DevOps West 2016 - Software Tester
Sunday, June 5
Fundamentals of Agile Certification—ICAgile (2–Day)
Certified ScrumMaster Training (2-Day)
Integrating Test with a DevOps Approach (2–Day)
Software Tester Certification—Foundation Level (3–Day)
Monday, June 6
Leading Change—Even If You’re Not in Charge
Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization and it doesn’t get the support that you thought it would. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. Or, you have a great idea but can’t get the resources required for successful implementation. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit of techniques to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work within your organization. This toolkit includes five rules for change management, a checklist to help you determine the type of change process needed in your organization, techniques for communicating your...
Essential Test-Driven Development: A Hands-On Workshop
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 until the test passes, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. The developer repeats this process many times until the behavior is complete—and fully tested. Rob Myers demonstrates...
Acceptance Test-Driven Development
Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done is often an area 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 the difficulty of performing these initial activities. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), explains why it works, and outlines the different roles team members play in the process. ATDD improves communication among customers, developers, and testers. ATDD has proven to dramatically increase productivity and reduce...
Writing Developer Tests for Untested Legacy Code: A Hands-On Workshop
Although we would like to reap the rewards of test-driven development (TDD) on all our projects, there is a lot of challenging legacy code to maintain as well. Given the conundrum of needing good test coverage to safely refactor while at the same time needing to refactor the code to make it more testable, how do we proceed? Although not a panacea, the solution to this dilemma lies in simple, pragmatic techniques for teasing apart the big code hairball into more manageable strands. Rob Myers shows how to start by getting critical areas protected with automated tests, which allows further...
Tuesday, June 7
Continuous Testing to Drive Continuous Integration and Deployment
Continuous integration and continuous testing are two vital agile feedback loops that lead to a continuous deployment environment. Continuous integration processes monitor source code―recompiling after every change, running smaller tests, and notifying the developer if anything goes wrong. Continuous testing (and potentially continuous deployment) monitors integration builds, installs the product in a staging environment, and runs integration tests, again looking for problems. Jared Richardson explains the ideas and the tools needed to implement both continuous integration and continuous...
Help Retain Knowledge: Increase Engagement to Achieve Learning
Ever walk out of a meeting or training class struggling to remember what was just discussed? Or be annoyed that people request information that you’ve already shared? You are not alone! Leaders struggle with how to create an engaging environment that results in high collaboration and learning. Unfortunately, most leaders start off with the disadvantage of being exposed to practices that recent brain science has proven to be ineffective, such as standing up front in the room and talking with slides for an hour instead of engaging people every 10–20 minutes. In an agile environment, learning...
Measurement and Metrics for Test Managers
To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he addresses common metrics—measures of product quality,...
Getting Things Done: What Testers Do in Agile
Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s 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 teams...
Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle
In test automation, we must often use several tools that have been developed or acquired over time with little consideration of an overall plan or architecture, and without considering the need for integration. As a result, productivity suffers and frustrations increase. Join Mike Sowers as he shares experiences from multiple organizations in creating an integrated test automation plan and developing a test automation architecture. Mike discusses both the good (engaging the technical architecture team) and the bad (too much isolation between test automators and test designers) on his test...
Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas
We attend conferences, read books and articles, and discover new ideas we want to bring into our organizations—but we often struggle when trying to implement those changes. Unfortunately, those introducing change are not always welcomed with open arms. Linda Rising offers proven change management strategies to help you become a more successful agent of change in your organization. Learn how to plant effective seeds of change, and what forces in your organization drive or block change. These approaches, strategies, and patterns are useful in many different settings—not only to change your...
Wednesday, June 8
DevOps and the Culture of High-Performing Software Organizations
The DevOps movement emphasizes the importance of culture in creating high-performing teams. However, often perceived to be subjective and intractable, culture is often neglected in favor of more concrete drivers such as tools and processes. And this is a major failure mode in organizations attempting to achieve substantially improved performance through implementing agile and DevOps. Jez Humble takes a practical, data-driven approach to culture, illustrated with examples from large, successful enterprises. Learn how to measure culture and examine what a generative, high-performance culture...
The Power of an Agile Mindset
Linda Rising, co-author of Fearless Change and the recently published More Fearless Change, has wondered for some time whether much of Agile's success has been the result of the placebo effect—that is, good things happened because we believed they would. The placebo effect is a startling reminder of the power our minds have over our perceived reality. Now cognitive scientists tell us that this is only a small part of what our minds can do. Research has identified what she likes to call “an agile mindset”—an attitude that equates failure and problems with opportunities for...
