Agile + DevOps East 2023 - Automated Testing
Monday, November 6
A Quality Engineering Introduction to AI and Machine Learning
Although 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,...
How to DevOps Your Testing Strategy – An Exercise in Value Stream Analysis
The 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...
Leveraging Generative AI for Software Productivity
Executive leaders across the globe have been asking a relatively simple yet profound question: Can we leverage generative AI to transform our business, enterprise, or industry? For software-based companies, focus has either been on differentiating their product and service offerings using this new technology. But how about leveraging generative AI to improve team productivity and efficiency? This may be possible but how do you measure its success? What are some of the key use cases within business analysis, development, and testing that software teams can use? Are there any pitfalls...
Tuesday, November 7
Prioritizing Like a Pro: Designing and Executing Defensible Ordering Strategies
Effective prioritization is critical to wring the most out of agility. When you’re just delivering once, ordering matters little. However, when the option to release on a regular basis is available, what you do sooner rather than later can have huge impacts on value realization, risk mitigation, and more. However, prioritization is much easier in theory than in practice for most organizations. Arlen has been a practicing agilist for over two decades. Working with hundreds of clients and teaching thousands of students how to effectively prioritize is one of the most frequently raised topics...
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
Many 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
Based 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
Many 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 8
What Effective Test Automation is...And Why it's NOT Testing!
In the frantic race to automate everything, one critical fact often gets overlooked…that test automation is NOT testing. Many organizations equate a comprehensive automated test suite with an effective software testing function. However, their definition of test automation is often limited to the automated execution of scripted test steps. Even in the best case scenario, this approach can give a false sense of security, especially when executing automated checks is the only “testing” that’s performed in the delivery pipeline. In this session, Lee will discuss why he sees the craft of...
Performance Testing and Engineering in Pipeline
As more and more organizations embark on modernizing their enterprise, and join the agile and DevOps bandwagon, it becomes but natural for the IT and Business teams to relook at their age-old legacy IT processes and align them with the modern delivery techniques. One of the first things that generally gets discussed in such a case from a testing standpoint is to implement a culture of shift left and testing in parallel with development. Harshad and Depen will take us through the essence of what that means from a performance testing and engineering standpoint and deep dive on the approach...
Evolve Your Selenium Scripts Into Performance Scripts
You have implemented your site functional tests with Selenium. Now, how can you reuse some of these tests to verify that your site does not only work as expected with one user, but with a big load of them? In this talk, Roger Abelenda will show you a way to achieve this without leaving your IDE. Roger will do a live demo generating a load script using JMeter DSL, from an existing Selenium script. Then, he will run it in combination with the Selenium script to generate load and evaluate user experience while such load is being imposed. Join Roger, add JMeter DSL to your toolbox and let's...
Thursday, November 9
CI/CD with Github Actions
In this session, attendees will learn about building, testing, and deploying applications using Github Actions. We will explore diverse ways to trigger builds and test different types of applications. After this session, you'll be able to build, test, and deploy your software from GitHub using GitHub Actions. You will understand GitHub Actions Runners; YAML workflow syntax including workflow triggers, variables, job dependencies, conditionals, matrix builds, outputs; environments; secrets; and deployments including container registries & Azure. By the end of this session, attendees...
Generative AI in Quality Assurance
The need for a new test automation model has been an imperative over the last 10 years as we have moved from waterfall to agile and agile to DevOps. Moving from test coverage to application coverage and reducing test time from months to an hour or less has created a substantial pressure for full success. Now AI in test is a reality. The first generative AI offerings in QA became available in 2018 and since then marked improvements have been made in outcomes. This has changed QA teams' focus, tasks, and work effort. With the ultimate goal of AI finding all our bugs, the advent of...
Transforming User Requirements to Test Cases Using Model-Driven Software Engineering and Natural Language Processing
Testing continues to be the main approach to ensuring software quality during development. Although there have been many attempts to automate the generation of test cases from user requirements (formal or informal), creating test cases continues to be mainly a manual process. However, many studies have shown that automating the generation of test cases from requirements can substantially reduce costs and improve the efficiency of the testing process. Test automation has also been proven to show positive effects on software quality. With the advances in Model-driven Software Engineering (...
Testing Your Way Out of Microservices Hell
A microservices architecture offers the fantastic promise of loosely coupled systems, independently testable and deployable. However, it can also present some significant challenges while conducting integration & exploratory testing. Since a single service will often not do anything valuable without several collaborator services, one typically needs to understand the way many services work together to effectively integration-test the system. This challenge can be viewed optimistically as well. By design, a microservice must at least provide some API interface, often making it easy to...
AutoOps: Harnessing the Power of AI-Augmented Testing with Generative AI
In the rapidly evolving landscape of software development, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) have emerged as pivotal methodologies for delivering high-quality software at an accelerated pace. To ensure the reliability and robustness of software releases in such an environment, the marriage of cutting-edge technologies becomes imperative. Incorporating Generative AI into business process automation seemed daunting just a few years ago. However, the availability and popularization of OpenAI/ChatGPT and other AI/ML technologies have made it a closer reality, and now it...
Transforming Testing with Generative AI: A Demonstration
Are you looking to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the agile testing process? Join and explore the future of agile testing with Generative AI. In agile software development, feature grooming, refinement, user story generation, acceptance testing, and test automation are all critical steps to ensure system quality. While these steps are critical to the project's success, they are not always handled effectively. They can be time-consuming and things like writing test cases and automation code can be labor-intensive and often fall short of covering all requirements. To address...