Software Testing

Keynotes

K1 The Care and Feeding of Feedback Cycles

Elisabeth Hendrickson, Pivotal

Wed, 11/11/2015 - 8:30am

Nothing interrupts the continuous flow of value like bad surprises that require immediate attention—major defects, service outages, support escalations, and even scrapping capabilities that don’t actually meet business needs. We already know that the sooner we discover a problem, the sooner and more smoothly we can remedy it. Elisabeth Hendrickson says that feedback comes in many forms, only some of which are traditionally considered testing. Continuous integration, acceptance testing, and cohort analysis to validate business hypotheses are all examples of important feedback cycles. Elisabeth examines the many forms of feedback, the questions each can answer, and the risks each can mitigate. She takes a fresh look at the churn and disruption created by having high feedback latency. Elisabeth considers how addressing bugs that are not detracting from business value can distract us from addressing real risks. Along the way, Elisabeth details fundamental principles that you can apply immediately to keep your feedback cycles healthy and happy.

K2 Continuous EVERYTHING: How Agile Is Changing Our World Forever

Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.

Wed, 11/11/2015 - 10:00am

Everywhere we look these days we see the word continuous—continuous delivery, continuous integration, continuous deployment, continuous testing, continuous security, and continuous ______ (fill in the blank). It’s continuous everything! So, what’s happening in our industry? Will a move toward more continuous practices result in better software? Will agile have any long-lasting effect on how software is built, tested, delivered, and maintained? Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the link between agile and continuous software engineering capabilities. Learn how operating in a continuous manner not only speeds things up but also results in better software quality and security. Discover how the continuous nature of agile is changing our world. Leave with an understanding of what this change means for us as software professionals. Take back knowledge about how we can get more involved in the continuous processes that surround our work.

K4 Scaling Agile: A Guide for the Perplexed

Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed

Thu, 11/12/2015 - 4:15pm

Scrum, XP, and Kanban are familiar agile methods. Now in the second decade of their adoption, agile methods continue to help organizations worldwide respond to change and shorten the time to deliver value. An overwhelming 88 percent of executives cite organizational agility as key to global success. So, in recent years, many have begun scaling their early agile adoptions beyond individual teams to programs, portfolios, and the enterprise. Even though today’s scaling techniques are not yet fully understood, new scaling frameworks continue to emerge. Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore this exciting area and discover approaches to scale agile in a way that makes the best sense for your organization. Learn about scaling frameworks including the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), as well as the simple Scrum-of-Scrums meeting. Join Sanjiv to explore how you can develop a straightforward scaling strategy for your organization.

Concurrent Sessions

BW6 Privacy, Security, and Trust in the Mobile Age

Philip Lew, XBOSoft

Wed, 11/11/2015 - 1:30pm

As mobile technologies penetrate our lives, the rate at which we generate and access data accelerates. Our mobile phones now have more memory than we thought we needed—and somehow we fill it up—and are repositories of important and private data. A recent study revealed that, due to concerns about personal information, more than half of mobile application users have uninstalled or decided not to install an application. So what does this mean for us? It means that no matter how great or how slick our app is, unless we give users the sense of security and privacy they want and deserve, we will fail to gain their trust. And because users are now more vocal than ever, trust is becoming a new currency that will drive end user uptake. Join Phil Lew to discover how we can foster trust in our apps. In this thought-provoking session, Phil reveals key elements and characteristics to enable us to design and evaluate a mobile application that generates end user trust.

BW9 Testing Is the Profession I Chose

Jyothi Rangaiah

Wed, 11/11/2015 - 2:45pm

Never underestimate the power of sharing the testing team’s achievements, lessons learned, challenges faced, roadblocks encountered, and the enriching solutions found. Jyothi Rangaiah says as testers we must be ready to nurture the needs of testing and testers in the organizations we serve. Only people, learning every day and questioning the norm, can and will move testing forward. Getting into this learning mode requires awareness of the need to improve. Jyothi discusses the importance of sharing the testing team’s everyday challenges and achievements with all involved.

BW12 Exploratory Testing: Make It Part of Your Test Strategy

Kevin Dunne, QA Symphony

Wed, 11/11/2015 - 4:15pm

Developers often have the unfortunate distinction of not thoroughly testing their code. It’s not that developers do not understand how to test well; it’s just that often they have not had an opportunity to understand how the product works. Kevin Dunne maintains that implementing a team-wide exploratory testing initiative can help build the collaboration and knowledge sharing needed to elevate all team members to the level of product master. Exploratory testing can be performed by anyone, but the real challenge is making sure that the process is properly managed, documented, and optimized. Kevin describes the tools necessary to drive a deeper understanding of software quality and to implement an effective and impactful exploratory testing practice. Creating better software is not just about writing code more accurately and efficiently; it is about delivering value to the end user. Well-executed exploratory testing helps unlock this capability across the entire development team.

BT3 Test Data Management: A Healthcare Industry Case Study

Jatinder Singh, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care

Shaheer Mohammed, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care

Thu, 11/12/2015 - 10:00am

As IT systems increase in both scale and complexity, delivering quality applications becomes more challenging. In addition to creating and executing test scenarios, testers need to create and maintain the test data that enables test execution. Test data management (TDM) creates and processes data in test environments using business knowledge and technology. Test data is created based on requirements provided from consumers. With TDM in your software delivery process, teams dependent on data can focus on creating and executing test scenarios instead of having to provision the data to run these tests. Shaheer Mohammed and Jatinder Singh present a case study that recaps the successful creation of a TDM team. They review what worked well, share lessons learned along the way, touch on the challenges of managing protected data in the health-care industry, and discuss innovative tools and processes that enabled their success.

BT6 Detection Theory Applied to Finding and Fixing Defects

Ru Cindrea, Altom Consulting

Thu, 11/12/2015 - 11:30am

Detection theory says: When trying to detect a certain event, a person can correctly report that it happened, miss it, report a false alarm, or correctly report that nothing happened. Under conditions of uncertainty, the decision to report an event is strongly influenced by how likely it is that the event could happen or what the consequences of the event might be. Using real life examples, Ru Cindrea shows how this theory can be applied not only to finding defects but also to fixing them. The decision to fix a defect is also made under conditions of uncertainty and, although testers are not the ones making such decisions, testers may influence how decisions are made. Ru discusses how we testers, in addition to finding the right balance between misses and false alarms when hunting for defects, must use our credibility to provide the right information to stakeholders making decisions about fixing defects.

BT9 Fostering Long-Term Test Automation Success

Carl Nagle, SAS Institute, Inc.

Thu, 11/12/2015 - 1:30pm

In today’s environment of plummeting software delivery cycle times, test automation becomes a more critical and strategic necessity. How can we possibly keep up with software delivery’s explosive pace while retaining satisfactory test coverage, keeping the reins on costs, and reducing risk? Carl Nagle maintains that the long-term solution is a greater level of “sustainable” test automation. The SAFS method separates test design from test execution with a data-driven/action-based approach that encapsulates volatile application-specific data into readily localizable “maps” for simple maintenance. Test designs (scripts) are completely independent of the ready-to-run SAFS engines that will execute them. And since the test design methodology does not change over long periods of time, testers can focus more on getting robust automation in place quickly, with little attention paid to each new technology, testing tool, or test IDE. Join Carl to learn how test automation thrives when testers and tools are not tied up in application-specific silos.