Better Software West 2018 - Agile Test Automation
Monday, June 4
Building Continuous Delivery Pipelines
Although continuous delivery (CD) and DevOps are growing in popularity, not much practical information is available about how to get started. Join Ken Mugrage for this hands-on technical tutorial where you can get your feet wet and your questions answered. In this workshop, Ken will provide a cloud-based instance of the continuous delivery server GoCD for you to learn on. You will configure a complete continuous delivery pipeline from source code commit through deployment. Learn when to run each common type of automated test for the fastest possible feedback and how to run tests in...
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
Many 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...
Tuesday, June 5
Take Your Test-Driven Development to the Next Level
PreviewTest-driven development (TDD) is a powerful discipline that combines testing, coding, and software design to ameliorate defect rates and facilitate future enhancements. TDD has been around for some twenty years, so why isn’t it more prevalent—and more popular? For one thing, TDD is not easy to get right! And, it seems expensive. In this mostly hands-on tutorial, Rob Myers will explore these concerns by diving straight into the deep-end. Rather than starting with theory and working toward practice, Rob is going to reverse the tutorial recipe. Come prepared to spend the first half of...
The Tester's (New) Role in Agile Development
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...
Wednesday, June 6
Use DevOps Principles to Transform Culture
PreviewAt the heart of DevOps is the idea that organizations break down silos and teams work together to innovate faster, reducing the length of feedback loops and delivering value faster. Ashley Hunsberger describes how Blackboard is using DevOps principles—collaborative practices, iterative improvements, incremental testing, and more—to transform their development culture so everyone owns quality. Big change does not happen overnight, so they learned to make smaller changes that support the overall vision. Join Ashley as she lays the groundwork for iterative and continuous improvement...
Taking Your Automation Framework to the Next Level Using Machine Learning
Automation fails frequently in companies due to a variety of reasons, including poor team communication, lack of skills, flaky tests, and inadequate understanding of test coverage. Even when things are going well, the automated tests sometimes grow to a size where the test suites take too long to execute for the run to be viable. James Farrier is a test automation architect who will show you ways to leverage machine learning to address these challenges. You'll learn how to determine which tests are valuable to run after each commit or build in order to cut down the suite run time, how to...
Managing Microservices Using Terraform, Docker, and the Cloud
Much has been written about how to write microservices, but not enough about how to effectively deploy and manage them. Microservices architecture multiplies the number of deployables IT has to manage by at least ten. In that world, tooling to manage cloud deployments and related infrastructure has become essential for success, and Terraform and Docker are increasingly being leveraged to facilitate microservices environments. Derek Ashmore will share his hard-learned best practices for deploying and managing microservices in production. He will leverage true infrastructure as code using...
Strategies for Selecting the Right Open Source Framework for Cross-Browser Testing
PreviewOrganizations today are required to test their web application across browsers and mobile devices. Choosing the right framework is a matter of organizational as well as technical fit. With a plethora of test frameworks that span across practices such as behavior-driven development, unit tests, UI, and others, it can be a struggle to select the right tool. In this session, Eran Kinsbruner will provide an overview of the market and cover the top ten open source test frameworks, with a comparison table of pros and cons about when and why to use one tool over another. Eran will take...
Testing with AI for Agile Teams
Agile teams ship frequently and change things all the time--by design. In the middle of all this, agile teams need to make sure that their core user flows like sign-in, shopping carts and search features still work on every new build. Traditional testing is a poor fit for agile teams. AI changes all that with the ability to create automated verification for new user flows, and automatically maintain those verification steps even when the application changes. AI changes the game so that agile teams can move faster, with less risk or worry about breaking the app. Jason Arbon walks you...
Accelerating Your Test Execution Pipeline
PreviewIs your team constantly feeling pressure to deliver software faster without compromising quality? As your test automation process ramps up, your testing efforts can lag behind due to speed and scalability issues. Test environments are often the root cause for a number of these problems due to the time it takes to create them and the cost to reflect real users. Incorporating a test automation platform can cut your testing time in half by leveraging cloud capabilities of testing multiple devices and browsers at one time and fixing bugs as fast as you find them. Bria Grangard will...
