EPIC Experience 2020 - Concurrent Sessions
Concurrent sessions offer attendees the flexibility to explore a variety of topics throughout the conference on Wednesday and Thursday in order to customize their learning experience. Learn both enterprise foundations and new methodologies to grow your skills, supercharge your knowledge, and re-energize your career growth.
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Wednesday, April 22
Slicing Kubernetes with Raspberry Pi, Monitoring, and Chaos
Do you ever feel like your systems lack unnecessary complexity? Do they just need more overengineering? This is the talk for you. Jonan Scheffler will detail the creation of a Raspberry Pi–based desktop Kubernetes cluster in an attempt to overcomplicate the already complex world of stateless web application deployment. He’ll walk through building an observability platform using open source tools like Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger to keep a close watch on our tiny fragile microservices, and then break them intentionally for our own amusement. Follow along as we exact our revenge on those...
Implementing ATDD from Scratch in a Large-Scale Agile Project
PreviewATDD (acceptance test-driven development) is often used synonymously with BDD (behavior-driven development) and TDD (test-driven development), but the main distinction of ATDD is its focus on collaboration. Developers, testers, business representatives, product owners, and other stakeholders work together to come up with a clear understanding of what needs to be implemented. Raj Subramayer will discuss how his team embraced ATDD to solve problems such as a lack of clarity in requirements, frequent scope creep, no visibility into the testing...
Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems
A ScrumMaster's work is never done. The development team needs your support, the product owner is lost in the complexities of agile product management, and your managers and stakeholders need to know what will be done, by when, and for how much. Learn how experienced ScrumMasters balance the demands of these three levels of servant leadership while removing organizational impediments and helping their Scrum teams deliver real value. Ryan Ripley will show you how to bring life back to your Scrum events by leveraging the full intelligence of your...
The Intersection of Testing and DevSecOps
PreviewNo one likes having a movie spoiled by learning about the ending before they see it, but you’ve seen this one before, and your customers need to know how it turns out. All software systems have the potential for bugs, issues, and errors, and discovering them before your users do requires collaboration from everyone involved. Luis Casillas will share his experiences living at the intersection of testing and DevSecOps, and help you prevent your thriller from becoming a horror show!
Planning Release Dates in an Agile World
The agile team is in place, the list of sized features are in the backlog, bug fixes are defined, and the release begins. But now the client and the rest of the business want a release date—and they want the release delivered on that date! How can you commit to a fixed date within an agile environment? Karen Holliday will guide you through planning an agile release. She’ll discuss the Agile Triangle and how you can benefit from using different planning techniques, walking you through her favorite two approaches: fixed-date and fixed-scope. You’ll...
JACKPOT! - Successful Automation for Testing Embedded Systems
Testing slot machines can present its own challenges as a constant mix of testing software, hardware and server. There are complex algorithms, machine responses, payout percentages, and fault tolerances. By fusing a combination of an API & UI-based automation approach, this can all come together. This case study that will illustrate how to use a Keyword methodology into UI-based recordings across both Windows & Linux systems to maintain global singularity. There will be an architecture review of how the new API library was built with the Keyword library, then finally tied in with...
Exploring Inclusion: Personas, Accessibility, and Meeting User Need
PreviewInclusive design and unified design systems are the best ways to ensure applications are inclusive to all users from their inception. But how do you test for inclusion, and where do you start? Meeting the needs of all your users may seem like a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be. Using personas and leaning on our knowledge of exploratory testing techniques, we can start to create testing experiences that help ensure we're truly meeting the needs of all our users. Jenna Charlton will discuss barriers that impact your user experience,...
Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems (continued)
A ScrumMaster's work is never done. The development team needs your support, the product owner is lost in the complexities of agile product management, and your managers and stakeholders need to know what will be done, by when, and for how much. Learn how experienced ScrumMasters balance the demands of these three levels of servant leadership while removing organizational impediments and helping their Scrum teams deliver real value. Ryan Ripley will show you how to bring life back to your Scrum events by leveraging the full intelligence of your...