Three Things You MUST Know to Transform into an Agile Enterprise
The farther we go down the path of scaled agile transformation, the more we learn that adding process and complexity can only take us so far. At some point, size and complexity are going limit our ability to be truly agile, and we must move toward greater organizational simplicity. The challenge is that large organizations are often complex and usually anything but simple. Most agile transformations start by either ignoring the complexity inherent in the system or by wrapping complexity in planning constructs that may help in the short run but ultimately doom your business agility. Mike...
Slay the Dragons of Agile Measurement
Some consider measurement in agile development destructive—or at the very least useless. Larry Maccherone disagrees and offers eight tools to slay the dragons of agile measurement. The #1 Dragon slayer—Use measurement for feedback rather than as a lever. What's the difference? Feedback is used to improve your own behavior; a lever is employed to change someone else's behavior. The distinction is subtle but critical. If you think what gets measured gets done, you are already venturing into “thar be dragons” territory. But it's not too late. Larry shows how to create a culture where...
Mobile App Testing: Planning, Priorities, Execution, and Reporting
When testers transition from web to mobile testing, they often miss the most important issues. The biggest challenge in mobile testing is knowing the mobile-specific issues—knowing what to test, in which order, and how. Jason Arbon shares his learnings from manual and automated testing of thousands of apps, and tips from working with top app teams. How do you balance functional with performance testing? Which, if any, tests should you automate? Should tests be executed on real devices or emulators? How do you best leverage your on-site, vendors, beta testers, and app store feedback? What...
End-to-End Quality Approach: 14 Levels of Testing
In 2015, the Standard & Poor’s Ratings IT team set out an ambitious objective—to tighten the process and controls around the quality of code deployed to production. Based on internal cost of quality assessments, and supporting agile and waterfall internal engineering processes, distinct testing levels were identified to help push quality left and root out the underlying causes of defects as early as possible. The ‘14 Levels of Testing’ were defined to collaboratively span organizational functions, establish quality expectations, and help track towards the goal of eliminating defects....
DevOps Is More than Just Dev and Ops: Don’t Forget Testing
What exactly is DevOps? It’s not just Dev, and it’s not just Ops. In fact, successful DevOps implementations meld development and operations activities with agile practices and a strong dose of automated testing. Organizations cannot afford to wait for a manual testing process to do the job. Developers need fast feedback loops, and managers need agile organizations. Join Jonah Stiennon as he discusses the importance of agile and testing in DevOps. Jonah introduces practical ways engineering departments can shorten the iteration cycle between Dev and Test. Automating the repetitive parts of...
Agile Metrics: Measuring Outcomes and Results
When organizations move to agile approaches, two very common metric anti-patterns surface: (1) The organization doesn’t change its metrics at all and simply continues to measure as they always have; or (2) The organization throws out every metric and just focuses on velocity and trying to increase it. Both of these anti-patterns lead to metrics dysfunction and disastrous results. Bob Galen explains that agile organizations should be developing their measurement strategies early. He explores unhealthy metrics (for example, velocity) and the drives behind measuring them. Then he describes...
Mobile Untethered: Lessons Learned without the Wires
Are you looking for insight into real-life companies and how “going mobile” has changed the roles for developers and testers in their organizations? Jennifer Bonine and Rick Faulise share strategies that have worked—and not worked—for organizations. What do you, as a developer or tester, need to think about when you move into mobile web and mobile apps? It is important to understand the changes required in your skillset and to keep up to date on what organizations are looking for in their resources as they embark on their mobile strategies. Jennifer and Rick explore the state of mobile...
Predictive Test Planning to Improve System Quality
Penny McVay shares how her team approached improving the quality of a large policy-writing application for a global insurance carrier. The application has many pieces and parts, thousands of lines of code are changed monthly, and the business depends on a stable application. To mitigate risk, the team investigated the question of how to predict where testing needed to focus. The regression test suite the organization had built was difficult to maintain, identified few defects, and took hours of effort to run. QA needed not only to optimize the regression suite but also to determine how to...
Continuous Integration as a Development Team’s Way of Life
Continuous integration (CI) is a buzzword in software development today. We know it means “run lots of builds,” but having a continuous integration pipeline opens up opportunities well beyond making sure your team's code compiles. What if this pipeline could improve everything from the quality of code reviews to how often and safely you deploy to production and how you monitor your product in the wild? What if CI could provide insights into how automated tests are performing and how to improve them? Melissa Benua describes how to set up a basic CI infrastructure and then transform it into...
Why Agile Works—and How to Screw It Up!
