STARCANADA 2016 - Developer
Tuesday, October 25
Selenium Test Automation: From the Ground Up
Knowledge of Selenium, the industry-standard tool for testing web applications, is a much sought after skill in today’s world of test automation. If you want to learn Selenium, then this full-day tutorial is a great start. Cheezy Morgan shows you how to build test automation using Selenium. But he doesn’t stop there. He uses his years of experience to show you how to build automation that is clean and easy to maintain. Cheezy introduces other tools that work with Selenium to help manage the data used to drive your tests, evaluate JavaScript-heavy applications,...
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
Quality-Driven Delivery in IT
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...
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...
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...
Objects vs. Images: Choosing the Right GUI Test Tool Architecture
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...
Thursday, October 27
Test Design for Responsive Websites
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...
Accessibility Standards and Testing Techniques: Be Inclusive or Be Left Behind
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...
Add Security Testing Tools to Your Delivery Pipeline
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...
Build Your Open Source Performance Testing Platform in the Cloud
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...
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-...
Slowing Down to Speed Up:The Benefits of A Custom Automation Framework
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...
The Future of Applications and Application Testing
“Software is eating the world,” and as a result, companies are building novel applications to support their business and products. This is the main drive behind the microservices trend where a product's architecture is comprised of many independent applications, both new and legacy. Testing and deploying any microservices architecture require high levels of coordination between components. A significant part of this approach is keeping interfaces compatible with other parts of the infrastructure, which means that collaboration and automation are critical. Dwayne...