Agile + DevOps West 2019 - Test Automation Engineer | TechWell

Conference archive

Agile + DevOps West 2019 - Test Automation Engineer

Customize your Agile + DevOps West 2019 experience with sessions covering test automation for engineers.

Monday, June 3

Coveros
MA

Introducing Docker and Kubernetes to Your DevOps Toolchain

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Monday, June 3, 2019 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

As organizations look to improve the speed with which they deliver software, they increasingly turn to microservices and infrastructure-as-code for software architecture and delivery techniques to help leverage value from their DevOps adoptions. Docker, an industry standard containerization tool, facilitates moving processes into isolated environments that can be frozen into images, with an ecosystem that helps developers across organizations build and share these containers. Kubernetes builds on these capabilities and allows a software team to break down their application into small,...

Bob Foster
Coveros
MB

Finding Performance Issues Early with JMeter

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Monday, June 3, 2019 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Performance issues can be difficult to resolve when found late in the software development lifecycle. Using an open-source tool like JMeter to develop, manage, and execute load and performance tests while the code is being developed, is an inexpensive way to help find performance issues. Executing these performance tests as part of your CI/CD pipeline enables users to find and resolve performance issues as soon as they are introduced. This hands-on workshop will help attendees develop a foundational understanding of JMeter, while engaging them in creating and running performance tests...

Melissa_Benua
mParticle
MC

Test Design for CI/CD Delivery

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Monday, June 3, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Imagine this … As soon as any developed functionality is submitted into the code repository, it is automatically subjected to the appropriate battery of tests and then released straight into production. Setting up the pipeline capable of doing just that is becoming more and more common and something you need to know about. But most organizations hit the same stumbling block—just what IS the appropriate battery of tests? Automated build architectures don't always lend themselves well to the traditional stages of testing. In this hands-on tutorial, Melissa Benua introduces you to key...

Mary Thorn
Vaco
MG

Getting Started with Acceptance Test-Driven / Behavior-Driven Development

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Monday, June 3, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Melissa_Benua
mParticle
MH

Continuous Testing with Containers

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Monday, June 3, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Containers. 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

Allen Holub
Independent Consultant
TA

The Architecture of Microservices

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Server-side monoliths—single programs that provide all back-end services—just don't work. They are hard to build, impossible to maintain, and gradually accrete so much baggage that forward development slows to a crawl. Agile development is impossible over this sort of system. Allen Holub says that microservices—systems of small, cooperating server-side agents—solve these problems. However, building a microservice system is not easy, and doing it wrong is disastrous. Taking a deep dive into practical microservice architecture and implementation, Allen covers a lot of practical details to...

Danilo Sato
ThoughtWorks
TB

Continuous Delivery in Practice: A Hands-On DevOps Workshop

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

For many organizations, delivering software into production has become increasingly more complex with long testing cycles and a division between development and operations teams. DevOps is a cultural movement that is breaking down those barriers. Focusing on automation, collaboration, tools, and knowledge sharing, DevOps is showing that developers and system engineers have much to learn from each other. Through a series of hands-on exercises, Danilo Sato will use a sample web application to demonstrate how to automate its build and deployment pipeline, using infrastructure and pipeline as...

Dana Pylayeva
Agile Play Consulting LLC
TC

Introduction to DevOps with Chocolate and LEGOs

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Tom Stiehm
Coveros, Inc.
TE

Tools for DevSecOps

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

DevOps is about creating alignment across the value stream for an application, service, or product. DevSecOps integrates security into this process, making the entire team responsible for delivering secure code that works and can be deployed and used securely. But how do you actually do that? What tools do you add to your DevOps pipeline to help make your software secure and provide your stakeholders with a high level of confidence that the software meets all security requirements & standards? In this tutorial Tom Stiehm will explore what security tools you can add to your DevOps...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
TF

What DevOps Means for Testers and Testing

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Mary Thorn
Vaco
Bob Galen
Vaco
TH

Learning How to Lead High-Performing Agile Teams

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, training, and even the empathy—revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized at best, and in the worst cases even vilified. But Bob Galen and Mary Thorn contend that there is a central and important role for managers and leaders within agile environments. Join Bob and Mary as they explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders. Examine why those who understand servant leadership know how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the team's...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.Com, Inc.
TI

The Tester's (New) Role in Agile Development

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s so easy for agile teams to fall into the rut in which testers only do traditional testing activities, and programmers strictly do their time-worn coding activities. Rob Sabourin shares a number of examples of how testing skills can be applied to a wide variety of activities in an agile project. Testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Risk analysis in self-organized agile teams empowers testers to drive design decisions. A tester’s affinity analysis skills help clear the way for...