Agile practices can be the easy part of agile. It’s getting people into the agile mindset that can be a real challenge. Do you have a team member who doesn’t quite support agile or someone who’s playing along but not really committed? One step toward obtaining real commitment is a better understanding of why agile works, why it is different, and when it is the right approach. In this fast moving session, Perry Reinert provides a fun look at some of the theory that gets to the core of why agile works. Yes, we really can use the words fun and theory in the same sentence. Combining parts of...
Improvisation for Agile Skill Development
In today's economy, the Creative Economy, businesses face a disrupted, highly competitive, and constantly changing landscape. Robie and Jody Wood say that to thrive in the Creative Economy, team members, managers, and executives need to become and remain agile. Improvisational theater provides a proven model for developing agility skills since the characteristics of “being agile”—engaging people, learning, making decisions in the midst of uncertainty and ambiguity, and adapting—are the very skills that improv artists work to develop with every exercise they perform. This session is about “...
Borrowing Best-of-Breed Software Delivery Techniques for the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the landscape of the traditional consumer electronics market. More and more electronic devices—from lightbulbs to thermostats to wrist watches—are now capable of being monitored and controlled from anywhere in the world. The increasing market demand for cloud-connected IoT devices is encouraging cohesion within traditionally disparate cloud- and hardware-oriented engineering organizations. While cloud-oriented organizations are well-suited to rapidly or even continuously delivering cloud-based software, hardware-oriented organizations historically...
What Hollywood Can Teach Us about Software Testing
If we observe the world through the lens of software testing, we discover that there are lessons all around us we can apply on the job, and one venue that’s packed with these tidbits is the movie theater. Bernie Berger gives examples of a few unlikely yet credible lessons from the language of some classic Hollywood movies—and how we can apply them as we test. Learn about the primary root cause of many software bugs from Office Space; see how the characters in Saving Private Ryan enacted ideas of exploratory testing; discover how to apply the skills of situational...
Using DevOps to Drive the Agile ALM
Many organizations struggle to implement sustainable processes to drive their software and systems development work. This leaves their technology managers and teams to use whatever worked for them on the last project, often resulting in a lack of integration and poor communication and collaboration across the organization. Based on his new book Agile Application Lifecycle Management: Using DevOps to Drive Process Improvement, Bob Aiello explores how to use DevOps principles and practices to drive the entire application lifecycle management process including establishing agile...
Five Critical Elements for Successful Agile Data Management
In the past few years we’ve used cloud technologies to improve pre-production flexibility and solve many problems that previously prevented us from delivering high quality apps to production. However, one problem consistently prevents full test coverage prior to deployment—the lack of comprehensive test data. As we try to get faster and leaner in our agile development processes, the problem with data becomes even more difficult to solve. Robert Kelman describes the evolution of DIRECTV’s (now AT&T) Agile Test Data Management program. He explains the five critical elements—centralized...
The Issues Agile Exposes and What To Do about Them
Before the short iterations in agile, projects were segmented into large blocks of work taking many weeks or months. If problems emerged, it was relatively easy to hide them. Now, with agile, many of these problems and issues can’t be hidden for long. Lee Copeland exposes these issues—trust, organization, work, measurement, and change—and explores solutions. Leaders often distrust their teams; teams often distrust their leaders. Learn the symptoms and solutions to these trust issues. A key organizational issue is that organizations cannot give up their previous team structures. Explore...
Project Estimation: Myths, Taboos, and Inconvenient Truths
Too many of us continue to suffer through schedule-driven crunch mode and cost overruns. We all know the usual suspects, including bad estimates and changing requirements. But what if we set aside myths and embraced reality? Estimates are uncertain, but that doesn’t make them bad—only inconvenient. We can’t manage away the uncertainty, but we can choose where it lands. Robert Merrill believes that our longing for stable requirements tells us where the uncertainty wants to be—in the scope. What if we stopped fighting it? What if we broke the taboo and said we’re done with crunch mode, with...
The Challenges of Testing a Wearable Banking Application
In many ways, the rapidly evolving mobile banking application industry is challenging for testers. Adding a wearable device brings new challenges, new user behaviors, and untested devices. To ensure a well-tested product, what changes and adaptations do you need to make to your test approach? Carl Johnson shares his hands-on experiences going from testing a mobile banking application to testing a wearable “watch-bank,” an application that makes it possible for customers to see balances and transactions on their smartwatches. Carl presents examples of his learnings—tools that could help you...
