EPIC Experience 2020 - EPIC Track 5
Wednesday, April 22
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...