Gene Gotimer
Coveros, Inc.
TN

DevOps for Leadership

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Competitive 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

Nathen Harvey
Google
K1

Start Your DevOps Journey on the Right Foot

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 8:30am to 9:45am

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...

Lee Eason
IHS Markit
AD1

Building Healthy Agile and DevOps Teams

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

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...

Angie Jones
Applitools
AD2

What's That Smell? Tidying Up Our Test Code

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

We are often reminded by those experienced in writing test automation that code is code. The sentiment being conveyed is that test code should be written with the same care and rigor that production code is written with. However, many people who write test code may not have experience writing production code, so it’s not exactly clear what is meant. And even those who write production code find that there are unique design patterns and code smells that are specific to test code. Join Angie Jones as she presents a smelly test automation code base littered with several bad coding practices...

Richard Mills
Coveros
AD6

DevOpsing Your Greenfield: Cultivating New Growth

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

Your project sponsor presents a golden opportunity with a brand-new project, saying, "I want to do some DevOps on our new agile project!" Sigh. Your response: "How about we be agile and adopt a DevOps approach to structuring our teams, designing our architecture, and leveraging automation to rapidly deliver value to our customers?" There—we've set the mood. Greenfield projects provide a unique opportunity for us as DevOps professionals because they don't come with baggage. But where you do you actually start? Unlike legacy projects, new projects don't have a set of pre-existing challenges...

AD7

The 7 Deadly Sins of DevOps

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

Do you know teams that are merely doing "cargo cult DevOps"? Near the end of WWII, the Allies had airstrips on many islands in the south Pacific. The natives on these islands noticed that when the Allies put the "coconuts" on their ears and spoke into the "banana," the gods would send down a magical flying creature with food and supplies. When the war ended and the Allies left, the natives put the coconuts on their ears and spoke into the banana, and they wondered why the gods failed to bless them, too. They didn't understand headphones or radio transmissions or that someone must be...

Paul_Grizzaffi
Magenic
AD10

Hunting Sasquatch: Finding Intermittent Issues Using Periodic Automation

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

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...

Shareen Gurley
Capital One
Narasima Yalamala
Capital One
AD15

DevOps: A Journey of Automation That's Worth the Wait

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

Continuous delivery is really about one thing: quickly responding to market changes. As with many teams, Shareen Gurley and Narasimha Yalamala's journey began with automation, which seemed never-ending. But to be effective with your DevOps implementation, you need to have solid technical and quality practices to ensure your code is always in a deployable state. If you don’t know exactly where you are going, how will you know when you get there? Join Shareen and Narasimha as they share the prerequisites for creating effective development delivery pipelines, integrated with critical...

Laura Keaton
Keaton Consulting
AD18

How to Avoid Automation Framework Sinkholes

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Joseph_Ours
Centric Consulting
AD22

The Lord of the Rings: DevOps Edition

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Modern software delivery involves lean principles, DevOps practices, and of course tools. Implementing those elements in harmony will necessitate a change in how teams operate—more specifically, it will require a change in how managers think about teams. If teams truly want to leverage the power of DevOps and become high-performing, how should leaders think about team construction? Using comical analogous reasoning, Joseph Ours will discuss the fellowship in The Lord of the Rings, the roles, the mission, and the skills team to extrapolate what can be learned. Joseph will take artistic...

Greg Sypolt
Gannett | USA Today Network
Sandy Park
Apptest.ai
Angie Jones
Applitools
AD24

Panel: What's the Next Big Thing in DevOps?

