Conference archive

STARCANADA 2016 - Concurrent Sessions

Concurrent sessions offer attendees the flexibility to follow a specific track or to explore various topics throughout the conference 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, October 26

Jane_Fraser
Anki, Inc.
W1

Become an Influential Tester: Learn How to Be Heard

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 10:15am to 11:15am

As a tester, are you frustrated that no one listens to you? Are you finding bugs and having them ignored? Are you worried that the development process and product quality aren’t as good as they should be? Jane Fraser shares ways to help you be heard―ways to position yourself as a leader within your organization, ways to increase your influence, and ways to report bugs to get them fixed. In this interactive session, Jane leads you to a better understanding of how to be heard in your organization. Learn how to tailor your defect reports depending on who makes the...

W2

Test-Driven Everything—with Deliberate Collaboration

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 10:15am to 11:15am

You've heard that quality belongs to everybody on an agile team. You've heard that testers and developers should collaborate in order to drive quality higher. You've heard that automated tests help a team continuously validate the quality. Well, it's time to stop just thinking and talking about these things! It's time to make them happen! Watch “Cheezy” Morgan do this in front of your eyes. Watch him build a web application, driven by acceptance and unit tests. Discover how a product owner, tester, and developer collaborate closely and deliberately to create...

W3

High-Performance Agile Testing in Software Development

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 10:15am to 11:15am

Agile testing is an approach to software testing that follows the principles of agile software development as outlined in the Agile Manifesto. Since many software development organizations are using agile development practices or transitioning to agile software development, it is very important for software testers to understand and learn to operate with an agile mindset. Sammy Kolluru explores the key aspects of agile—whole-team approach, improved collaboration and ownership, results visibility, and incorporating automated tools into testing. Explore how you can...

Rick_Faulise
tap | QA
W4

Mobile Untethered: Lessons Learned without Wires

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 10:15am to 11:15am

Are you seeking insight into how “going mobile" changes the dev and test roles in real-life organizations? Jennifer Bonine and Rick Faulise take a focused look at the automation of mobile testing: the need, the options, and the tools. They discuss strategies that work—and have not worked—for companies making the transition to mobile. What are the things you, as a developer or tester moving into mobile web and mobile apps, must think about? You need to understand the skill set changes required and the importance of keeping up to date on what companies are looking...

Douglas_Sanders
Comcast
W5

Quality-Driven Delivery in IT

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Compromising on quality and customer experience is not an option for IT organizations anymore. To remain relevant, IT organizations and their software development arms must re-imagine how they operate, amplifying their focus on quality while accelerating time to market. Join Doug Sanders as he discusses the five forces—mobility, big data, artificial intelligence, social media, and cloud—that are driving IT transformations and the instrumental role that QA and testing must play. Doug draws on real-world experiences, lessons learned, and industry best practices as...

Florin_Ursu
Pong Studios
W6

Mindmaps: Agile and Lightweight Documentation for Testing

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Quality starts with requirements. In small to mid-size companies, it is not uncommon for the communication chain to be broken. Florin Ursu shares ways to avoid miscommunication through a streamlined process in which requirements are communicated to both developers and testers simultaneously; then developers write code while testers document what will be tested. Florin explores what mindmaps are; what they can be used for, both in general and applied to software development; and then dives deeper into how mindmaps can be used for testing. He describes how his teams...

Syed_Hossain
QA Consultants
W7

Performance Testing in Agile and DevOps Environments

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

As organizations embrace agile and DevOps delivery models, non-functional performance testing becomes a challenge. While functional validation continues to mature in Agile, many organizations are either struggling to integrate application performance into the delivery model or are addressing performance through an end of sprint hardening approach. Join Syed Hossain as he explores the challenges of performance testing in agile and DevOps environments. Learn proven approaches to performance testing—staggered sprints, incremental testing, and targeted sprints....

Pradeep_Macharla
Inmar Inc.
W8

Addressing the Challenges of Mobile Test Automation

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

As technology continues to disrupt every industry, mobile applications are increasingly becoming a primary way to interact with customers. Mobile application test automation tools and frameworks are far from being as mature as web test automation tools. The mobile test automation space is much more complex than web because of the number of devices that follow different standards. Simulators and emulators partially address this mobile diversity, however, to feel confident releasing an application to market, a deep understanding of what libraries, tools, and...

Tony_Higgins
Blueprint Software
W9

When User Stories Are Not Enough

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

IT organizations adopting agile development often struggle when applying agile to anything other than small, mid-sized, or non-critical applications. Because IT organizations must deal with the myriad business rules, non-functional requirements, industry regulations, and associated audits, the software requirements and resulting user stories can easily become too complex and interrelated. Tony Higgins says that approaches are surfacing which allow complex IT environments to improve upfront scoping, promote reuse, embrace living documentation, and deal with...