Building Compassionate Teams: A Sustainable Path to Scalability
Growing pains on a team are a real thing. How do you hire the right person? Once hired, how do you train them? How do you keep them aligned, not just on the product, but also on team values? How do you build trust within the team? How do you encourage autonomy and engagement? All of this takes time and money, but you need to try to show value early on and get buy-in from management and the executives. Join Archana Rajan as she takes you on her journey of scaling her team from one to 20 people over the course of five years, all while reducing risk...
Planning Release Dates in an Agile World (continued)
The agile team is in place, the list of sized features are in the backlog, bug fixes are defined, and the release begins. But now the client and the rest of the business want a release date—and they want the release delivered on that date! How can you commit to a fixed date within an agile environment? Karen Holliday will guide you through planning an agile release. She’ll discuss the Agile Triangle and how you can benefit from using different planning techniques, walking you through her favorite two approaches: fixed-date and fixed-scope. You’ll...
Testing The Limits of Agile with Design Research
Agile has proven itself invaluable to the world of software development. Yet it's impossible to author one of agile's foundational artifacts, a user story, without first understanding its protagonist—the user who desires the new capability you’re building. What can we do to identify with this customer? We can test the limits of agile. Andrew Maier will introduce two types of design research—generative research (such as user interviews) and evaluative research (such as usability testing)—and show how they inform the stories we author and the...
Exploring Inclusion: Personas, Accessibility, and Meeting User Need (continued)
Inclusive design and unified design systems are the best ways to ensure applications are inclusive to all users from their inception. But how do you test for inclusion, and where do you start? Meeting the needs of all your users may seem like a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be. Using personas and leaning on our knowledge of exploratory testing techniques, we can start to create testing experiences that help ensure we're truly meeting the needs of all our users. Jenna Charlton will discuss barriers that impact your user experience,...
Fixing Your Scrum: Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems (continued)
A ScrumMaster's work is never done. The development team needs your support, the product owner is lost in the complexities of agile product management, and your managers and stakeholders need to know what will be done, by when, and for how much. Learn how experienced ScrumMasters balance the demands of these three levels of servant leadership while removing organizational impediments and helping their Scrum teams deliver real value. Ryan Ripley will show you how to bring life back to your Scrum events by leveraging the full intelligence of your...
Expanding TDD to a Whole Test-Driven Organization
Software engineers have long used the practice of test-driven development (TDD) to better inform decision-making, reduce total development time, and write well-crafted, elegant code. But this approach can benefit more than just software engineers; sales teams, product managers, QA specialists, and release engineers can all employ TDD. What if your entire organization operated with a “red, green, refactor” philosophy? The sales team could write tests for their hypotheses about what potential customers want, product managers could write tests to...
Everything We Learned about Automation, We Learned from Saturday Morning Cartoons
Do you remember sitting in front of the TV as a kid, enjoying your favorite Saturday morning cartoons? Chris Loder will lead an interactive discussion on what lessons we learned from those cartoons and how they apply to our everyday work in automation. Wait until you hear what we’ve learned from the likes of Scooby Doo®, Wile E. Coyote®, and many other favorites! Like Bugs Bunny®, maybe we too “should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque” and done things a little differently. And like the animators in Spider-Man® didn’t redraw every background and instead reused the animation cells, we...
Act like an Engineer, Think like a Designer
Most careers require years of training to be successful. Doctors, lawyers, engineers, and artists all spend many years training to become great at what they do. But what happens when the rules change and what worked in the past is no longer enough for the new challenges you face? That’s exactly what happened to Chemia Davis, an engineer and project management professional, when she entered the world of innovation and design thinking. Suddenly, all of the things she had worked so hard to avoid in the early part of her career—risk, mistakes, and...
Effective Agile Interactions Using Improv Sessions
Most development projects rely on the assumption that the environment in which it is built is stable. However, software development environments are highly complex, in constant flux, and thus unpredictable—not because of the software itself, but because of the people creating it. The most important factor for an agile team is their ability to communicate effectively. Understanding how to interact with your internal and external team can make or break the agile process. This interactive workshop will have you using applied improv exercises on active...
Learning to Say No
Although we’d like to always be able to say yes, there are times when saying no actually serves our projects, our teammates, and our stakeholders best. Software practitioners can be subject to many conflicting or unreasonable demands. A manager may insist we work on several projects simultaneously, making it impossible for us to do good work on any of them. There may be enormous pressure to work long hours, which will jeopardize our health and the quality of our work. We can even find ourselves pressured to do things that conflict with our personal...
