STARCANADA 2016 - Collaboration or Communication
Tuesday, October 25
Critical Thinking for Software Testers
Critical thinking is the kind of thinking that specifically looks for problems and mistakes. Regular people don't do a lot of it. However, if you want to be a great tester, you need to be a great critical thinker. Critically thinking testers save projects from dangerous assumptions and ultimately from disasters. The good news is that critical thinking is not just innate intelligence or a talent—it's a learnable and improvable skill you can master. Michael Bolton shares the specific techniques and heuristics of critical thinking and presents realistic testing...
Just in Time Testing
Turbulent development projects experience almost daily requirements changes, user interface modifications, and the continual integration of new functions, features, and technologies. Keeping your testing efforts on track is a challenge while reacting to changing priorities, technologies, and user needs. In this interactive workshop Rob Sabourin offers a unique set of tools such as dynamic test planning, test idea development, and test triage to help you cope with—and perhaps even flourish in—what may seem to be a totally chaotic environment. Be ready for just...
Getting Your Message Across: Communication Skills for Testers
Communication is at the heart of our profession. No matter how advanced our testing capabilities are, if we can’t convey our concerns in ways that connect with key members of the project team, our contribution is likely to be ignored. Because we act solely in an advisory capacity, rather than being in command, our power to exert influence is almost entirely based on our communication skills. With people suffering information overload and deluged with emails, it is more important than ever that we craft succinct and effective messages, using a range of...
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...
Better Together: Group Exploratory Testing
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...
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...