Test Engineer

Tutorials

MB Software Requirements Fundamentals for BAs, Testers, and Developers NEW

Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 8:30am

You deal with software requirements all the time. Whether you are a developer in an agile environment, an analyst who identifies and documents requirements for plan-driven development, a software designer who studies requirements as the basis for agile development, a tester who employs or often must discover requirements as the foundation of test cases, or a technical user who describes your needs to development, you need the right approaches and skills to develop and interpret software requirements.

MC Career Superpowers NEW

James Whittaker, Microsoft

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 8:30am

Line up all the successful people in the world. Take away the pedigreed and the prodigies—you know the people who are going to succeed no matter what. Remove the brown-nosers and right-time-right-place lottery winners. And who do you have left? People who succeeded on purpose. Study these folks carefully, and you’ll find their paths to the top have common themes. James Whittaker exposes the career strategies of the ultra-successful and analyzes them in detail.

MD Specification by Example: Mastering Agile Testing

Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 8:30am

On agile teams, testers can struggle to keep up with the pace of development if they continue employing a waterfall verification process―finding bugs after development. Nate Oster challenges you to question waterfall assumptions and replace a “test last” mentality with “specification by example.” Practice “test first” by writing executable specifications for a new feature before development begins. Learn to switch from tests as verification to tests as specification and guide development with concrete examples written in the language of your business.

MI CANCELLED - Seven Principles of Impossible Thinking

Presentation Cancelled

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 8:30am

This Tutorial has been cancelled.

MK Continuous Integration and Deployment through Continuous Testing NEW

Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 1:00pm

Continuous integration and continuous testing are two vital agile feedback loops that lead to a continuous deployment environment. Continuous integration monitors your source code―recompiling after every change, running smaller tests, and notifying the developer if anything goes wrong. Continuous testing (and potentially continuous deployment) monitors integration builds, installs the product in a staging environment, and runs integration tests, again looking for problems.

MN Essential Test-Driven Development

Rob Myers, Agile Institute

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 1:00pm

Test-driven development (TDD) is a powerful technique for combining software design, unit testing, and coding in a continuous process to increase reliability and produce better code design. Using the TDD approach, developers write programs in very short development cycles: first the developer writes a failing automated test case that defines a new function or improvement, then produces code to pass that test, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. The developer repeats this process many times until the behavior is complete and fully tested.

MO It’s All About Me™: Owning Your Behavior, Improving Your Team NEW

Doc List, Doc List Enterprises

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 1:00pm

Successful high-performing teams have many common attributes. One is their ability to function together collaboratively. In order to collaborate well, they must communicate effectively and get beyond some of the members' personal biases and quirks. In this interactive workshop, Doc List shares common problems with behavior, motivation, emotions, and interpretation that frequently get in the way. Participate in exercises that lead you to understand―and sometimes expose―your own blind spots and limitations.

TB Giving Great Presentations: The Art of Stage Presence NEW

James Whittaker, Microsoft

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 8:30am

Every hour of every day in every country where business is conducted, the same scene plays out―dozens of well-paid people sitting in a conference room being bored senseless. Death by a thousand slides. This mind numbing, soul crushing, grotesquely expensive experience ends here and now! James Whittaker reveals the secrets to conceiving, building, and delivering a great presentation. Whatever your level of presentation skills, this tutorial will hone them. Learn how to build a compelling story from the ground up. Receive advice on how to remember and recall that story as you deliver it.

TH Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions

Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 8:30am

Agile initiatives always begin with the best of intentions—accelerate delivery, better meet customer needs, or improve software quality. Unfortunately, some agile projects do not deliver on these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or get an agile project back on track, this session is for you. Jeff Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues—or mitigate their damaging effects.

TM Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities NEW

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 1:00pm

Innovation is a word frequently tossed around in organizations today. The standard cliché is “Do more with less.” People and teams want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, prioritize, implement, and track their innovation efforts. Jennifer Bonine shares the Innovation Types model to give you new tools to evolve and expand your innovation capabilities. Find out if your innovation ideas and efforts match your team and company goals. Learn how to classify your innovation and improvement efforts as core (to the business) or context (essential but non-revenue generating).