The Agile Playbook: A Catalyst for Real Agile Culture Change
PreviewAre your teams looking to improve and evolve your agile practices but struggling to convince your leaders of what or why you need to change? Or perhaps your leaders decided to embark on a “transformation” to implement agile, but folks on the ground don’t know what that really means or how their daily work changes. It’s the Agile Playbook to the rescue! This simple yet incredibly powerful tool allows you to translate theory into everyday practices that are tailored to the realities of your organization. It captures how you intend to make...
A Tester’s Introduction to TDD in Ruby Using RSpec
Although agile developers write tests as part of their work, they frequently overlook opportunities to benefit from the skills and perspective that testers bring to the team. Testers are all too often treated as a safety net for the developers, rather than being given the chance to help shape the software and its development. This workshop will familiarize testers with the test-driven development (TDD) approach, so they can work more closely with the developers on their teams and contribute earlier in the development process. You’ll explore the differences between code-first and TDD...
Humanizing Data to Tell Stories That Matter
Like the trope of the native people trading their valuables away to colonizers for something seemingly worthless, we participate in systems every day that are optimized to extract value from us and give us relatively little in return. When we learn about the systems in play, they become apparent everywhere. Once you’re empowered with the ability to recognize these systems, we place ourselves and those around us in a much more powerful position where we can change them. Jim Remsik will show how you can use data to visualize a world and bring it to...
Effective Agile Interactions Using Improv Sessions (continued)
Most development projects rely on the assumption that the environment in which it is built is stable. However, software development environments are highly complex, in constant flux, and thus unpredictable—not because of the software itself, but because of the people creating it. The most important factor for an agile team is their ability to communicate effectively. Understanding how to interact with your internal and external team can make or break the agile process. This interactive workshop will have you using applied improv exercises on active...
Learning to Say No (continued)
Although we’d like to always be able to say yes, there are times when saying no actually serves our projects, our teammates, and our stakeholders best. Software practitioners can be subject to many conflicting or unreasonable demands. A manager may insist we work on several projects simultaneously, making it impossible for us to do good work on any of them. There may be enormous pressure to work long hours, which will jeopardize our health and the quality of our work. We can even find ourselves pressured to do things that conflict with our personal...
The Agile Playbook: A Catalyst for Real Agile Culture Change (continued)
PreviewAre your teams looking to improve and evolve your agile practices but struggling to convince your leaders of what or why you need to change? Or perhaps your leaders decided to embark on a “transformation” to implement agile, but folks on the ground don’t know what that really means or how their daily work changes. It’s the Agile Playbook to the rescue! This simple yet incredibly powerful tool allows you to translate theory into everyday practices that are tailored to the realities of your organization. It captures how you intend to make...
Your Tests Lack Vision: Adding Eyes to Your Automation Framework
Automation has come a long way in assisting with regression testing efforts. Teams worldwide are successfully running hundreds of functional regression tests at every check-in. While this provides a great source of confidence, critical regression bugs are still missed using this approach. That’s because these tests can only assert on what their human programmer asks them to. Additional errors with functionality, UX, and usability often go uncaught using today’s most common test automation techniques. For this reason, the top companies in all sectors of the industry are turning to visual...
A Retrospective on Retrospectives
PreviewThe expectation in agile retrospectives is that the entire team reflects on the completed sprint and openly discusses what went well, what didn’t go well, and what is going to be done differently in the upcoming sprint. In reality, it is common for retrospectives to turn into a blame game—or, worse yet, an hour that is reminiscent of a high school class where no one willingly participates. In order to have honest and valuable discussion, a team must be in the right mental state to both give and receive honest and valuable feedback. Marilou...
Are You in the Agile Game or Sitting on the Bench?
Agile is a set of values and principles that lead teams to make decisions. It’s not dependent on tools, products, or one person’s point of view; it’s a collaborative effort. How are you contributing to the process? Are you a team player, sharing your perspective and considering others’ points of view? Or are you a passive observer sitting on the bench? Nicole Mason will provide you with a game plan and practice drills to effectively engage partners, share your expertise, and communicate ideas that advocate for the customer, all while being your authentic self. Get in the agile game!
