STARCANADA 2016 - Software Tester
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...
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,...
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...
Test Data: Create, Secure, Manage, and Reuse
The absence of a well-defined data management approach can cripple your testing and test automation, significantly reducing pre-release defect yield. Many teams invest lots of time and money managing test data and still do not achieve their goals for test coverage and quality. Test data challenges include test data creation, privacy masking, management, maintenance, replication, security, quality, scalability, and reusability. Chip Groder presents an engaging and interactive discussion on the critical factors for managing test data, including developing a defined...
Test Design for Better Test Automation
When automated tests are cumbersome to maintain, we often view this as a technical problem. However, an often-overlooked factor is the role that testers play in making automation scalable and maintainable. Test design can help or hurt how automation engineers can implement tests efficiently. If tests are too detailed or lack focus, good automation becomes virtually impossible. In this tutorial—for both testers and automation engineers—Hans Buwalda addresses what it means for test design when tests are to be automated. See why successful automated testing is not so...
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...
Measurement and Metrics for Managers
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—...
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...
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
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...
Test-Driven Everything—with Deliberate Collaboration
You've heard that quality belongs to everybody on an agile team. You've heard that testers and developers should collaborate in order to drive quality higher. You've heard that automated tests help a team continuously validate the quality. Well, it's time to stop just thinking and talking about these things! It's time to make them happen! Watch “Cheezy” Morgan do this in front of your eyes. Watch him build a web application, driven by acceptance and unit tests. Discover how a product owner, tester, and developer collaborate closely and deliberately to create...
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...
Mobile Untethered: Lessons Learned without Wires
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...
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...
Performance Testing in Agile and DevOps Environments
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....
Addressing the Challenges of Mobile Test Automation
As technology continues to disrupt every industry, mobile applications are increasingly becoming a primary way to interact with customers. Mobile application test automation tools and frameworks are far from being as mature as web test automation tools. The mobile test automation space is much more complex than web because of the number of devices that follow different standards. Simulators and emulators partially address this mobile diversity, however, to feel confident releasing an application to market, a deep understanding of what libraries, tools, and...
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...
A Rapid Testing Approach to Test Automation
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,...
Using Artificial Intelligence to Test the Candy Crush Saga Game
Candy Crush Saga is one of the biggest mobile games today with more than 1000 levels of difficulty—and users continue to ask for more. When building new content, it is extremely important to make sure that the level of difficulty is balanced and that the user does not experience crashes or problems through some unforeseen level of play. Alexander Andelkovic shows you how King is training artificial intelligence (AI) programs (bots) to test its games by mimicking human interactions. Join Alex as he discusses how King is taking testing to the next level by...
Dell’s Journey to Achieve TMMi Level 3 Certification
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...
Combinatorial Black-Box Testing with Classification Trees
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...
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...
Test Metrics in Agile: A Powerful Tool to Demonstrate Value
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...
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,...
Continuous Testing - The New Normal
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...
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...
How to Build a Fully Open Source Test Automation Framework
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...
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...
API Testing: Top 5 Myths
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...
Design for Testability in Practice
With the drive for continuous integration and delivery, the implications and approaches for designing more testable software are receiving substantial discussion and debate. What does testability really mean in practice? How do you take the idea of testability—how easy it is to test software—and put it into action through the different dimensions of designing and testing a real-world product? Nir Szilagyi recognizes that the challenges of difficult-to-test software can transform a testing cycle from a small automation and exploratory effort to a long struggle of...
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...
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...
IoT and Embedded Testing: A Roku Case Study
With big hitters like Time Warner and HBO selectively testing Roku releases, testing these little boxes of joy is becoming more of a necessity in the IoT tester’s playbook. Join Rick Faulise as he shares the secrets of testing on a Roku device including how to get into the Roku interface and make it respond to your commands, how to select a broadcast environment for testing, and how to measure streaming performance. Take your IoT testing to the next level by understanding what special types of testing are unique to the Roku and other important considerations to...
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...
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.