Test Engineer

Tutorials

MD Giving Great Presentations: The Art of Stage Presence NEW

James Whittaker, Microsoft

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

Every hour of every day in every country where business is conducted, the same scene plays out―dozens of well-paid people sitting in a conference room being bored senseless. Death by a thousand slides. This mind numbing, soul crushing, grotesquely expensive experience ends here and now! James Whittaker reveals the secrets to conceiving, building, and delivering a great presentation. Whatever your level of presentation skills, this tutorial will hone them. Learn how to build a compelling story from the ground up. Receive advice on how to remember and recall that story as you deliver it.

ME Acceptance Test-Driven Development: Mastering Agile Testing SOLD OUT

Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

On agile teams, testers can struggle to keep pace with development if they continue employing a waterfall-based verification process—finding bugs after development. Nate Oster challenges you to question waterfall assumptions and replace this legacy verification testing with acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). With ATDD, you “test first” by writing executable specifications for a new feature before development begins.

MG Solving Real Problems through Collaborative Innovation Games®

Michael Vizdos, Vizdos Enterprises, LLC

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

Are you having trouble getting people in your organization to agree on a path forward? Is collaboration sometimes more like a contest to see who can yell the loudest? Is it difficult to get customers to give you the information you need to create a product charter or unambiguous requirements? Achieving meaningful collaboration with a diverse group of people can be very difficult. Michael Vizdos shares his experiences with Innovation Games®, collaboration exercises that dramatically improve the way people work together.

MH What’s Your Leadership IQ?

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

Have you ever needed a way to measure your leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that.

MI Scaling Agile with the Lessons of Lean Product Development Flow

Al Shalloway, Net Objectives

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

Although first generation agile methods have a solid track record at the team level, many agile transformations get stuck trying to expand throughout the organization. With a set of principles that can help improve software development quality and productivity, lean thinking provides a method for escaping the trap of local optimization. While agile teams can use lean principles to improve their practices, larger organizations can embrace lean to solve problems that commonly plague company-wide agile endeavors.

MO Essential Test-Driven Development

Rob Myers, Agile Institute

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 1:00pm

Test-driven development (TDD) is a powerful technique for combining software design, unit testing, and coding in a continuous process to increase reliability and produce better code design. Using the TDD approach, developers write programs in very short development cycles. The developer first writes a failing automated test case that defines a new function or improvement, then produces code to pass that test, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. The developer repeats this process many times until the behavior is complete and fully tested.

MP Agile Test Automation: Do It Early and Often SOLD OUT

Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 1:00pm

Agile teams deliver “potentially” shippable software at the end of every iteration—typically, one to four weeks but possibly as often as daily. This goal can't be achieved without comprehensive automated tests, a place where many teams struggle. The challenge of automating functional regression tests even frightens many experienced and competent testers. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

TC Leadership and Career Success—On Purpose NEW

James Whittaker, Microsoft

Tue, 06/03/2014 - 8:30am

Line up all the successful people in the world. Take away the pedigreed and the prodigies—you know the people who are going to succeed no matter what. Remove the brown-nosers and right-time-right-place lottery winners. And who do you have left? People who succeeded on purpose. Study these folks carefully, and you’ll find theirs paths to the top have common themes. James Whittaker exposes the career strategies of the ultra-successful and analyzes them in detail.

TN Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities NEW

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

Tue, 06/03/2014 - 1:00pm

Innovation is a word frequently tossed around in organizations today. The standard cliché is “Do more with less.” People and teams want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, prioritize, implement, and track their innovation efforts. Jennifer Bonine shares the Innovation Types model to give you new tools to evolve and expand your innovation capabilities. Find out if your innovation ideas and efforts match your team and company goals. Learn how to classify your innovation and improvement efforts as core (to the business) or context (essential but non-revenue generating).

TR Getting Started with Scrum: An Experiential Workshop

Mitch Lacey, Mitch Lacey & Associates, Inc.

Tue, 06/03/2014 - 1:00pm

Agile is now mainstream, but many companies continue to struggle. When agile is adopted, common issues occur in every organization: getting people to try agile, selling agile to management, learning how to do efficient standup meetings, fitting planning into a short window, and running effective retrospectives. When you add in scaling issues, different development styles, and outsourcing, your simple agile adoption just gets more difficult.

