STARCANADA 2016 - Personal Improvement
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...
What's Your Leadership IQ?
Have you ever needed a way to measure your leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies, explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can improve competencies that are not in your core set of...
Innovation: Evolving and Expanding Your Creative Capabilities
Innovation is a word frequently tossed around in organizations today. The standard cliché is “Do more with less.” People and teams want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, prioritize, implement, and track their innovation efforts. Jennifer Bonine shares the Innovation Types model to give you new tools to evolve and expand your innovation capabilities. Find out if your innovation ideas and efforts match your team and company goals. Learn how to classify your innovation and improvement efforts as core (to the business) or context (essential but...
Wednesday, October 26
Testing Leaders in the Digital Age: Are You Adapting?
We are working in a world where we are asked to be agile and flexible on a daily basis, but are you struggling to see the benefits of being agile with all the changes you are being asked to make? Jennifer Bonine recognizes that the role of the testing leader has changed significantly and the requirements for success are dramatically different. Are you stuck in old patterns? Are you not seeing results although other teams or leaders are? Join Jennifer to learn what things have changed in the way we think about teams, the new dynamic of teams, why people leave...
Become an Influential Tester: Learn How to Be Heard
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...
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...
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,...
Sensible Test Automation
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...
Friday, October 28
The Power of Collective Experience
Bring your biggest challenges to this session and tap the wisdom of others. In this immersive session, you will tackle some of the most widely mentioned challenges brought to light from the group. Whether it’s a software testing conundrum, a project setback, a management blocker, a group or team dysfunction or an interpersonal hurdle, all of these can slow our progress and reduce our effectiveness. And when we hunt for options, we all have blind spots and biases that prevent us from thinking out of the box and finding new and different solutions. Typically the...
Panel–Career Superpowers
Let’s discuss and define the most important career superpowers for women. Hear what industry professionals, leaders, and idea disruptors think the important career superpowers are for women in 2016 and going forward.
Panel: Melissa Benua, Senior Backend Software Engineer at PlayFab, Inc. and more.