Conference archive

STARCANADA 2016 - General Management

Tuesday, October 25

TD

What's Your Leadership IQ?

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Tuesday, October 25, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

TG

Innovation: Evolving and Expanding Your Creative Capabilities

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Tuesday, October 25, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Mike_Sowers
TechWell Corp.
TH

Measurement and Metrics for Managers

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Tuesday, October 25, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he addresses common metrics—...

Wednesday, October 26

K1

Testing Leaders in the Digital Age: Are You Adapting?

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Wednesday, October 26, 2016 - 8:30am to 9:45am

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...

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...

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...

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....

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, and...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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-...

Friday, October 28

Alison Wade
TechWell Corp.
WWT5

Panel–Career Superpowers

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Friday, October 28, 2016 - 2:00pm to 2:45pm

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.

 

WWT6

Building your Personal Brand for Success

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Friday, October 28, 2016 - 3:00pm to 3:45pm
Building the right personal brand is one of the critical success factors in today’s workplace. Organizations develop a brand and image, but not many individuals think about their personal brand and how it can affect their career. As we interact with people, we want to influence them to support our efforts—approving projects, budgets, and funding; supporting our next career move; or recommending us for that promotion or raise we want.  As a professional, it is critical to understand how you are being perceived by your...