Agile + DevOps West 2022 - Software Tester
Customize your Agile + DevOps West 2022 experience with sessions for software testers.
Monday, June 13
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...
Prioritizing like a Pro: Designing and Executing Defensible Ordering Strategies
NewEffective 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...
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...
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...
Tuesday, June 14
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...
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...
Thursday, June 16
The Automation Firehose: Be Strategic and Tactical
The widespread adoption of test automation has led to numerous challenges that range from development lifecycle integration to simple scripting strategy. Just because a scenario CAN be automated does not mean it SHOULD be automated. Teams that adopt automation often rush to automate everything they can -- the automation firehose. For those scenarios that should automated, every team must adopt an implementation plan to ensure value is derived from reliable automated test execution. In this session, the audience will learn how to automate both strategically and tactically to maximize the...
Adopt Continuous Testing to Fulfill “Need for Speed” with High Quality
When it comes to DevOps, organizations find QA to be a bottleneck. Often in the race for faster releases, enterprises tend to sacrifice “Quality”. Companies that merely focus on speed and ignore quality suffer a huge blow. Often, they can’t implement Continuous Testing fully or lack the tools and processes for test orchestration in the pipeline. To do so successfully, you not only need to move testing upstream, but you also need to adopt the right set of test practices. In practice, continuous testing is the process of testing early, testing frequently and comprehensively, using automation...