Better Software West 2018 - Agile Testing
Monday, June 4
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...
Get Started with Acceptance Test-Driven/Behavior-Driven Development
Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done are often areas of discomfort for product managers, developers, and quality assurance experts alike. The origin of many items, living in our defect tracking systems, can be traced to our difficulty performing these initial activities. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development (ATDD)/behavior driven development (BDD), explains why it works, and outlines the different roles team members play in the process. ATDD/BDD improves communication among customers, developers, and testers. By decreasing re-work, ATDD/...
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
Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Testers
Testing in agile teams is still one of the great mysteries of the agile world. In many organizations, testers continue to be marginalized. In others, testers are active but rarely understand or reach the full potential of their role. In this session, Shaun Bradshaw, an experienced agile coach and tester, will explore the practices and mindset of fully empowered agile testers on high-performance agile teams. Throughout Shaun’s agile coaching experience, he’s seen it all—from total dysfunction to high performance and everything in between. He’ll share with you real-world tactics to help you...
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...
Thursday, June 7
Overcoming Test-Driven Damage
Test-driven development is supposed to help us refactor our code safely, but we often find that when we refactor our code, we also have to refactor our tests. What was supposed to add safety becomes a burden requiring time and effort. Writing good unit tests is a critical skill that developers need to master in order to get the most benefit from test-driven development. Tests must be unique, written at the right level of abstraction, and implementation-independent in order to be most valuable. In this session, David Bernstein will cover effective techniques for doing TDD that support...
Mobbing for Test Design: Connecting with Your Colleagues’ Test Ideas
PreviewDo you have trouble generating test ideas? Are there bugs that are getting through because you missed certain tests? This workshop will teach you mob test design techniques to help you generate test ideas around your features and products. Join James Fogarty and Jeff MacBane to learn the benefits of mob test design and understand the value your colleagues bring to test design. First, they will explain how mob test design sessions work and why you need to be doing them. Next, they will explore a heuristic test strategy model they’ve developed to help organize a mob test design...
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,...