Proving Out Your DevOps Pipeline Using a Minimum Viable Product
In the rush to be more competitive, an organization is often tempted to do an across-the board, "big bang" implementation. However, taking a big bang approach to implementing a DevOps pipeline carries with it a myriad of risks and challenges that can result in a failed DevOps implementation. Many of these risks and challenges can be mitigated or even eliminated by developing a DevOps minimum viable product (MVP). Join Tim Guay as he discusses how to apply an MVP concept to DevOps. You'll understand how to effectively test the end-to-end functionality of your DevOps pipeline and provide...
Liquibase: An Open Source Version Control Tool for Your Database
PreviewIt is generally accepted that you should always use proper version control when developing software. Why wouldn't you do the same with your database changes? It's even more important as part of a DevOps continuous integration strategy. Evolving your database schema using SQL scripts seems easy at the start but quickly becomes a nightmare as your application grows more complex. How do you track which scripts have been run? How do you rollback changes? Can you conditionally run certain changes for different environments? In this session Blaine Carter will discuss using a schema...
Thursday, June 7
Product Delivery Powered by Continuous Integration: A Case Study
Are you a developer who wants to easily manage and customize continuous integration and delivery? Do you work in a team environment where everyone collaborates and depends on CI for automation and delivery of clean code to production? In this session, Amit Mishra will share a case study of how Credit Karma evolved from a single, standalone CI instance to a self-service, Dockerized CI infrastructure combined with bots, webhooks, and GitHub APIs. He will cover GitHub's features and powerful APIs that were most valuable in this process, and how using GitHub freed up time previously spent on...
Scaling to Infinity: The Quest for Fully Automated, Scalable, Self-Healing Systems
The number of servers in our systems is constantly increasing. With the move to microservices and continuous deployment practices, deployments frequency is higher than ever, yet we are expected to handle increased demand with the same workforce as before. How can we operate clusters at scale with minimum human involvement? The answer lies in adoption of new practices and tools. Join Viktor Farcic as he discussions how container schedulers are becoming a de facto standard for deploying services at scale and continuous deployment is the new norm for complete automation of software delivery....
Managing DevOps Complexity with Systems Thinking
Many teams make the mistake of starting their DevOps journey without a plan. They are excited that there is a way to eliminate pain and increase value in their delivery cycles and value streams, but starting without a plan often relieves pain in one part of the value stream but only causes more pain elsewhere. In this case study-style presentation, Logan Daigle will discuss the methods he has used with a variety of companies to ensure they are thinking about the whole DevOps picture from the beginning. He'll discuss best steps and practices for applying systems thinking to DevOps and give...
The Great Debate: The Pros and Cons of Continuous Delivery
The Great Continuous Delivery Debate There is a lot of debate about whether continuous delivery is a boon or a curse. Proponents will sing the praises of being able to deliver software into production very frequently with no manual intervention. Skeptics will highlight the challenges delivering quality, working with legacy code, and the need for intensive system-wide assurance activities prior to deploying into production. So which is it? Can most organizations benefit from continuous delivery and, if so, how? Or is continuous delivery a pipedream and only reachable by the select few....
Engineering Productivity and Enterprise Quality at Scale
Over the past two years, PayPal has been on a journey to modernize its internal development and test systems, from test environments, implementing enterprise continuous integration and code propagation into the development pipeline, to release processes and production code validation. Jose Buraschi and Nir Szilagyi will talk about transforming the code of 5,000 developers across 350 teams and how it required social “magic” to influence behaviors and motivate engagement. This modernization of PayPal's development practices has involved creating reliable integrated test environments,...
Aligning Zero-Touch Nonfunctional Testing in DevOps Implementation
When a host of applications and data centers get migrated from their traditional IT systems to a cloud-based data center using an automated DevOps model of deployment, effective testing is critical to success. True DevOps value is realized when all development, testing, and operations functions collaborate and operate on a zero-touch automation model. In this session, Subash Newton will review the prerequisites for creating an effective DevOps testing strategy that includes nonfunctional testing. He will share how to set up an effective test strategy using a zero-touch process automation...