Identify and Exploit Behavioral Boundaries for Unit Testing
Whether writing unit tests after coding or using test-driven development (TDD), developers often ask themselves—How much testing is enough? Or too much? Or not enough? Rob Myers helps answer these questions using the techniques from his experience doing and teaching TDD. Look for those tests that cause us to write code, look for unique behaviors and code-paths, and strive to narrow in the boundary conditions. This gives us pinpoint accuracy when something breaks. Rob demonstrates what this approach looks like using graphs, tests, and code. To answer “What needs to be tested?” Rob...
Thursday, June 9
How to Do Kick-Ass Software Development
Software development is hard― keeping developers, testers, designers, product managers and other stakeholders in sync and working on the right things at the right time. Building the systems that customers care about and delivering high-quality code fast are challenges every development team faces. Just being agile isn’t enough; we need to actively think about how we can improve software development processes and techniques. Sven details Atlassian’s coding practices and team dynamics, which include: collaborating fast to develop ideas, helping QA with testing, avoiding meetings to get...
Implementing Agile in an FDA Regulated Environment
Developing medical devices that are subject to FDA approval has traditionally followed the waterfall methodology, largely due to the structure of the regulations that govern development practices. But we know from myriad case studies in different industries that agile methodologies are far superior in providing the highest value to customers in the shortest time to market. Neal Herman shares how one developer of complex medical devices embraced agile software development practices and proved that it could not only develop software faster with higher quality but also meet all regulatory...
Continuous Discovery: The Path to Learning and Growing
Software development is a process of continuous discovery. When writing software, we create ideas, we try them in code, we learn what works and what doesn’t—and that steers us to a better solution. And sometimes we do this all day long! Woody Zuill says that this same process of continuous discovery works for making improvements for our teams, and in our workplaces and organizations. With continuous discovery we do numerous micro experiments that guide us along the path to a better future. If we follow the values and principles expressed in the Agile Manifesto, which provides us a powerful...
Experiments: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful
Through the years, Linda Rising has given presentations about the use of stories instead of science in the industry, so in this session she has decided to be more helpful and talk about experiments. There's an increasing emphasis on experiments as a part of being more innovative but sometimes Linda says we need a nudge and some examples to help us get going. No, this is not too rigorous! Rather than talking about statistics, she is going to explore cheap, easy experiments—what to do, what to be aware of, and our own cognitive biases, including the confirmation bias that does its best to...
The Tester's Role in Agile Planning
If testers sit passively through agile planning, important testing activities will be glossed over or missed altogether. Testing late in the sprint becomes a bottleneck, quickly diminishing the advantages of agile development. However, testers can actively advocate for customers’ concerns while helping the team implement robust solutions. Rob Sabourin shows how testers can—and should—contribute to the estimation, task definition, clarification, and scoping work required to implement user stories. Testers apply their elicitation skills to understand what users need, collecting great...
Docker Containers in the Enterprise DevOps Journey
As technology moves from being a cost-center to a revenue generator in nearly every business, technologists are expected to deliver more with fewer resources. DevOps enables this efficiency through improved collaboration between product management, development, release management, quality assurance, information security, and operations. However, Aater Suleman says that the challenge of incorporating DevOps into a business is no small task. Improving this collaboration requires cross-functional technologies that benefit all departments. By this definition, Docker may well be the most...
Playwriting, Imagination, and Agile Software Development … Oh My!
Agile practitioners are constantly striving to improve their processes and delivery to gain a competitive edge. To become a cross-functional T-shaped rock star, you have to be open to learning from other disciplines and adapting quickly. Tania Katan knows a little about crossing disciplines and adapting at a breakneck pace. She is a playwright by training who recently made the audacious leap into software. Tania helps you find your inner “T” so you will have the breadth and depth to take on the unpredictability of software development with the imagination and insights of a playwright....
Managing a Software Engineering Team
You’re a senior engineer who decides to switch to management for experience in leading a team. How is your work going to change? What challenges are you going to face? How are you going to keep up with new technologies? Are people reporting to you going to see you as a leader and follow you? Sebastiano Armeli asked himself all these questions when he became a manager. See what he found it and learn how you can bring this information into your work. While management varies greatly by organization, Sebastiano explores leadership and management behaviors you can apply at your company. At...
White Box Testing: It’s Not Just for Developers Any More
Software development has improved dramatically over the past several years due in part to techniques, approaches, and development environments that take advantage of the power of modern computing machines. Software testing techniques have, by comparison, lagged. As projects and teams become more agile, the lines between the roles blur. Testers cannot remain uninformed about the underlying code and technologies that power the products they test. Join Robert Vanderwall as he shows how to take a deeper look at the code, using test-driven development (TDD) tests as a roadmap. Robert outlines...