Keynotes

K1 Beyond the Web and Apps: The Domestication of Knowledge

James Whittaker, Microsoft

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 8:30am

Since the dawn of computing, we've invented only two ways to get work done―the web or apps. We hunt for information on the web or we gather functionality from the app store. In each case, users must take the initiative to find the information they need. We've become used to this life of hunting and gathering, but its time is ending. A new era of domesticated information and functionality is dawning. In this new world, the web's information comes to users when and where they need it.

K2 For Maximum Awesome

Joe Justice, Scrum, Inc

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 10:15am

An agile hardware and engineering company of 500 collaborators in twenty countries, Team WIKISPEED uses test-first development practices, is run by Scrum teams, and produces road legal cars, micro-houses, and social-good projects. Joe Justice shares how their 100-MPG road car was created in just three months through object-oriented design, iterative development, and agile project management.

K3 An Agile Throwdown: Munich Takes on the Columbus Agile Benchmark Study

Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 8:30am

Agile has not only gone mainstream, it’s gone global. Data on agile team performance, time-to-market, and quality have emerged in the past decade. In 2012, a group of Columbus, Ohio, companies—business, IT, and financial services firms—participated in the first ever “Columbus Agile vs. the World” study. They collected velocity, schedule, effort, staffing, and quality data which were compared against QSM’s Software Lifecycle Management (SLIM) database. Analysis revealed delivery was 31 percent faster with 75 percent fewer defects than industry norms. Enter Munich, Germany.

K4 Producing Product Developers

David Hussman, DevJam

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 3:45pm

Many teams and organizations have found agile methods help them produce more. Where critical thinking is alive, a more important question arises: Are we producing the right thing? Even though agile tools and processes have helped produce more, they often fail to help us produce the right product, change our focus to product over process, or improve product learning.

Concurrent Sessions

BW3 This Is Not Your Father's Career: Advice for the Modern Information Worker

James Whittaker, Microsoft

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 12:45pm

In an era where college drop-outs run successful companies and creative entrepreneurs out-earn corporate vice presidents, working smart is clearly the new working hard. James Whittaker turns on their head the career rules that guided past generations and provides a new career manual for working smarter that speaks to the need for creativity, innovation, and insight. James teaches a set of skills designed for the modern era of working for companies, big or small. Learn how to avoid a one-sided relationship with your employer and ensure your passion is working for—and not against—you.

BW5 You’re Not as Smart as You Think: Improve Your Decision-Making Skills

Brandon Carlson, Lean TECHniques, Inc.

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 2:15pm

We all think of ourselves as pretty smart. After all, we sent a man to the moon and can instantly send a message across the world. Unfortunately, we suffer from a nasty little thing known as the Overconfidence Effect, a bias that applies to almost everything we do, including judging our own intelligence. Overconfidence is one of the dozens of documented biases and shortcomings in human judgment and decision making.

BW7 Collaboration and Communication through Improvisation

Kupe Kupersmith, B2T Training

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 2:15pm

To accomplish anything, you need the help of others. Successful teams are composed of members who are continually improving how they interact and communicate. Collaboration, creativity, and results grow out of an environment that is honest, positive, and affirming. Improvisation is about creating a positive environment where actors take an idea and then collaborate to co-create another great idea. In today’s world, a superstar does not sit in his office and emerge with a great idea. Great ideas evolve through group interaction.

BW8 The Secrets of Mobile App Testing

Jason Arbon, Applause

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 2:15pm

Most app teams aim for 4 stars—not 5. Why? Because delivering and maintaining a high-quality app becomes more challenging every day. Agile engineering and continuous integration put more pressure than ever on testers and quality-focused developers. Add to that the raw complexity of device and platform fragmentation, new sensors, app store processes, star ratings and reviews, increased app competition, mobile automation frameworks that only half work, and users who expect the app to not just work flawlessly, but also to be intuitive and even beautiful and fun.

BW11 Speed-Reading Your Colleagues and Bosses for Understanding

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 3:45pm

Effective communication is one of the most critical factors for success in the workplace. For software professionals, it is critical to understand how best to present information to your target audience in a way that they will understand and then take the action you want. Jennifer Bonine presents ideas on mastering politics, reading your colleagues and bosses perspective on how they want to receive information, and techniques to use if you’re not getting the action you want from your interactions.

