Agile + DevOps West 2019 - Quality Assurance
Customize your Agile + DevOps West 2019 experience with sessions covering quality assurance for software developers or testers.
Monday, June 3
Getting Started with Acceptance Test-Driven / Behavior-Driven Development
We’ve all been there. We work incredibly hard to develop a feature and design tests based on written requirements. We build a detailed test plan that aligns the tests with the software and the documented business needs. And when we put the tests to the software, it all falls apart because the requirements were changed without informing everyone. Mary Thorn says help is at hand. Enter behavior-driven development (BDD) and Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) practices that help facilitate better communication. Mary explores the nuances of BDD and ATDD and shows you how to implement BDD...
Continuous Testing with Containers
Preview NewContainers. Every manager thinks they want them, but few teams have experience in knowing what to DO with them. Used thoughtfully, containerization of your services can transform the way your organization thinks about testing. Gone can be the days of maintaining X different compute environments with Y different configurations. Imagine instead spinning up just the code you need, on the machine type it needs, and only for as long as you need it. In this technical training, Melissa will walk through what containerization means for a legacy code base attempting to practice continuous...
Tuesday, June 4
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...
DevOps for Leadership
Preview NewCompetitive markets dictate an ever increasing need to be able to react quickly and deliver business value and quality efficiently. Organizations who cannot evolve to the newer and faster paced delivery models will not survive. DevOps is necessary to deliver robust software solutions and products quickly and reliably, without increasing risk or sacrificing quality. Today’s leaders need to understand what DevOps is all about and how to implement it across the enterprise to remain competitive and facilitate growth. This interactive workshop will explain what DevOps is and isn’t, what...
Wednesday, June 5
Start Your DevOps Journey on the Right Foot
The word "DevOps" is ubiquitous, yet there is no standard definition of the term. DevOps is not a tool or something you can buy. DevOps is a cultural and professional movement focused on how we build and operate high-velocity organizations, born from the experience of its practitioners. So, how do you get your organization on board with the ideas of DevOps? What are the steps to begin this journey? You start by clarifying who your customer is and how your work plays a part in delivering delight to these customers. With that in mind, dedicate yourself to experimentation and learning. Make...
Building Healthy Agile and DevOps Teams
The tools and technologies our teams rely on to build solutions are changing faster every day. New frameworks, new tools, transformations to DevOps, and migrations to public cloud are all putting strain on our teams. These changes drive a natural entropy as key-person dependencies form, hurting quality and throughput and leading to morale issues and attrition. Lee Eason has been watching this happen over the past several years and has developed a tool and an approach to address it. You will learn practical approaches to help you build a culture of continuous learning within your teams in...
Who Owns Quality in Agile?
What do you mean, who owns quality? The quality assurance team, of course—the kings and queens of quality, the masters of the tests, the lords of the sign-off. People often used to look down on quality assurance as less technical, the last to get their hands on the code, and the first to be blamed when things go wrong, but of course, agile adoption has changed the industry. These days we have cross-functional teams and develop test automation. But we also do "Scrummerfall" and have hardening sprints and stressful deadlines. Despite all of that planning, testing still often comes as an...
Hunting Sasquatch: Finding Intermittent Issues Using Periodic Automation
In pop culture, Sasquatch (aka Bigfoot) is an ape-like creature infrequently seen in the Pacific Northwest of North America—if he even exists. In the software realm, we have our own version of Sasquatch: that irritating, elusive "intermittent issue." Traditionally, we run automated tests on event boundaries, like when we have a successful deployment; we look for problems when we think they may have been introduced. Logically, points of change are when we expect to have injected issues, so we tend to only look for issues then. This approach alone, however, limits opportunities to reproduce...
How to Avoid Automation Framework Sinkholes
Test automation frameworks are constantly plagued by runaway costs and huge codebases that become maintenance nightmares. Successful automation frameworks are best defined under the “keep it simple, stupid” philosophy—KISS! Test automation needs to be only as complicated as the most complex variation in the system. Laura Keaton will show how to streamline the development and maintenance of automation by integrating it with development, operations, and project management. If KISS is used properly, the maintenance and cost can be relatively straightforward. Join Laura to learn how to...
Thursday, June 6
Mobbing, Pairing, Soloing, and Pipe Fires: A Personal History of Collaboration
Pair programming: the practice you love to hate! Twenty years after being introduced as part of Extreme Programming, the collaborative practice is still a thing. And if you thought pairing was nuts, now there's mobbing, where the entire team works together on one thing at a time. Yet we often hear teams say, "We go faster because we are mobbing." In this anecdote-heavy session, you'll hear Jeff Langr's history of working through various models for collaboration (or not) across the past several decades, including solo programming, pairing, and mobbing. He'll show you his office blueprints...
Postmodern Testing
If you want to speed up delivery while maintaining quality, this is the talk for you. Jason’s move from Microsoft to Google’s agile and DevOps-driven world was a shock. Today’s agile teams have ten times more builds, ten times faster releases, ten times fewer testers, ten times quicker bug fixing speed, and … similar or worse software quality. Jason shares his lessons learned from being a tester on high-quality teams such as Google Chrome and Search. Jason also has experience managing software quality in the roles of director of engineering, director of product, and now startup CEO. He...
5 Common Types of Mobile App Bugs Found Using AI
Among all mobile apps, the current error rate is believed to be at 15 percent. With a thousand new apps launching daily and a constant increase of mobile devices, there’s a need for a scalable solution to create and maintain high-quality apps, without hassle. Thanks to artificial intelligence, exploratory testing is advancing and proving to detect mobile bugs at scale. Join Sandy Park as she examines the five most common types of errors found through more than ten thousand hours of AI-powered testing, with actual samples. She will introduce the challenges of each type and explain how the...