Jeff_Abshoff
ANSYS Canada Ltd
W10

Better Together: Group Exploratory Testing

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Jeff Abshoff faced a most difficult challenge in 2015. His team size tripled, with testers of varying skill levels spread across six sites worldwide. The product was moving to a more frequent release cycle, was of poor quality, and had multiple key stakeholders. Features were incomplete, defects were not discovered until late in the cycle, and downstream stability and feature integration problems were common. Join Jeff as he shares his experience with Group Exploratory Testing, and discusses the positive impact this approach has had on his team and the ANSYS...

Michael_Bolton
DevelopSense
W11

A Rapid Testing Approach to Test Automation

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

There are many wonderful ways tools can be used to help software testing. Yet, all across the industry, tools are poorly applied, which adds terrible waste, confusion, and pain to what is already a hard problem. Why is this so? What can be done? Michael Bolton thinks that the fundamental problem is a shallow, narrow, and ritualistic approach to tool use. This is encouraged by the pandemic, rarely examined, and absolutely false belief that testing is a mechanical, repetitive process. Good testing, like programming, is instead a challenging intellectual process,...

Alexander_Andelkovic
King/Midasplayer AB
W12

Using Artificial Intelligence to Test the Candy Crush Saga Game

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Candy Crush Saga is one of the biggest mobile games today with more than 1000 levels of difficulty—and users continue to ask for more. When building new content, it is extremely important to make sure that the level of difficulty is balanced and that the user does not experience crashes or problems through some unforeseen level of play. Alexander Andelkovic shows you how King is training artificial intelligence (AI) programs (bots) to test its games by mimicking human interactions. Join Alex as he discusses how King is taking testing to the next level by...

W13

Dell’s Journey to Achieve TMMi Level 3 Certification

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

The Testing Maturity Model Integration (TMMi) is a model of testing best practices that can help organizations determine whether their testing processes are complete and effective. As a complementary model to the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), TMMi addresses those issues important to test managers, test engineers, and software quality professionals. Dell’s commercial sales and enterprise solutions (CSES) organization employs both waterfall and agile in the testing of its server, solutions, embedded, and systems management products. Join Mark...

Peter_Kruse
Berner & Mattner Systemtechnik GmbH
W14

Combinatorial Black-Box Testing with Classification Trees

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

A basic problem in software testing often is choosing a subset from the near infinite number of possible test cases. Consider the challenges of testing multiple browsers, multiple mobile devices, mobile applications, or use case paths. Testers must select test cases to design, create, and then execute to obtain sufficient coverage—all while managing the time it takes to test relative to risks. Even though test resources are limited, you still want to select the best possible set of tests. Peter Kruse shares his experiences designing test cases with TESTONA, the...

Chip_Groder
Intervise Consultants Inc.
W15

Objects vs. Images: Choosing the Right GUI Test Tool Architecture

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Most popular GUI test tools are based on an object recognition architecture. They recognize and manipulate screen objects by communicating with the underlying GUI subsystem. A new breed of tools has been introduced in the past few years that implements an image recognition architecture. These tools use sophisticated image processing and OCR technology to recognize objects by their appearance on the display. Image recognition-based tools have distinct advantages in some environments, but object-based tools are a better choice in other situations. Join Chip Groder...

Iuliia_Zavertailo
Itera Norge
W16

Test Metrics in Agile: A Powerful Tool to Demonstrate Value

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Most understand that an agile development and testing approach improves quality and reduces risks in our projects. In some companies and culture however, there are skeptics. Is the move to agile—and therefore agile testing—really beneficial? Join Iuliia Zavertailo for a closer look at a Scandinavian insurance company that started with one manual tester and within three years moved toward opening a large test center in the Baltic. Behind this story were many small steps of demonstrating testing's value to the client through a well-defined set of agile metrics...

Thursday, October 27

Tom_Wissink
Intervise, Inc.
T1

Continuous Testing - The New Normal

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Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 10:15am to 11:15am

Some notions of continuous testing (CT) have been applied in software development methodologies for a while but it was never called by that term. Another term sometimes used for CT is parallel testing. While some have mastered CT, most of us struggle with how to transform our current testing approaches to CT approaches and align them with evolving development methodologies. Join Tom Wissink as he discusses current examples of CT implementations across different software development methodologies (agile, waterfall, incremental) and describes where parallel or CT...

Adam_Rosenberg
Elephant Inc.
T2

Test Design for Responsive Websites

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Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 10:15am to 11:15am

Websites built with responsive design come with the added testing challenge of having a single web application working across all screen sizes and many devices. So, how can you ensure your application will render correctly without testing on a huge number of smartphones, tablets, and desktops? Join Adam Rosenberg as he shares how to make intelligent test design choices for the best selection of devices to test on. For example, which is more important—the screen size or the pixel density? How do these affect how a page renders and what breakpoint is hit? When do...

Matt_Joste
Ryerson University
T3

How to Build a Fully Open Source Test Automation Framework

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Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 10:15am to 11:15am

Automated testing can be difficult, slow to implement, involve expensive and non-compatible software, and require a high level of technical expertise to use. Join Matt Joste as he presents Ryerson University's Automation Framework, put together using best-in-class open source software. The framework allows software developers, product owners, and testers without a technical background to write and run automated scripts. This modular framework addresses both functional and nonfunctional automated tests—performance, security, and accessibility—and is both agile and...

