STARCANADA 2016 - Adopting Agile Practices
Tuesday, October 25
Virtualization and Containers for Automating Web Testing
Vagrant and Docker are automation tools that are becoming increasingly popular in the DevOps world. Vagrant provides a simple, consistent interface to create virtual machines on your local system and in the cloud. Docker lets you control containers—like virtual machines, but smaller and faster with less overhead. These tools can provide on-demand, disposable test environments that are delivered quickly, in a known state, locally or in the cloud. Systems under test, test tools, infrastructure, and even pre-populated test data are all candidates for virtualization...
Wednesday, October 26
High-Performance Agile Testing in Software Development
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...
Mindmaps: Agile and Lightweight Documentation for Testing
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...
When User Stories Are Not Enough
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...
Testers in Agile Teams—Isolation or Collaboration?
What exactly are testers doing as organizations evolve from waterfall lifecycles to iterative, incremental agile approaches? Agile transitions, rather than fostering collaboration, often lead to isolation, role confusion, and fear. Many testers are left out in the cold. Agile testers face existential challenges: Is it enough that programmers test their own code? Must testers become programming experts? Do we still need business analysts or subject matter experts? Test evangelist Rob Sabourin explores an exciting vision for testers and demonstrates how they can...
Thursday, October 27
Evolution—Not Revolution: Transforming Your Testing
“The only constant on any project is change” is a phrase used in the early 1990s. Yet even now, the prospect of change is rarely welcomed—either personally or professionally. How is it that we still believe that these changes apply to others but not to us? An MIT-published article describes how they are trying to prevent software bugs by leveraging the new trends of DevOps and IoT to radically change how we do testing. Julie Gardiner says that now is the time to re-evaluate and transform how we do testing to deliver more value to organizations—from a people,...
Agile QA & Test: A Shift in Mindset from Finding to Preventing Bugs
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-grooming...