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Agile Testing

Tutorials

TB Testers in Value-Driven Product Development
J.B. Rainsberger, JBRAINS.CA
Tue, 06/23/2015 - 8:30am

Even in many agile projects, testers stand aside while others set product and project goals and requirements (stories). These other people aren’t doing poor work but rather are often developing artifacts that are too easily misinterpreted. J.B. Rainsberger presents two value-driven development techniques that testers—who by their very nature are critical thinkers—can use to help the team figure out what to build, which parts to build first, and most importantly, what not to build at all. Learn a powerful modeling technique to reduce a long laundry list of stories down to a clear, high-level path toward a great product. Join J.B. to practice the art of “talking in examples,” which will help you work with product owners, analysts, and programmers to develop a clear picture of what to build. Don’t remain relegated to after-the-fact acceptance testing. Learn how to play a vital role in building the right thing the first time.

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TG Getting Things Done: What Testers Do in Agile Sprints
Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
Tue, 06/23/2015 - 1:00pm

Avoiding siloed development and test is a tricky business—even with agile practices in place. It is easy for agile teams to fall into the rut in which testers only do testing and programmers only do coding. Rob Sabourin explores many ways to apply your testing knowledge and experience inside a Scrum sprint or iteration and throughout an agile project. He finds that testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Rob describes a host of ways testers add value to an agile sprint—using their analysis skills to help clear the way to make tough technical trade-offs; pairing with programmers to help design and review unit tests; studying static analysis reports to find unexpected code complexity or security; and much more. Join Rob to see how testers can start working hand-in-hand with developers, business analysts, and product owners to get more things done in agile sprints and projects.

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Keynotes

K1 How We NOW Test Software at Microsoft
Alan Page, Microsoft
Wed, 06/24/2015 - 8:30am

In December 2008 when How We Test Software at Microsoft was first published, the software community appreciated the insight into many testing activities and processes popular at Microsoft. Six and a half years later, many companies—including Microsoft—have evolved and changed in a variety of ways, and now much of the book is outdated or obsolete. New products, new ideas, and new strategies for releasing software have emerged. Alan Page explores Microsoft’s current approaches to software testing and quality. He digs into new practices, describes changing roles, rants about long-lived ideas kicked to the curb in the past seven years―and might even share a few tidbits not fit for print and wide-scale distribution. To give organizations food for thought and ideas for growth, Alan reveals what’s new in quality approaches, developer to tester ratios, agile practices, tools, tester responsibilities—and lessons he’s learned along the way.

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Concurrent Sessions

W9 The Tester’s Role in Agile Planning
Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
Wed, 06/24/2015 - 1:30pm

All too often testers passively participate in agile planning. And the results? Important testing activities are missed, late testing becomes a bottleneck, and the benefits of agile development quickly diminish. However, testers can actively advocate customer concerns while helping to implement robust solutions. Rob Sabourin shows how testers contribute to estimation, task definition, and scoping work required to implement user stories. Testers apply their elicitation skills to understand what users need, exploring typical, alternate, and error scenarios. Testers can anticipate cross story interference and the impact of new stories on legacy functionality. Rob discusses examples of how to break agile stories into test-related tasks. He shares experiences of transforming agile testers from passive planning participants into dynamic advocates of effective trade-offs, addressing the product owners’ critical business concerns, the teams’ limited resources, and the software projects’ technical risks. Join Rob to explore test infrastructure, test data, non-functional attributes, privacy, security, robustness, exploration, regression, business rules, and more.

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W16 Agile Metrics and the Software Delivery Pipeline
Christopher Davis, Nike, Inc.
Wed, 06/24/2015 - 3:00pm

Today’s build pipelines and agile tracking systems are very advanced and generate lots of data. Christopher Davis has found that many teams face challenges when interpreting that data to show meaningful agile metrics across the entire organization. As a result, measuring agile development ends up being a fuzzy art—when it doesn’t have to be. Using common open source tools, you can automate the collection and aggregation of data from your build pipeline to show the right level metrics to the right people in your organization, track what means the most to your team, and create actionable metrics you can use to improve your team and process.  Join Christopher to learn about open source tools you can use to collect data and create metrics, several key metrics you can use today to help make your team better, and how to implement these tools to automatically collect and distribute them in your build pipeline.

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T3 Create Disposable Test Environments with Vagrant and Puppet
Gene Gotimer, Coveros, Inc.
Thu, 06/25/2015 - 10:15am

As the pace of development increases, testing has more to do and less time in which to do it. Software testing must evolve to meet delivery goals while continuing to meet quality objectives. Gene Gotimer explores how tools like Vagrant and Puppet work together to provide on-demand, disposable test environments that are delivered quickly, in a known state, with pre-populated test data and automated test fixture provisioning. With a single command, Vagrant provisions one or more virtual machines on a local box, in a private or public cloud. Puppet then takes over to install and configure software, setup test data, and get the system or systems ready for testing. Since the process is automated, anyone on the team can use the same Vagrant and Puppet scripts to get his own virtual environment for testing. When you are finished with it, Vagrant tears it back down and restores it to the same original state.

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