Inclusive Media Design
Sandy_Feldman
Inclusive Media Design
Rob_Harvie
Inclusive Media Design
T4

Accessibility Standards and Testing Techniques: Be Inclusive or Be Left Behind

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Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 10:15am to 11:15am

While Information and Communication Technology (ICT) accessibility for a wider spectrum of users—including the blind—and their interfaces is being required by law across more jurisdictions, testing for it remains limited, naïve, and too late. The consequences of staying ignorant include increased exposure to litigation, penalties, and loss of contracts and revenue. Join David Best, Sandy Feldman, and Rob Harvie to learn why accessibility is now becoming a valued, integral part of the design process and much different from usability of twenty years ago. Ensure...

T5

API Testing: Top 5 Myths

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Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

With the emergence of the API Economy, the risks associated with an API failure undeniably have broader business impacts. Organizations must ensure that the APIs they produce and consume continuously deliver the expected level of security, reliability, functionality, and performance.

This session dispels some of the most common API testing myths prevalent across the industry. Wondering how rigorously you need to test the 3 rd party APIs you consume? Relying on GUI testing to cover API functionality? Think your monitoring efforts will alert you to critical...

Nir_Szilagyi
PayPal
T6

Design for Testability in Practice

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Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

With the drive for continuous integration and delivery, the implications and approaches for designing more testable software are receiving substantial discussion and debate. What does testability really mean in practice? How do you take the idea of testability—how easy it is to test software—and put it into action through the different dimensions of designing and testing a real-world product? Nir Szilagyi recognizes that the challenges of difficult-to-test software can transform a testing cycle from a small automation and exploratory effort to a long struggle of...

Jerry_Penner
Waterloo Hydrogeologic
T7

Sensible Test Automation

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Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Your boss has given you the directive to “automate everything.” So, what’s behind this? Is he expecting to reduce costs? Implement the latest silver-bullet tool that will save the company? Increase test coverage to avoid future embarrassment? How should you respond? Jerry Penner shows how you can manage expectations by asking the right questions and framing in business terms the capabilities of computer-aided testing. Discussion includes good and bad reasons to automate, and what should and should not be automated so you can find more of the important bugs faster...

Gene_Gotimer
Coveros, Inc.
T8

Add Security Testing Tools to Your Delivery Pipeline

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Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Developing a delivery pipeline means more than just adding automated deploys to the development cycle. To be successful, quality testing of all types must be incorporated throughout the process to ensure that problems aren’t slipping through. Those checks must include security, or you risk developing insecure software. Fortunately, the delivery pipeline opens up opportunities to add more security testing to the delivery process. Continuous integration builds can add static analysis tools to test for simple security errors and check if components with known...

Gopal_Brugalette
Concur Technologies
T9

Build Your Open Source Performance Testing Platform in the Cloud

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Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Proprietary performance testing platforms can be complex, expensive, and difficult to scale. With the right approach, everything from continuous integration, to continuous deployment pipelines, to full-scale production loads can be supported, but a dizzying array of platforms, services, and approaches available in AWS and the open-source community must be navigated to arrive at solutions that work. Join Gopal Brugalette and explore how to build a performance testing platform in the cloud using open source tools. Gopal shares what he has learned from his failures...

Oscar_Gracia
AppFolio
Todd_Albers
AppFolio
T10

Agile QA & Test: A Shift in Mindset from Finding to Preventing Bugs

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Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Although most software companies have adopted agile development these days, many still treat quality assurance (QA) as something that gets handled when coding is done and is “ready for test.” Use of this waterfall method to ensure quality costs teams in rework, context switching, slower code release cycles, growing bug queues, and the release of defects into production. Join Oscar Gracia and Todd Albers as they present techniques you can use to help change this ready-for-test mindset. Learn how to focus on testing and quality from the start by using a pre-...

Christine_McGarry
Magnet Forensics
T11

Slowing Down to Speed Up:The Benefits of A Custom Automation Framework

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Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

With today’s shortened software release cycles, products need to be tested quickly and reliably. Automating tests is even more challenging as we are often building the next generation product even as we maintain the legacy products. Join Christine McGarry as she describes how she automated tests for dataset comparison for data stored in substantially differing SQL database schemas. Christine shares a case study on how the test automation strategy and tactics were defined for testing datasets output from distinct versions of an application. She provides insight...

Rick_Faulise
tap | QA
T12

IoT and Embedded Testing: A Roku Case Study

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Thursday, October 27, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

With big hitters like Time Warner and HBO selectively testing Roku releases, testing these little boxes of joy is becoming more of a necessity in the IoT tester’s playbook. Join Rick Faulise as he shares the secrets of testing on a Roku device including how to get into the Roku interface and make it respond to your commands, how to select a broadcast environment for testing, and how to measure streaming performance. Take your IoT testing to the next level by understanding what special types of testing are unique to the Roku and other important considerations to...