Agile + DevOps East 2023 - Software Tester
Customize your Agile + DevOps East 2023 experience with sessions for software testers.
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...
Introduction to DevOps with Chocolate and LEGOs
Organizations today can no longer afford to deliver new features to their respective markets once a year or even once a quarter. In the attempt to catch up with the competition, they jump onto DevOps journey starting with the "How" and losing the sight of "Why" and "What". Join this gamified simulation tutorial to gain a solid understanding of foundational principles of the DevOps culture. Experience the benefits of DevOps transformation even before initiating one in your enterprise! This tutorial is ideally designed for organizations that are evaluating their approach to DevOps...
Tuesday, November 7
Supercharge Your Workflow: To GitHub and Beyond
Whether you are new or experienced with GitHub this class is for you! Supercharging your workflow caters to anyone who wants to enhance their Agile and DevOps process with the capabilities of GitHub. GitHub has long been the premier site for open-source projects and is now turning a pivotal corner into becoming the predominant platform for all aspects of the development lifecycle. Some examples of this include; protecting company code through various GitHub Products or curating marketplace actions and workflows prior to use. This tutorial will look at how to leverage GitHub Actions (CI/CD...
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...
Getting Started with AI and Machine Learning
Are you a software professional who would like to learn to use AI and machine learning (ML), but don't know how to get started? One of the best ways to get into ML is by designing and completing small projects. Although you will ultimately need to understand the fundamentals of AI/ML, there's no reason why you can't learn foundational terms, concepts and principles as you put them into practice. Join Dionny Santiago as he introduces you to the world of applied machine learning. Dionny will guide you through a series of ML projects end-to-end, enabling you to gain experience with creating...
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
'Redefinement' of Refinement & Other Quips on Retuning Agile Ceremonies
In this talk, Melissa Tondi will examine the top agile ceremonies and show how they can be retuned to create more value in their present-day practice. Melissa will share her experience consulting with and working for companies that have embarked on their agile transformation. Over the last 12 years, she has seen similarities between companies in their implementation of agile. At some point, a company's approach to agile no longer meets the needs of the teams responsible for delivering so a retune is required to optimize their efficiency instead of using a 'one-size-fits-all' model. This...
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...
Exploring Non-ChatGPT Ways to Use AI in Testing
Artificial intelligence and machine learning tools like ChatGPT are bringing AI to the public. The goal and purpose of code generation and refactoring tools like GitHub’s Co-Pilot are evident. However, it may not be as obvious to tell which tools are specifically tailored for testing and quality engineering. Join Carlos Kidman as he compares multiple AI/ML tools and practical applications that testers and quality engineers can use right now. You’ll discover AI for functional testing solutions and tools for test data management. While not all of these tools are free, this session will give...
Tales of Dojo Coaching—Insights for All
In the agile space, do you ever wonder why we use words such as "transformation" and "journey"? It's because it's really freaking hard. As an Agile coach, there are days when you move a group one step forward only to realize that they've fallen two steps back. You are part practitioner and part therapist. You experience frequent memory lapses like "I could've sworn we've worked on this anti-pattern before." Or, did you? What day is it again? Now, imagine throwing gasoline on that by condensing a team's journey into six weeks. What breakthroughs might emerge when we accelerate the journey...
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
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...
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...