Going Beyond the Story: Navigating Your Truth to Success
PreviewAs leaders, we’re encouraged to fake it until we make it. But we’re also pressured to show our authentic selves. No wonder we get lost in the story we’re trying to tell. Our story, or the perception of it, impacts so much more than our resume, LinkedIn profile, or company bio. It impacts how we lead, how others relate to us, how our teams operate, and how our career evolves. Join Lia James in an exploration of what it means to be an agile leader. Learn how to live your story—for real—to transcend your leadership style from good to agile. These tips are known to improve career...
Great Idea Going Nowhere Fast? Test and Learn to the Rescue!
PreviewYou have a great idea and want to try something that you think will make life better—for you, your team, your family, or your customers. Maybe it’s a new framework or tool that you are so excited to bring back to your boss. Maybe it’s a different way to think about your team structure. Maybe you have a great idea of how to improve the customer experience for your most loyal customers. But then your idea is shot down by your boss, team, or coworkers—not because it isn’t a great idea, but because they don’t know for sure it will work. What’s the ROI? What if it fails? What will we do...
Web Application Testing: Beyond Theory into Practice
Have you ever wondered how other people test applications—not in theory, but in practice? What were their thought processes? How did they model the application? What tools were used? How did they track the testing? That's what this talk is all about. Alan Richardson will give a short case study of testing an open source web application. Using an open source application ensures there is no commercial confidentiality about the procedures or tools, and throughout the demonstration, Alan will explain his thought processes, coverage, approaches, tools...
Thursday, April 23
The Art of Agile Testing Leadership: Finding Your Path
PreviewTesting leadership is evolving with agile and DevOps. The key to helping your teams transform and be successful in this new world is to know what skills you need to be effective—and, in turn, help your team navigate change. Jennifer Bonine will give you a toolkit for agile leadership so you can explore your level of acceptance of change, how adaptive you are, and strategies to help others adapt to change. She will provide exercises that enable you to discover your leadership style and understand your blind spots as a...
Characteristics of a Rock Star Agile Leader
Whether you are a chief agile dog at your company or just someone who is passionate about agile and seeking to spread the word, there are some personal characteristics that may make or break your success. These characteristics embody the spirit of agile and must be internalized if you are going to be successful in leading agile efforts. Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the attributes of a successful agile and DevOps leader and how you can improve your leadership skills. Learn how these characteristics can be made actionable to enable your teams to embody agile principles and be more...
Getting to Continuous Testing
Max Saperstone tells the story of how a health care company striving to get to continuous releases built up their automation to secure confidence in regular releases. Initially, as no test automation existed, Max was able to take an opportunity for greenfield test automation and, in the span of twelve months, develop over two thousand test cases. A pipeline was created to verify the integrity of the automated tests and build Docker containers for simplified test execution. These containers could be easily reused by developers and the DevOps team to verify the application. Join Max as he...
5 Patterns of Effective Communication in Agile Teams
PreviewThe way we communicate is the single most important skill set employers look for when hiring. It has a significant impact on cost, productivity, team morale, and employee retention; in fact, a study conducted by The Economist shows that problems in communication often delay project completion, lead to low morale and missed goals, and can result in a loss of sales. With that in mind, it becomes all the more important to identify gaps in communication when working with agile teams that have different roles, such as project managers, developers...
Shifting toward a Future of Self-Testing Systems
DevOps as a culture, a movement, and a philosophy is leading to an increase in the practice of shifting testing to the right, toward production. Many organizations now use continuous integration and delivery pipelines to make decisions about production readiness and, once the software is released, leverage real-time monitoring for detecting and debugging issues. Testing in production (TiP) has historically been the subject of great scrutiny due to its frequent association with insufficient pre-production testing. However, when applied appropriately...
The Art of Agile Testing Leadership: Finding Your Path (continued)
PreviewTesting leadership is evolving with agile and DevOps. The key to helping your teams transform and be successful in this new world is to know what skills you need to be effective—and, in turn, help your team navigate change. Jennifer Bonine will give you a toolkit for agile leadership so you can explore your level of acceptance of change, how adaptive you are, and strategies to help others adapt to change. She will provide exercises that enable you to discover your leadership style and understand your blind spots as a...
