Devasahayam: The First Martyr For Jesus Christ In Travancore

Travancore was the first and foremost among the princely states of India to receive the message of Jesus Christ. According to tradition, St. Thomas the Apostle came to India in 52 A.D. He made many conversions along the west coast of India. It had to the beginning of the Christian Community in India from the early Christian era. He attained martyrdom in 72 A.D. At Calamina in St. Thomas mount, Madras. He was the first to be sacrificed for the sake of Christ in India. During the close of the second century A.D. The Gospel reached the people of southern most part of India, Travancore. Emperor Constantine deputed Theophilus to India in 354 A.D. To preach the Gospel. During this time the persecution of Christians in Persia seemed to have brought many Christian refugees to Malabar coast and after their arrival it strengthened the Christian community there. During the 4th century A.D. Thomas of Cana, a merchant from West Asia came to Malabar and converted many people. During the 6th century A.D. Theodore, a monk, visited India and reported the existence of a church and a few Christian groups at Mylapore and the monastery of St. Thomas in India. Joannes De Maringoly, Papal Legate who visited Malabar in 1348 has given evidence of the existence of a Latin Church at Quilon. Hosten noted many settlements from Karachi to Cape Comorin and from Cape Comorin to Mylapore. The Portuguese were the first European power to establish their power in India. Under the Portuguese, Christians experienced several changes in their general life and religion. Vas-co-da-gama reached Calicut on May 17, 1498. His arrival marked a new epoch in the history of Christianity in India. Many Syrian Catholics were brought into the Roman Catholic fold and made India, the most Catholic country in the East. Between 1535 to 1537 a group of Paravas were converted to Christianity by the Portuguese. In 1544 a group of fishermen were converted to Christian religion. St. Francis Xavier came to India in the year 1542. He is known as the second Apostle of India. He laid the foundation of Latin Christianity in Travancore. He could make many conversions. He is said to have baptized 30,000 people in South India. Roman Congregation of the propagation of Faith formed a Nemom Mission in 1622. The conversion of the Nairs was given much priority. As a result, several Nairs followed Christian faith particularly around Nemom about 8 k.m. South of Trivandrum. Ettuvitu pillaimars, the feudal chiefs began to persecute the Christians of the Nemom Mission. Martyr Devasahayam, belonged to the Nair community and was executed during the reign of Marthandavarma (1729-1758). It is an important chapter in the History of Christianity in South India in general, and of Travancore in particular.

Quality Assurance of Medium Scale Projects Using Dxprum Methodology

Agile methods are being used as a new way of developing software. They are basically used to fasten software development cycle by keeping an eye on its quality. Using Agile methods in any project along with quality assurance perspective is a crucial task. Many software developing organizations are using Agile methods now a days in their projects to reduce cost involved in a project. Agile methods are best suited for small projects as they require less resources and able to generate output in less time. However, days many organizations are also using Agile methods for medium and large scale projects. These projects also use large teams. Moreover, there may be teams having members taking part in these projects at geographically distributed locations. Assuring quality of these projects using Agile method is a challenging task as in Agile, testing is also carried out in each iteration along with software development. So the system has to be up and running every time for testing purpose. It means testing is only easy when organizations are working on small projects. As the size of the projects increases, the quality assurance of these projects also becomes a difficult task. The projects become complex as they require more resources and time, so there is always a burden on quality assurance team to deliver. The project may go for days and weeks without a functional build and thus testing cannot be done on regular basis. Secondly as the size of the project gets larger by adding more and more features in it, the number of tests is also increased to assure that the system is still performing what it is supposed to perform. The assurance of the quality of such projects is always a difficult task for any quality assurance team. Many Agile methods are being used by software developing organizations to build high quality software which involve less cost and time. Each Agile method has its own strengths and weaknesses. This research work is based on purposing a new hybrid Agile methodology DXPRUM. The DXPRUM is a combination of three of the agile models named as Dynamic System Development Method, Extreme Programming and Scrum (D comes from DSDM, XP from Extreme Programing, RUM from Scrum). The objective of the research is to purpose a new Agile methodology DXPRUM which combines the strengths of all the three Agile methods by removing their weaknesses. The main strength of DXPRUM will be the in time delivery of the project to customer with reduced cost.and the weaknesses to overcome will be to reduce resource utilization without affecting the output and to remove the overlapped resources. This research will consider a medium scale project with the implementation of a new Agile methodology DXPRUM under the perspective of quality assurance. The results of this research will also be compared with results of all three methods individually to validate the research.The metrics used for the evaluation will be total time in weeks, total number of modules build, total predicted hours, total line of code (LOC) and pre and post release defects etc.