Using Component Testing for Ultra-Fast Builds
A best practice of software architecture is to design your applications into independent modules or components, with a published contract for interaction between components. This is a principle of the microservices style of architecture, but it also applies to components created in a large monolith. If we can test the functionality of the component independently, and apply a level of trust that those components work, this opens the door to rethinking our continuous integration and continuous delivery strategy, potentially reducing the need for long test suites and many environments. It...
Building Quality into Your Release Pipeline
Decreasing the time to market has become critical for many organizations. This heightened focus on speed has fundamentally changed the way software is designed, developed, released, and tested. Not long ago, it would have been common to see release testing efforts that took weeks or even months. Today, in many instances, QA instead only has days or hours to complete their testing efforts. Stepping up to this challenge is not easy, but it's essential. Troy Walsh will talk about adding quality to your release pipeline, starting by looking at what a release pipeline is and how it works....
Agile+DevOps Feud!
Join us for a game of Agile+DevOps Feud, where two teams of thought leaders compete to name the most popular responses to survey questions to win bragging rights and to share their experiences. Questions and voting will be in the TechWell Hub leading up to the conference, where community members will name their greatest concerns, best practices, etc. Our two teals of panelists, Mary Thorn, Ryan Ripley, and Lee Eason, versus Melissa...
The Evolution of a Continuous Integration Pipeline
Preview
Each month more than 120 million unique visitors access content from USA TODAY and Gannett’s local media organizations, making them the largest US newspaper publisher by total daily circulation. The company’s continuous integration pipeline has evolved from a slow-moving tortoise to a sprinting hare and continues to evolve today. When they started their pipeline, everything was a manual process. Now they have a dedicated operations team that oversees onboarding, maintains the infrastructure, cares for the continuous integration and continuous delivery tools, provides...
Reality-Driven Testing in Agile Projects
Many agile teams rework previously deployed stories, even after plenty of in-sprint testing. Even well-groomed, refined stories, framed with typical, alternate, and error scenarios and gracefully described in well-formed Gherkin, continue to encounter all sorts of bugs. Software engineering consultant Rob Sabourin sees rework in over 20 percent of deployed stories, but he can show you how agile teams can drive rework down dramatically, often achieving near-zero rework after a story is done. Rob teaches teams to identify and implement relevant testing activities above and beyond those...
How to Prevent Catastrophic Doom on Your Next Federal DevOps Project
Trying to achieve real continuous deployments into production is hard for everyone, but it’s especially hard for highly regulated or government projects. These types of challenges range from client-specific, such as a set of manual checks and validations that need to be performed, to more generic problems, like how to version microservices and promote potentially breaking changes. Join Ryan Kenney as he discusses ways that he and his team have overcome obstacles to reaching continuous deployment. First Ryan will give an overview of the project and some of the problems they’ve faced. Then...
Building the Blocks of Trust in Automation
PreviewWhen moving toward automation, establishing trust in the automation test suite is important to unite the team as a whole. Once trust is established in the process and the tests, it becomes crucial to the overall software development lifecycle. Join Sneha Viswalingam as she shares the journey of how her team of manual test engineers contributed to automation, the steps they took to build clean automation and win the confidence of the organization, and how they came to believe that the automation effort has their backs. She'll outline the strategies used to make the tests reliable...
Pyramid Discussion: DevOps Adoption in Large, Slow Organizations
PreviewAre you in a large, plodding enterprise that's beginning, in the midst of, or considering a move toward DevOps? Unsure how or even if it will work, but know you have to make a move anyway? Do you want to hear from your peers about how they've managed so far? A pyramid discussion starts as a series of one-on-one conversations between the participants. After each pair hashes out their thoughts with each other, they join another couple to refine their points and hear pros and cons. After a while, those four join with four more, and so on until there is only one discussion, with...
Getting to Continuous Testing
Max Saperstone tells the story of how a healthcare company striving to get to continuous releases built up their automation to secure confidence in regular releases. Initially, as no test automation existed, Max was able to capitalize on a greenfield test automation opportunity, and in the span of 12 months, develop over 2,000 test cases. A pipeline was created to verify the integrity of the automated tests and build Docker containers for simplified test execution. These containers could be easily re-used by developers and the DevOps team to verify the application. Join Max as he walks...
Get Your Poker Face On: How to Effectively Use Planning Poker to Slay Project Estimations
PreviewHow long will that take? It’s a question we’ve all either asked or been asked, and it can be a challenge to answer accurately. How long will it take to get that feature out the door? How much time would you need to build this kind of software? How many developers would we need to get this project done in three months? Join Laura Janusek as she explores the tools and strategies to effectively use Planning Poker — the agile, consensus-based estimation technique — to generate accurate, data-backed responses to those questions. Attendees will gain insight into the process with real-...
See the Forest, Not Just the Trees: Improving Quality and Flow in a Continuous Delivery World
There are many companies today implementing agile and DevOps practices, usually enabled by a microservices architecture. Most of them are focused on continuously delivering value to their customers within the boundary of a time-bound sprint. If you work at one of these companies or want to move in that direction, how does the quality delivered by your team today compare to in the past? Has it improved, stayed the same, or gotten worse? Are you actively using that data to improve quality? Join Ashwin Desai as he reviews how his company implemented a lean-based approach that allowed them to...