How Far Can You Go with Agile for Embedded Software?
With the proliferation of IoT and consumer demand for smarter homes, appliances, automobiles, and wearables, many traditional product-based manufacturing companies are now becoming embedded software companies. This means that the design and manufacturing of physical products is becoming more complex since it now requires the integration of the physical components of the product, the firmware, and the myriad software components these products contain. Historically, embedded software developers have lagged behind IT in the adoption of agile development practices, largely due to the...
A Simple Tool for Speaking Honestly and Constructively
Are you on a team where people avoid conflict or shy away from saying anything that might sound critical? Reluctance to speak up can block important challenges from being identified, and deny your team and organization the opportunity to learn and improve. According to Lorraine Aguilar, this avoidance is most evident in peer-to-peer communications. Lorraine designed a tool for agile coaches, facilitators, and team leaders who want to make it easy and safe for people to speak authentically during retrospectives and other opportunities for performance feedback and continuous improvement....
What Everyone on the Team Needs to Know about Test Automation
Test automation should be an activity that involves the entire project team—not just the testing group. Test automation is a technical testing task, and the test team benefits from the assistance of others in the organization. Jim Trentadue outlines the various testing activities with the corresponding contributions and benefits of each team member. Project managers can coordinate the effort and schedule. Business analysts can manage technical test requirements. User acceptance testers can provide proper steps and screenshots for IT personnel. Developers can write code with testability in...
Going Agile at Scale: A Mindset Transformation of Global Proportions
How do you successfully transform 700 people working on one product? The answer: Give them ownership. Value people over process. This requires that leaders learn how and when to step back—and when to step up. In the past eight years, the Veritas NetBackup organization had tried three agile transformations: two unsuccessful and one showing promise. The key difference has been the transformation of the leaders, helping teams take ownership rather than focusing only on artifacts and ceremonies. What did the leaders learn—and how? Julie Urban and Jeff Byron describe NetBackup’s transformation...
Testing in a Super-Agile Software Development Environment
Channel 4 broadcasting company in Finland provides live streams of sporting events on the Internet (Ruutu.fi). The software development is done by agile principles but even more straightforward and quicker than normal agile projects. Tomi Kaleva says they have changed the entire production environment and renewed all the mobile apps in the past year. As a result, the normal agile development speed wasn’t enough. The fast software development cycle makes software testing challenging as there isn’t sufficient time for test...
Create Brainstorming Commandos for Creative Problem Solving
Agile teams are solving real-world complex problems every day. These problems require creative problem solving by team members. In its truest sense, brainstorming is intended to be a practical approach to this task. Brainstorming entails “using the brain to storm a creative problem and to do so in commando fashion, with each 'stormer' audaciously attacking the same objective.” In this highly practical workshop, Pradeepa Narayanaswamy introduces you to a variety of brainstorming games that get the creative juices flowing to yield better collaboration and ideas among team members. Delegates...
Move Your Selenium Testing to the Cloud
What is the most challenging aspect of running automation tests? Anshul Sharma believes it is covering multiple browsers and cross-device testing combined with faster execution of tests. One way to do this is parallel execution of tests concurrently over a Selenium Grid, but that comes with a substantial burden of managing and maintaining the platforms and browsers. Now that cloud-computing resources are available and affordable, an alternative is leveraging the cloud. Moving to the cloud makes tests easier and faster to run for several reasons. First, no installing/upgrading the browser...
Where Is Test in DevOps?
As organizations try to meet faster delivery schedules and improve collaboration between development and operations, DevOps has become a hot topic. So, where does testing fit into a DevOps strategy? By narrowly focusing on just Dev and Ops, the term DevOps itself ends up missing testing. Nikhil Kaul gives an overview of recent trends in DevOps, specifically changes that have taken place in the testing industry in the past year. Nikhil explores why testing is becoming more important than ever before. With Apple, Google, and Microsoft making it easier for Dev and Ops to build and deploy...
Internet of Things and the Wisdom of Mobile
The Internet of Things—what many are calling the Fourth Industrial Revolution—is shaping up to be a game-changing marvel as great as the Internet itself. With more than 10 billion connected devices and thousands more coming online by the minute, we are undoubtedly more connected than ever before. From your dishwasher to your toothbrush to your dog’s collar, electronic devices everywhere are connected. This phenomenon is drastically increasing demands on APIs, data, security, and software quality, pushing every industry sector to step up its game to stay relevant in the new era of...