Artful Testing
At first glance, art and testing may seem like an odd couple. However, Glenford Myers combined both in his book The Art of Software Testing. More recently, Robert Austin and Lee Devin published Artful Making, which relates software development to the creation of a piece of artwork. These authors inspired Zeger Van Hese to consider the idea of artful testing. Zeger will investigate what happens when we combine and infuse testing with aesthetics. With some surprising examples, he’ll show how the fine arts can support and complement our testing efforts. For instance, the tools art critics use...
Being Agile without Doing Agile
The most common requests Dawn Haynes gets as a consultant these days are to help testers and teams transition to an agile development process, or to help testers be more effective in “agile-ish” environments. Interestingly, the core answer to these questions starts with forgetting the process for a moment and focusing on yourself and what you’re trying to accomplish. Being agile starts with a mindset and an attitude that drive focus, approaches, and solutions. When you start there, the path to improvement can almost always be summarized as “being...
Effective Agile Interactions Using Improv Sessions (continued)
Most development projects rely on the assumption that the environment in which it is built is stable. However, software development environments are highly complex, in constant flux, and thus unpredictable—not because of the software itself, but because of the people creating it. The most important factor for an agile team is their ability to communicate effectively. Understanding how to interact with your internal and external team can make or break the agile process. This interactive workshop will have you using applied improv exercises on active...
Test Design for Continuous Delivery
PreviewImagine that within moments of being submitted into the code repository, a new feature automatically releases straight into production. Is this your team’s dream or their nightmare? The answer depends not just on the continuous build pipeline, but on the quality and coverage of the battery of your tests. The difference between shipping a product quickly and shoveling garbage into production quickly lies in what the appropriate battery of tests should be. Automated build architectures don't always lend themselves well to the traditional...
The Art of Agile Testing Leadership: Finding Your Path (continued)
PreviewTesting leadership is evolving with agile and DevOps. The key to helping your teams transform and be successful in this new world is to know what skills you need to be effective—and, in turn, help your team navigate change. Jennifer Bonine will give you a toolkit for agile leadership so you can explore your level of acceptance of change, how adaptive you are, and strategies to help others adapt to change. She will provide exercises that enable you to discover your leadership style and understand your blind spots as a...
Artful Testing (continued)
At first glance, art and testing may seem like an odd couple. However, Glenford Myers combined both in his book The Art of Software Testing. More recently, Robert Austin and Lee Devin published Artful Making, which relates software development to the creation of a piece of artwork. These authors inspired Zeger Van Hese to consider the idea of artful testing. Zeger will investigate what happens when we combine and infuse testing with aesthetics. With some surprising examples, he’ll show how the fine arts can support and complement our testing efforts. For instance, the tools art critics use...
Being Agile without Doing Agile (continued)
The most common requests Dawn Haynes gets as a consultant these days are to help testers and teams transition to an agile development process, or to help testers be more effective in “agile-ish” environments. Interestingly, the core answer to these questions starts with forgetting the process for a moment and focusing on yourself and what you’re trying to accomplish. Being agile starts with a mindset and an attitude that drive focus, approaches, and solutions. When you start there, the path to improvement can almost always be summarized as “being...
Effective Agile Interactions Using Improv Sessions (continued)
Most development projects rely on the assumption that the environment in which it is built is stable. However, software development environments are highly complex, in constant flux, and thus unpredictable—not because of the software itself, but because of the people creating it. The most important factor for an agile team is their ability to communicate effectively. Understanding how to interact with your internal and external team can make or break the agile process. This interactive workshop will have you using applied improv exercises on active...
Test Design for Continuous Delivery (continued)
PreviewImagine that within moments of being submitted into the code repository, a new feature automatically releases straight into production. Is this your team’s dream or their nightmare? The answer depends not just on the continuous build pipeline, but on the quality and coverage of the battery of your tests. The difference between shipping a product quickly and shoveling garbage into production quickly lies in what the appropriate battery of tests should be. Automated build architectures don't always lend themselves well to the traditional...
Getting Lean: Creating a Culture of Quality
An important tenet of lean implementations is the notion of building quality in. This concept always receives universal head-nods when said aloud, but it can be challenging in practice. How can we actually start this transformation within our organizations? Daniel Slatton will walk through how his company has taken a culture-first approach to quality, stressing the importance of creating meaningful feedback loops, focusing on the specific language used, and constructing outcome-focused environments. He’ll show how these approaches can help your team to enhance its ultimate goal of...
