products and services.
Some of the buzzwords that are going to be important to build skills on and will be valuable in this domain include cloud computing, devices and cross compatibility, software-as-a-service, application-oriented testing, and mobile technologies. These are transferable skills that are very useful across several domains but more so for the music space.
Understanding competition is very important here given the feature richness and multitude of offerings that each player introduces frequently. Testing could play a major role in determining the success of the product and/or service, especially since several giants have been trying to create spaces for themselves in the music market for quite a few years now. This will go a long way toward enhancing test coverage for the product/service at hand and making suggestions for future improvements.
In our digitally connected age, it will be very exciting to see what new devices and services come to market in the next couple of years. But let’s not wait until then to sharpen our skills in using them—either as end users or testers.
