Agile + DevOps West 2023 - Automated Testing
Monday, June 5
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,...
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...
Tuesday, June 6
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
NewMany 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...
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...
The Craft of Highly-Effective Agile Leadership
NewBased 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
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...
Wednesday, June 7
You Want to Test What in the Build Pipeline? How to Move Integration, E2E, and Other Large Tests Reliably into the CI/CD Pipeline
Testing automation has a reputation for being slow and unreliable, but automated tests which are not run as a part of the CI/CD pipeline are often ignored or written off when they don't pass. If nobody pays attention to the results though, automated tests are not very useful. Any tests which depend on another system will eventually break, unless special care is taken, keeping the addition of integration (or larger) tests to the build pipeline just out of reach. During this session, John Jenkins will show attendees how these larger tests can be reliably automated, so that these tests can be...
Thursday, June 8
Why Kubernetes Applications Require a New Approach to Testing Using Testkube
Microservices, CI/CD, DevOps, GitOps, cluster networking, etc.—more and more teams are building software fundamentally differently than they did even a few years ago. However, testing approaches and tooling have not caught up yet. At least not until now. What if you could apply the same type of GitOps and DevOps methodologies to your testing activities? Tests could be deployed and stored in a Kubernetes cluster, they could be decoupled from your CI/CD, orchestrated in the cluster in the same way you do with your applications and not in your CI/CD, publish results aggregated in a common...
What the Titanic Disaster Can Teach Us About Software Quality
An engaging and entertaining session that takes lessons from the Titanic maritime disaster and uses them as jumping off points for lessons about software quality. As an example—on the Titanic, the lookouts did not have access to binoculars, which impacted their ability to see icebergs in time to prevent the disaster. What tools are we missing that allow us to see problems coming? By presenting this topic as a series of stories instead of as a dry set of bullet points, people will take away key details and be able to apply them to their own unique situations.
A Test Automation Workflow for Mobile Software That Actually Works
The vision is shared amongst many engineering and quality teams: we’re going to automate our testing end to end and integrate it seamlessly into our CI/CD pipeline. It sounds beautiful and efficient. And for much of your software testing infrastructure, you’re probably making it happen! Then reality hits hard as soon as you deploy the latest release of your mobile app. You don’t have control over the third-party devices or SDKs your app depends on, or the universe of operating systems users actually use. If you care about quality, and you want complete coverage for your mobile app, it isn’...
Migrating Healthcare Data for All 50 States
Is it possible to test millions of healthcare records for the entire country? Sure it is. But what about in an agile environment that requires a quick feedback loop? This session will share a case study on how Dan Reale and his team were up against a tight deadline and struggling to test a data migration. With two testers on their scrum team and constantly shifting requirements, the team tested one state a day for their MVP launch. They realized this was not sustainable if they wanted to test all 50 states, so they implemented an automation framework that could help test faster. Taking...
A Journey in Improving Test Pipeline Stability
Building automated tests is only the first step. The true challenge is building them with high enough reliability that they can be run as part of a deployment pipeline. But understanding how to get to that point is hard, and getting to that point often seems unsurmountable. This session will focus on exactly how Olo went from having a few hundred tests being triggered manually, to having thousands of tests running as part of a deployment pipeline. Brian Kitchener will give concrete examples of what tools were used at each step of the process, what challenges were faced, what tools needed...