DevOps West 2017 - Testing & QA
Monday, June 5
Git and GitHub for Developers and Testers
PreviewGit clients and the GitHub cloud have achieved an enviable adoption rate. Major corporations as well as open source projects now host their code on GitHub. Developers, DevOps, and non-technical writers alike now use Git to work with text files in a way that enables them to go back to specific versions at any point in time. Websites at GitHub.io are proliferating. Job interviewers look to GitHub to gauge each individual's creativity, popularity, capability, and tenacity. Join Wilson Mar in this hands-on tutorial to become immediately productive with these vital tools. Wilson has...
Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle
PreviewIn test automation, we often must 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...
IoT Testing Workshop
The Internet of Things now has a strong foothold in our world. If your business is not prepared for it now, it’s already behind. The IoT is no longer something talked about as a futuristic concept. With the proliferation of connected devices, connected appliances, connected cars, and even connected clothes, the stage is set and IoT apps are here to stay. Our testing, product management, and development teams need to be preparing to address how to develop and test in this new world we live in. The explosive growth of the IoT market has had a major impact on mobile testing and testing in...
Tuesday, June 6
Thinking Inside the Box – Root Cause Analysis with The Six Boxes
Do you want to improve business and user value delivery, quality, efficiency, and productivity of your software engineering team? OK, who doesn’t? Poor productivity problems, quality issues, failing to meet commitments, and general team inefficiencies are unfortunately still commonplace. And what is at the root of most problems? James Waletzky says the answer is those highly imperfect creatures—humans. So how do we go about fixing the problems? First, we must discover the root causes, not just the symptoms, and those are not always obvious. In this hands-on tutorial, James focuses on a...
The Tester’s (New) Role in Agile Development
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...
Wednesday, June 7
The Future of Scrum
In the past two decades, Scrum has become the standard for agile development, with more than 90 percent of teams today using Scrum to deliver working software. But, as Scrum starts into its third decade, it’s not the fresh-faced process framework that came into the world in the summer of 1995. In an industry that survives on the bleeding edge of trends will there continue to be a role for Scrum, or will its events, artifacts and roles be consumed by other process frameworks? What really is the future of Scrum? Dave West reviews the past, present, and future of Scrum, using real data from...
From Monoliths to Services: Paying Your Technical Debt
PreviewEver since distributed software became popular, developers have been choosing whether to use monolithic architectures or service-oriented architectures. With the advancement of cloud infrastructure and the widespread implementation of agile methodologies, the latter approach has been getting much easier. David Litvak describes how a monolithic application—due to its ever increasing technical debt—can become too big to support. He explores how to gradually reduce the size by extracting its components into smaller services, so ultimately the application is decoupled and highly...
Notes from the Test Management Battlefield
PreviewAre you a new, aspiring, or experienced manager tasked with building a team of stars? Do you manage a team that needs to be motivated or re-energized? Join Tanya Kravtsov as she shares stories, tips, and tricks on hiring, on-boarding, and managing test engineers and turning your group into a Dream Team. From the experience of building teams in new organizations, managing test teams from five people to fifty, both onsite and onshore, Tanya shares lessons learned and successful processes that she adopted. The talent and level of commitment of individual team members, as well as their...
Drive Product Improvements with Telemetry
Do you want to know how real users are interacting with your product? Do you want to know which features they don’t use? Would you like to understand how your product works internally under real operational conditions? Then you need telemetry—the instrumentation of your product to record this information and transmit it back to you for analysis. Windows 10 implemented this capability. Today, there are more than 450 million devices running Windows 10 providing constant feedback on its operation. Ken Johnston says Microsoft learned a lot about what they did right for that launch—and what...
Thursday, June 8
Finding Efficiencies in Your Development Lifecycle
Many of us feel like we never have enough time to complete everything we want in a given sprint, cycle, or phase. Even though we can't add more hours to our day, we can add time by removing inefficiencies in our development lifecycle management approach. Melissa Tondi explores a number of areas that may be causing inefficiencies in our overall approach. These problem areas include acceptance criteria for requirements that are not understood, actionable, or demonstrable; unit tests that are misunderstood or non-existent; and demos that don’t actually demonstrate capability. Melissa shares...
Why You Shouldn’t Automate – And Why You Will Anyway
PreviewAutomation has been touted as a way to speed up release delivery, improve quality, and reduce testing costs. However, what if there is a different side to this story? Come hear an opposing view to automation—and why it may actually cost your organization time, resources, and even quality. Kevin Pyles discusses why automation projects continue to fail, why automation checks should take a backseat to manual testing, and why the cost of automation is just too high. Kevin suggests you “just say no” to automation. But with pressure from your manager and great industry marketing hype,...
Scaling Automated Tests: Choosing an Appropriate Subset
Automated testing of an application with many dependent services can be challenging. Achieving continuous deployment across these services can be even more so. Managing, coordinating, and scaling deployments of services can become overwhelming and error prone over time. Ensuring that you are able to detect important defects before customers do can be difficult. Executing only relevant tests after each code change rather than always running everything (boiling the ocean) can be a formidable task and might not scale well as the size of the app increases. Manoj Pahuja and Daniel Clayton...
Visual Management Gone Wild
A visual management system is a low-tech tool with a simple mission—to visually represent the work that the team is doing. When used regularly and correctly, it can be a project acceleration tool. However, teams often go wild with visuals, decorating every inch of free wall space with gridlines, Sticky Notes, and project stats until it looks like the arts and crafts store vomited all over the office. Nichole Vanderlaan refers to this as “wallpaper,” which is often static and fails to provide much benefit. She highlights common failure modes that result in wallpaper such as not huddling...
Six Ways to Improve Class Design for Better Software
Decomposing a system design into small classes with narrow responsibilities is essential for creating a maintainable software product. However, without guidance, it can often be difficult—especially for new software developers—to see how a large class might be broken down into smaller pieces. The problem usually isn’t knowing how to make a change, it’s knowing what change to make. Max Guernsey shares six techniques that can ease the burden of identifying smaller design elements. These include direct examination of code qualities, modeling real-world entities, responding to code smells,...
Include Automated Testing in Your Definition of Done
Even though most teams appreciate the benefits of test automation, it is commonly viewed as too time-consuming to be included as part of an agile sprint. This results in automation being done in isolation, typically months after the user story has been completed. This can lead to several problems including automation team members being disengaged and missing key aspects of the requirements, as well as teams going through a period where new features are being introduced but no regression testing is occurring. Angie Jones provides agile-friendly approaches to test automation that allow teams...
Identify Development Pains and Resolve Them with Idea Flow
With the explosion of new frameworks, a mountain of automation, and our applications distributed across hundreds of services in the cloud, the level of complexity in software development is growing at an insane pace. With increased complexity comes increased costs and risks. When diagnosing unexpected behavior can take days, weeks, or sometimes months, all while our release is on the line, our projects plunge into chaos. In the invisible world of software development, how do we identify what's causing our pain? How do we escape the chaos? Janelle Klein presents a novel approach to...