Reality-Driven Testing in Agile Projects
PreviewMany agile teams rework previously deployed stories, even after plenty of in-sprint testing. Well-groomed, refined stories framed with typical, alternate, and error scenarios, gracefully described in well-formed Gherkin, continue to encounter all sorts of bugs. In fact, software engineering consultant Rob Sabourin sees rework in over 20% of deployed stories. Rob will show how agile teams can drive rework down dramatically, often achieving near-zero rework after a story is done, by prioritizing reality-driven testing. He’ll teach you to...
Practicing Exploration
PreviewHave you ever overcooked peanut butter and jelly? Ever put too much antacid in your chili? Have you ever tried to do either? Certainty and experimentation rarely go hand in hand, but it is possible to do both. As software professionals, we're required to experiment and explore. When we don't, our products end up shallow and uninteresting. We must sink into the depths of what's scary and uncertain in order to resurface with winning ideas that are just what our customers need. Adam Cuppy will explore bridging the gap between certainty and...
Automating E2E Integration Tests for Mobile with Detox
PreviewReact Native provides a low barrier into mobile development across platforms for iOS and Android. However, things are a little toxic when it comes to writing fully automated end-to-end tests. Eliminate the bad stuff with Detox! Detox is an end-to-end testing framework for mobile apps. Many other frameworks require redundant coding with platform-specific languages—this means you could write a test to validate your login screen in Swift for iOS, then write the same test again in Java for Android. Detox allows you to write one set of tests that...
Seamless Performance Acceptability Activities in Agile
An agile team’s task is to consistently deliver performant applications. But an additional goal should be to seamlessly embed valuable, performance-related activities into software development without disrupting, complicating, or extending the flow and efficiency of the overall lifecycle or the individual sprint. This talk won’t be theoretical, philosophical, or prescriptive; it will be a practical discussion. Scott Barber will share the most poignant, surprising, and enlightening stories he’s encountered from agile teams concerning their journeys...
Session Coming Soon
Session description coming soon!
Reality-Driven Testing in Agile Projects (continued)
PreviewMany agile teams rework previously deployed stories, even after plenty of in-sprint testing. Well-groomed, refined stories framed with typical, alternate, and error scenarios, gracefully described in well-formed Gherkin, continue to encounter all sorts of bugs. In fact, software engineering consultant Rob Sabourin sees rework in over 20% of deployed stories. Rob will show how agile teams can drive rework down dramatically, often achieving near-zero rework after a story is done, by prioritizing reality-driven testing. He’ll teach you to...
Inside Out: Harnessing the Power of Emotional Intelligence In Your Career
PreviewRecently while watching the Disney movie Inside Out with her children, Aly Klidies realized that so many of the emotions displayed in the film are actually valuable demonstrations that can help us explore, understand, and develop as adults in our careers. Have you ever been in a meeting where your project deadline date was moved up two weeks sooner than expected and you wanted to burst into flames like "Anger"? Or maybe you were sitting in a performance review and you started to focus solely on the negative comments from your manager like "Sadness" would? We have all been there!...
Automating E2E Integration Tests for Mobile with Detox (continued)
PreviewReact Native provides a low barrier into mobile development across platforms for iOS and Android. However, things are a little toxic when it comes to writing fully automated end-to-end tests. Eliminate the bad stuff with Detox! Detox is an end-to-end testing framework for mobile apps. Many other frameworks require redundant coding with platform-specific languages—this means you could write a test to validate your login screen in Swift for iOS, then write the same test again in Java for Android. Detox allows you to write one set of tests that...
Seamless Performance Acceptability Activities in Agile (continued)
An agile team’s task is to consistently deliver performant applications. But an additional goal should be to seamlessly embed valuable, performance-related activities into software development without disrupting, complicating, or extending the flow and efficiency of the overall lifecycle or the individual sprint. This talk won’t be theoretical, philosophical, or prescriptive; it will be a practical discussion. Scott Barber will share the most poignant, surprising, and enlightening stories he’s encountered from agile teams concerning their journeys...