BW12 Web Application Security Testing: Kali Linux Is the Way to Go

Gene Gotimer, Coveros, Inc.

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 3:45pm

Many free security testing tools are available, but finding ones that meet your needs and work in your environment can involve substantial time and effort. Especially when you are just starting out with security testing, finding reputable tools that do what you need is not easy. And installing them correctly just to evaluate them can be prohibitively time consuming. Kali Linux is a free Linux distribution with hundreds of security testing and auditing tools installed. Gene Gotimer gives an overview of Kali Linux, ways to effectively use it, and a survey of the tools available.

BT3 Accelerate Software Delivery with the Cloud

Rohit Jainendra, Electric Cloud

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 10:15am

The rate of technology innovation continues to accelerate, creating a demand for businesses to quickly deliver software that keeps pace with customer expectations. From development teams working across multiple locations to numerous tools within IT, releasing software in any enterprise has always been a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. While methodologies like agile and DevOps have reduced the release cycle time, organizations can now combine these methodologies with the cloud to deliver software even faster.

BT4 From Good to Great: Combining Session- and Thread-Based Test Management

Michael Albrecht, AddQ Consulting

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 10:15am

With the increased demand of short iterations, less time for formal testing, and increasingly complex applications, your daily testing habits must change. Session-based test management (SBTM) starts with Exploratory Testing and adds some structure to make it more focused, accountable, and reportable. Thread-based test management (TBTM) organizes Exploratory Testing around threads of activity, rather than test sessions or test artifacts. Michael Albrecht has combined SBTM and TBTM into xBTM™ to take full advantage of both.

BT6 Service Virtualization: Speed Up Delivery and Improve Quality

Anne Hungate, Independent Consultant

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 12:45pm

“We could not test this because…” Every technology professional has experienced issues during system testing when unit testing was overlooked or cut short. Every project team has hit roadblocks during system testing when dependent systems or complicated data have been unavailable. Service virtualization is a tool that eliminates the waiting and the excuses, making thorough and complete unit and system testing realistic. Done well, service virtualization improves defect detection and resolution in every phase of a project—driving down cost while improving quality.

BT8 Spice Up Your Test Plans with Mind Maps

Jeanne Peng, Cisco Video Technologies France

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 12:45pm

As our systems grow and are composed of numerous new-to-market technologies, testing becomes more complex and difficult. If you feel limited by the traditional ways your team designs tests, you can find out with Jeanne Peng how to animate test design and improve test coverage by using heuristics, mnemonics, and mind maps. Jeanne and her colleagues use these techniques to help them trigger and develop new test ideas, including their in-house Integration Maturity Level and the widely used SFDPOT mnemonic.

BT9 Helping Others Take Ownership of Conflict Resolution

Tricia Broderick, Pearson

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 2:15pm

Healthy conflict helps build stronger teams. This should not come as a big surprise. Yet, leaders are all too familiar with the struggle to get members of teams to appropriately resolve their own conflicts. Tricia Broderick faced this challenge until she stopped taking ownership of the conflict and its resolution. Although conflict situations can be dramatically different, underneath most conflicts is a misalignment between perceptions and intentions.

BT10 Technical Debt: You Can’t Afford It

David Croley, Agile Velocity

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 2:15pm

Technical debt happens, either via strategic decisions or inadvertantly as a project progresses. Debt can slow down a project and represents a risk that is not always apparent to those outside the project. Teams must find ways to work technical debt resolution activities into sprints and get agreement from external management to reduce it. David Croley explores the sources and types of technical debt and discusses the costs associated with ignoring it. David discusses techniques for making technical debt visible and quantifiable, and shows how to reduce it in an agile fashion.

BT11 Demystifying Big Data and NoSQL

Jon Mills, PaigeTechnologies

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 2:15pm

Big Data is here to stay and with it comes a deluge of new buzzwords and acronyms. Phrases like NoSQL; Document Database; Velocity, Volume, and Variety; Hadoop; and Map Reduce are now commonplace. To complicate matters further, different people define these phrases slightly differently. Jon Mills explains what Big Data really means and pulls back the curtain on the buzzwords surrounding it. Jon explains the origins of NoSQL, what the various NoSQL databases are, and when each is used.