TS Specifying Non-Functional Requirements NEW

John Terzakis, Intel

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 1:00pm

Non-functional requirements present unique challenges for authors, reviewers, and testers. Non-functional requirements often begin as vague concepts such as “the software must be easy to install” or “the software must be intuitive and respond quickly.” As written, these requirements are not testable. Definitions of easy, intuitive, and quickly are open to interpretation and dependent on the reader’s experiences. In order to be testable, non-functional requirements must be quantifiable and measurable.

Concurrent Sessions

AW3 Shifting Left: The Evolution of Test Automation

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

Michael Faulise, tap | QA

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 11:30am

As the software development lifecycle shifts toward agile and lean methodologies, quality in every build becomes critical. Continuous integration allows development teams to receive immediate feedback on their code, creating more efficiency and higher quality. After exploring the differences in continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment, Jennifer Bonine and Michael Faulise discuss what is needed for their successful implementation, including the technologies and resources required at each stage of the process.

AT3 Toward a Well-Run, Cross-Functional, High-Performance Team

Fuming Ye, Pitney Bowes

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 10:00am

Behind every successful delivery to a customer, there is a well-run, cross-functional team. They trust each other; they work well together. Yet every team, agile or not, faces the challenges of building such a team. And, despite their best efforts, many teams fail in this attempt, never fully realize their full potential, and are unable to deliver the best possible value to their customers. Fuming Ye discusses the foundations to build a high performing team: an agile team’s responsibilities to each other, problem ownership, and the discipline to execute.

AT4 Establishing an Agile Testing Culture

Leigh Ishikawa, TripAdvisor

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 10:00am

Many resources describe how to accelerate performance of your development organization through adoption of agile methodologies, but very few cover testing in a practical manner. And those that do generally focus on technical details, leaving out how to build an agile testing culture while facing numerous adoption challenges. Leigh Ishikawa describes how an organization needs to rethink testing in the agile world. He begins by taking a holistic look at how different groups combine in an agile testing culture.

AT8 Integrating Performance Engineering and Testing into Agile

Arun Shanmugam

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 11:30am

Performance engineering and testing are a set of activities by which we design, test, and implement the most optimal system that meets the expected performance goals, based on planning and estimation coupled with tests to verify the system’s capabilities. Although the conventional approach to performance testing works well for traditional delivery models, it is ineffective in agile as it involves testing and tuning near the end of development.

AT11 Assessing Agile Engineering Practices

Rob Myers, Agile Institute

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 1:30pm

Organizations are often reluctant to adopt the more challenging agile engineering practices—first seen together in Extreme Programming and later adopted by the Scrum Alliance as the Scrum Developer Practices. These practices are difficult to implement and sustain, and the benefits are often vague, subtle, and measurable only after months of disciplined effort. For an engineering practice to provide real organizational value, it must effectively address real throughput constraints.

AT16 Test Automation in Agile: A Successful Implementation

Melissa Tondi, Denver Automation and Quality Engineering

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 3:00pm

Many teams feel that they are forced to make an either/or decision when it comes to investing time to automate tests versus executing them manually. Sometimes a “silver bullet” tool is purchased, and testers are forced to use it when there may be a better option; other times unskilled team members are designated the automation engineers; and often there is a lack of good guidance on what to automate. These pitfalls cause product owners to de-prioritize those tasks when there’s a better way.

Keynotes

K4 Get Out of Your Comfort Zone―Now

Tricia Broderick, Pearson

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 4:15pm

In an industry that continues to rapidly evolve, the pressure to increase our mastery can be overwhelming. Whether browsing the web or your organization's technical library, it's discouraging to realize that many of the skills you’ve mastered are now obsolete, replaced by new, important ones that you know little about. Is there a way to change discouragement into excitement? Early in her career, Tricia Broderick was terrified to take chances for fear of failing.