Agile Testing

Tutorials

MD Specification by Example: Mastering Agile Testing

Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC

Mon, 06/08/2015 - 8:30am

On agile teams, testers can struggle to keep up with the pace of development if they continue employing a waterfall verification process―finding bugs after development. Nate Oster challenges you to question waterfall assumptions and replace a “test last” mentality with “specification by example.” Practice “test first” by writing executable specifications for a new feature before development begins. Learn to switch from tests as verification to tests as specification and guide development with concrete examples written in the language of your business. Start by joining a team for a humorous simulation of real-world issues and experience. Learn how specification by example helps build quality in instead of trying to test defects out. Progress to increasingly more realistic scenarios and practice the art of specifying intent with table-based and given-when-then formats. These paper-based simulations give you meaningful practice specifying concrete examples and will change the way you think about writing tests and collaborating as a team. This is not a tools session—no laptops required.

ME Build Product Backlogs with Test-Driven Thinking―and More SOLD OUT NEW

David Hussman, DevJam

Mon, 06/08/2015 - 8:30am

Many product backlogs of user stories are nothing more than glorified to-do lists. Teams have lost the idea of prioritizing real business value and focus instead only on finishing stories and accumulating story points. Join David Hussman as he drives a stake into the heart of lame backlogs and breathes new life into product design with pragmatic UX and test-driven thinking. Using real-world examples, David shares his experiences and teaches tools you can use to fuse centered-product thinking with end-to-end testing. These techniques include: developing test-driven user experiences, improving product discovery (backlog grooming) sessions with testing talk, adding story clarity with examples and tests, validating requirements with tests, connecting program teams by decomposing product ideas into small testable stories, and recomposing them to validate product level learning. Because we learn by doing and questioning as we go, show up ready to work. This session is for testers, developers, product owners, and anyone else interested in improving their product thinking and product backlog. Bring your failing product backlog stories for discussion, too.

ML Wearables: Navigating the Perfect Storm of Sensors, Big Data, Privacy, and Security NEW

Philip Lew, XBOSoft

Mon, 06/08/2015 - 1:00pm

One of the latest facets of the mobile paradigm is mobile wearables―a new generation of personalized technology that knows us better than our closest friends do. How many of your friends know how far you walked or what you ate today? Although you may think mobile wearables are just for geeks, they will become commonplace very quickly. Our challenge is to develop applications that can synthesize context from the gigantic amount of data these devices and their sensors generate. Ensuring the privacy and security of device usage and its data will be of highest concern. Philip Lew systematically analyzes context―the most important element in future design and development of mobile applications while incorporating big data, privacy, and security. Using examples, Philip shows the contextual elements you need to consider now and discusses how to identify key factors for a future generation of wearable products based on discovering anticipatory services.

TC Rapid Software Testing for Programmers NEW

James Bach, Satisfice, Inc.

Tue, 06/09/2015 - 8:30am

Perhaps you’re a programmer, trying to identify important problems in your code before they affect customers. Or a tester with skills in reading or writing code on a mission to find coding defects. James Bach presents Rapid Software Testing, a universal methodology for testing that consists of both a mindset and a skillset that can be applied whether or not you have a technical background. However, for people with coding skills, it has additional dimensions. Long before you can apply tools or write code to help solve problems, you must identify technical risk and consider the costs and benefits of various testing tactics. This is not a session about canned test tools and how to use them. It does not cover the mechanics of any specific tool or simple technique. Instead, we use practical exercises and Socratic questioning to explore the deeper skills of investigating, framing, and solving real testing problems using the skills and perspective of a programmer.

LAPTOP REQUIRED. Delegates must bring Windows-based laptops to this tutorial.

TI Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions SOLD OUT

Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.

Tue, 06/09/2015 - 8:30am

Agile initiatives always begin with the best of intentions—accelerate delivery, better meet customer needs, or improve software quality. Unfortunately, some agile projects do not deliver on these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or get an agile project back on track, this session is for you. Jeffery Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues—or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development problems, and (non)agile testing can all contribute to project failure. Learn practical tips and techniques for identifying early warning signs that your agile project might be in trouble and how you can best get your project back on track. Gain the knowledge you need to guide your organization toward agile project implementations that serve the business and the stakeholders.

Concurrent Sessions

BW6 Requirements and Acceptance Tests: Yes, They Go Together

Ken Pugh, Net Objectives

Wed, 06/10/2015 - 1:30pm

The practice of software development requires a clear understanding of business needs. Misunderstanding requirements causes waste, slipped schedules, and mistrust. Developers implement their perceived interpretation of requirements; testers test against their perceptions. Disagreement can arise about implementation defects, when the cause is really a disagreement about a requirement. Ken Pugh shows how early acceptance test development decreases requirements misunderstandings by both developers and testers. A testable requirement provides a single source that serves as the analysis document, acceptance criteria, regression test suite, and progress tracker for each feature. Explore how the business, testers, and developers can create, evaluate, and use testable requirements. Join Ken to examine how to transform requirements into stories, which are small units of work that have business value, small implementation effort, and easy-to-understand acceptance tests. Learn how testers and requirement elicitors can work together to create acceptance tests prior to implementation.

BT12 Prevent Test Automation Shelfware: A Selenium-WebDriver Case Study

Alan Ark, Eid Passport

Thu, 06/11/2015 - 1:30pm

Eid Passport had a suite of Selenium tests with a bad reputation—difficult to maintain, broken all the time, and just plain unreliable. A tester would spend more than four days to get through one execution and validation pass of these automated tests. Eid Passport was ready to toss these tests into the trash. Alan Ark volunteered to take a look at the tests with an eye toward showing that Selenium-based tests can, in fact, be reliable and used in the regression test effort. Alan shares techniques he used to transform a sick, test automation codebase into a reliable workhorse. These techniques include AJAX-proofing, use of the Page Object model, and pop-up handling. The test process that used to take more than four days to turnaround now finishes in under two hours. And this is just the beginning.