Agile + DevOps East 2022 - Automated Testing
Monday, November 7
Clone of A Quality Engineering Introduction to AI and Machine Learning
NewAlthough there are several controversies and misunderstandings surrounding AI and machine learning, one thing is apparent — people have quality concerns about the safety, reliability, and trustworthiness of these types of systems. Not only are ML-based systems shrouded in mystery due to their largely black-box nature, they also tend to be unpredictable since they can adapt and learn new things at runtime. Validating ML systems is challenging and requires a cross-section of knowledge, skills, and experience from areas such as mathematics, data science, software engineering, cyber-security,...
A Quality Engineering Introduction to AI and Machine Learning
NewAlthough there are several controversies and misunderstandings surrounding AI and machine learning, one thing is apparent — people have quality concerns about the safety, reliability, and trustworthiness of these types of systems. Not only are ML-based systems shrouded in mystery due to their largely black-box nature, they also tend to be unpredictable since they can adapt and learn new things at runtime. Validating ML systems is challenging and requires a cross-section of knowledge, skills, and experience from areas such as mathematics, data science, software engineering, cyber-security,...
Achieving Product Ownership Excellence – What Does “Good” Look Like?
NewWhile there seems to be a clear description of the Product Owner role, the sad reality is that there is a tremendous amount of variety in the “real world”. There are also quite a few impediments standing between Product Owners and effectively doing their jobs. Much of this is due to organizational pressure and misunderstanding rather than by the Product Owners themselves. Well, forget the excuses, pressure, hand waving, and debate. In this workshop, we’re going to explore what solid, fantastic, excellent agile Product Ownership looks like. First, we’ll use a model called the 4 – Quadrants...
Rethinking Product Strategy & Customer Discovery
NewIn many organizations product ideas often lack customer or business validation. Products or features tend to be a manifestation of a HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) or blind feature matching of a competitor. Likewise, product strategies are often pithy phrases, uninspiring targets, or contain too many goals to be actionable. Neither of these needs to be true! Using lightweight, evidence-based approaches that guide product discovery with demonstrable outcomes is key to finding customers and generating business value. Once a product idea has been refined, a well-designed and deployed...
Continuous Product Road Mapping & Collaborative Prioritization
NewFor a lot of people, product roadmaps are something between a stack of lies and an act of futility. That’s because they are typically just a wishlist of features; often with deadlines that are wild guesses or imposed from On High. What’s worse is that the items in a product roadmap often lack true prioritization, change priority frequently, or are merely prioritized at the whims of a HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion). However, product roadmaps do not need to be riddled with such frustration! Good product roadmaps are useful tools that establish a continuous process that balances...
How to DevOps Your Testing Strategy – An Exercise in Value Stream Analysis
NewThe DevOps movement is here. Companies across many industries are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, IT organizations have been staffed with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding to stay relevant and add greater value to the business. DevOps really...
Tuesday, November 8
Hands-on HELM: Templating Your Way to a Brighter Future
NewWith the introduction of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the advancements of software architecture towards the use of microservices and containerized applications, open-source container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes have become extremely popular for automating software deployments. While Kubernetes has helped solve the complexities of container orchestration it has also introduced new complexities dealing with deploying and managing applications. Using an open-source tool like Helm will help reduce the complexities of application deployment, enabling teams to...
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
NewMany teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually, a few classes, some tools’ introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward fairly efficient execution. However, these teams are quite often simply going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from their experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen and Mary Thorn explore high-performance team patterns, which are the thinking models of mature agile teams, including large-scale emergent...
The Craft of Highly-Effective Agile Leadership
NewBased on the learning objectives from the iCAgile, Leading with Agility workshop, this ½ day version will explore the craft of agile leadership in guiding your journey to becoming a catalyst leader. Along the way, we'll explore the why of leading with agility, how to develop and grow your personal agility, tactics for developing and deepening your organizational relationships, and approaches for leading cultural and organizational transformation. Critical topics include your responsibility in shaping a culture that is inclusive, safe, empowered, aligned, and results/impact-focused. We also...
What DevOps Means for Testers and Testing
DevOps is more than a buzzword or a passing fad. It's a radically new approach to rapidly deliver high-quality software applications. However, many organizations don’t fully grasp the magnitude of this change or what it means for everyone involved in the software development lifecycle. Jeffery Payne says that DevOps—when done right—drives higher quality and efficiency into software development, software testing, and application management activities. It empowers teams to remove impediments to quality and productivity throughout the entire software lifecycle. However, when DevOps is done...
Designing (Much) Better Agile Meetings
NewMany teams have been following the same few patterns for facilitating sessions such as Daily Scrums, Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives, and backlog refinement events for decades now. However, while these well-trodden approaches can be good starting points, there are ways to make them tremendously more effective with minimal effort. You will learn to design agile meetings that account for your particular circumstances and goals while wasting as little time as possible. First, Arlene will cover Exploring the True Purpose of Agile Meetings – Is the Daily Scrum more about status or planning? Is...
Wednesday, November 9
Reimagining Digital Cloud Transformation : Automation and DevOps Pipeline
Organizations face numerous challenges during their journey to Digital Cloud Transformation – the most pressing challenges are frequent failures and the absence of a “big-picture” mindset. Driven by KPMG’s quest to deliver a superior customer experience, our Digital Cloud Transformation framework delivers improved quality, reduced time to market, reliability, and sustainable Cloud Transformation. Moving away from the archaic approach from replicating traditional regression onto cloud integration validations, KPMG has helped customers minimize risk and increase test coverage by E2E...
Tips and Tricks for Effective Agile Testing
Automated Continuous Compliance Testing in the Cloud Age
Cloud computing is becoming ever more relevant, even in highly regulated industries. As these industries move deeper into the cloud age, compliance and security plays an important part in automated cloud deployment. However, compliance testing is usually left up to manual processes or monitoring tools scanning software solutions that have already been deployed to a given cloud environment. By sharing my story of how I built and distributed an automated continuous compliance test framework for software teams in Novo Nordisk, I hope to inspire the listeners to think about how they can...
Avoiding the Chaos of an Agile transformation
Agile is not a fairy tale. You have to face real life challenges well prepared in order to succeed. The reality is: the bigger and older your organization is, the more difficult it is to pass through process level changes and that's when Chaos is born. Resolving all the issues with Chaos could potentially take years.
Peter will share his story of one of his projects where he had to face numerous obstacles as a Test Manager in achieving proper Agile implementation and to raise the quality of the products of his client. Some of the obstacles included: agile ceremonies not followed;...
Thursday, November 10
API Testing Made Easy With Postman
Application program interface (API) has become the connecting tissue that allows the exchange of data and logic between software products and different layers of an application (data layer, service layer, and presentation layer). Multiple independent systems can be integrated easily with the help of APIs and its specification. Testing these APIs before and/or after they are consummated can greatly improve the efficiency of your test strategy as a whole because the API layer directly touches both the data layer and presentation layer, it presents itself as a good candidate for continuous...
Engaging the Hive Mind Through Swarm Test Planning
Are you looking for more ways to shift quality to the left? Do you wish your team was more proactive and less reactive when it comes to quality? Do you rely on a single QA or developer to come up with all of the test cases on their own?
We know that from concepts similar to Mob Programming, the collective mind can often be more effective than any one individual. Applying this principle to testing, we introduce the practice of Swarm Test Planning.
In this session we will teach the concept of Swarm Test Planning, using structured brainstorming and heuristic categorization to...