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Are you comfortable with what DevOps is now but wondering what you will have to worry about next? Or just curious about what our experts think will be the next big thing in DevOps? Come listen to our panelists as they answer questions about the future of DevOps—or at least some possible futures. This panel is looking to answer your questions about where the industry is headed, so be ready to participate.

Thursday, June 6

Jason_Arbon
test.ai
AD26

Postmodern Testing

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

Sandy Park
Apptest.ai
AD30

5 Common Types of Mobile App Bugs Found Using AI

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

Timothy Cochran
Thoughtworks
AD31

Using Component Testing for Ultra-Fast Builds

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
AD32

Fishbowl Discussion: How Much Automation Is Enough?

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

These days, everyone knows some automation is a necessity. More usually feels better. But when are you done? Or when do you stop for now? How can you tell if adding automation is no longer helping, or is even distracting from the real issues? Because the answer is "It depends," you'll want to listen to the wisdom of others who are on the same journey. In a fishbowl discussion, the audience members sit in a circle of chairs in the middle of the room. Several brave souls will fill all but one of the chairs in the "fishbowl." When you want to join as a speaker, you enter the fishbowl and sit...

Raj Subramanian
Testim.io
AD34

Hacks to Becoming a Mindful Agile Tester

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Have you ever felt like you've been working on multiple tasks all day long, but at the end of the day when you review your work, you realize you haven’t accomplished anything concrete? After years of working in the tech industry, Raj Subramanian realized he was not able to accomplish any task with complete focus and attention. So in 2017, he started a six-month journey of self-exploration and discovery. He read books; listened to podcasts on mindfulness, productivity, leadership, and self-motivation; and tried to apply various concepts learned from this journey in his daily tasks...

Anders Wallgren
CloudBees
AD37

You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello: Bridging the Gap Between Dev and Ops

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Getting quality software into production quickly and efficiently is a major priority for organizations of all types. Yet many find that development teams’ focus on “innovation and experimentation” conflicts with Ops’ mandate to mitigate risk and increase predictability. This cultural and organizational mismatch puts transformation success at risk and generates a constant state of “release anxiety.” However, breaking down these silos and implementing new trends in organizational structures, value stream mapping, and pipeline monitoring and tracking can help get development and operations...

Troy Walsh
Magenic
AD38

Building Quality into Your Release Pipeline

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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....

Alan Crouch
Coveros
AD39

Making the Jump from DevOps to DevSecOps

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Organizations are moving to DevOps to build and deploy software more rapidly. But as they break down organizational silos to bring together testing, development, and operations, they often avoid or exclude security in their transformational efforts. Leaders in highly regulated organizations are often left wondering, where does my traditional security organization fit into this new DevOps world? How do I know that my applications are becoming more secure, while still getting the advantages of rapid, incremental deployment? Alan Crouch will talk about his experiences with financial,...

Nathen Harvey
Google
AD40

A DevOps Fireside Chat with Nathen Harvey

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

You've got DevOps questions, and we've got Nathen Harvey to answer them for you. He won't really be sitting by the fire, but he will be on hand to talk about all things DevOps. From his experiences building communities at Chef to being an advocate for developers at Google to being a huge part of the DevOps Days conferences, Nathen wants to talk about the things that worry you or thrill you about DevOps. Bring your questions and be ready for a lively, interactive discussion.

Owen Gotimer
TechWell
B1

Agile+DevOps Feud!

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 1:30pm to 2:00pm

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...

Greg Sypolt
Gannett | USA Today Network
K5

The Evolution of a Continuous Integration Pipeline

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 2:00pm to 2:45pm

 

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...

Ryan Kenney
Coveros
AD46

How to Prevent Catastrophic Doom on Your Next Federal DevOps Project

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 3:15pm to 4:15pm

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...

Sneha Viswalingam
Zoll Lifevest
AD47

Building the Blocks of Trust in Automation

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 3:15pm to 4:15pm

When 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...

Gene Gotimer
Coveros, Inc.
AD48

Pyramid Discussion: DevOps Adoption in Large, Slow Organizations

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 3:15pm to 4:15pm

Are 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...

Max_Saperstone
Coveros
AD50

Getting to Continuous Testing

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm

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...