STARCANADA 2017 - Concurrent Sessions
Concurrent sessions offer attendees the flexibility to follow a specific track or to explore various topics throughout the conference in order to customize their learning experience. Learn both enterprise foundations and new methodologies to grow your skills, supercharge your knowledge, and re-energize your career growth.
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Wednesday, October 18
The Secret Life of Testers: Where Your Time Really Goes
Testing is on the schedule. Your title is Tester. It is time to test. The team is waiting for you. Everybody thinks you spend your time testing. So, why does it seem that you spend so little time actually testing? Michael Bolton will show you a training and research tool to visually animate the progress of testing has been developed. Through the use of testopsies and session-based test management data, patterns have been collected on how context-driven testers use their time—from the micro to the macro level. Among the findings are that a good tester can spend a whole week in earnest work...
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 executable user stories that...
The Three Pillars Approach to an Agile Testing Strategy
PreviewDefining the Optimal Level of Test Automation
NewTest automation scripts are largely run against stable functionality with repeatable results. But automation does not have to be just about running reliable tests against a fixed code base to make them effective; rather, you can determine the right level of automation you need to meet your project’s needs. Three levels of test automation will be discussed in this presentation: Level 1 tests exercise the simplest aspect of functionality in a module, Level 2 tests explore all module aspects except interfaces to other components, and Level 3 tests examine the deepest level of functionality in...
Applying Earned Value Management to Testing
Preview NewImprove Test Strategies and Outcomes with Mind Maps
Do you ever sit in test strategy or test plan review sessions and get little or no participation from others? Are you looking for a better way to communicate important information around the test plan or strategy? Do you want your stakeholders to understand and engage in providing feedback and suggestions? Jennifer Bonine has a solution for you—a mind mapping tool that can help you address these questions. A mind map is a visual approach used to help organize information rather than a text outline or list. Jennifer helps you download a free mind mapping tool, trains you how to use the tool...
Machine Learning: Will It Take Over Testing?
Preview NewAutomating Performance Testing at Every Step
Preview NewTransforming Your QA and Test Team
Preview NewAre Your Tests Well-Traveled? Thoughts on Test Coverage
There are many places to visit it the world and it can be interesting to see “where you’ve been”. There are many places in software for tests to visit, and seeing “where the tests have been” can be very interesting for testers. Dot Graham explains what coverage is, and why it can be misleading to talk about 100% coverage. Coverage is a relationship between the tests and the software being tested, and is an objective measurement of some aspect of thoroughness of the testing. Dot will discuss the ways in which the term coverage is mis-used, and the four caveats of coverage which every tester...
World-Class Test Automation: You Can Build It Too
NewJoin Chris Loder as he describes the test automation framework they have created from the ground up. Chris shares the environment they have put together to run in virtual machines, physical hardware, and mobile devices—with Jenkins keeping track of it all. He explains their use of the keyword driven and page object approaches, and how that has allowed a high rate of automated test case development from all members of the quality team. Using this framework, they run over 7,000 unique regression web tests daily—quickly and consistently. Chris shows how they built their automation with both...
Flaky No More: Find the Right Framework for Your Selenium Tests
NewSelenium has an industry reputation of being a flaky tool where individual tests pass, then fail—sometimes with no production changes at all. Such flakiness in your test suites can be extremely difficult, time-consuming, and frustrating to debug. The vast majority of these issues come from using either bad locators or bad wait conditions. Both of these root causes can be addressed by implementing the right framework for your Selenium tests. Craig Schwarzwald shares the most important concepts in creating a more reliable Selenium framework, such as using a base page object that wraps core...
Story Time for Testers
Stories help us learn. They can be fun or scary, exciting or relaxing. People worldwide tell and listen to stories. We access them through books, film, TV, and computers. But direct, face-to-face storytelling is still a powerful experience. When Isabel Evans was young, there was a program on the radio called Listen with Mother. For fifteen minutes, mothers and children across the land would sit and listen to a story. Join Isabel and become your younger child, bring your testing parent, and listen to her stories. In fifteen-minute sections, Isabel recounts stories drawn from myths, legends...
Discovering What Matters, Fast: Combination Testing Case Studies
NewEven the simplest application depends on a vast, rich, and complex set of variables interacting and collaborating to drive behavior. Each variable has many options, and the number of ways these variables can be combined can be astronomical, making it next to impossible to test them all. Combination testing—combining individual test values to form complete test cases—can help. Rob Sabourin shares three real-world case studies that show how combination test design helped testers focus on a manageable subset of combinations to find critical bugs, quickly. Rob will share examples of some...
Testing RESTful Web Services
Preview NewCombine Automation and Exploratory Testing for Quality Coverage
PreviewThursday, October 19
Seven Questions to Ask for Successful Change Management
Preview NewLeverage Big Data and Analytics for Testing
Sabermetrics turned the baseball world upside down by challenging decades-old measures of individual performance and their perceived linkage to team success. After cementing their legacy as the Lovable Losers for 108 years, the Chicago Cubs were able to leverage a data-driven approach to finally win a World Series. An Arkansas high school football coach, devoted to statistical analysis, has won three state championships—by never punting. Formula 1 racing teams collect staggering amounts of telemetry data from their race cars for the purpose of eking out seconds during the course of a race...
Accessibility Standards and Testing Techniques: Be Inclusive or Be Left Behind
PreviewJump Start Agile Testing with Acceptance Test Driven Development
PreviewImplementing a Test Dashboard to Boost Quality
PreviewBehavior Driven Development—A Guide to Agile Practices
It seems as if the agile methods have lots of DD’s going on. BDD – Behavior Driven Development, ATDD – Acceptance Test Driven Development and several others. Adopting BDD allows for testing to be done as early as possible in the software development life cycle, promoting accurate testing, ensuring proper test coverage, and supporting the introduction of automation testing. One challenge is understanding the characteristics and benefits of “driven” approaches. Join Josh Eastman to discover ways that BDD can be employed to describe and test system behavior, user stories, and user acceptance...
Getting a Grip on Cognitive Adaptive Testing
NewCognitive Adaptive Testing means harnessing the power of analytics and autonomics in support of continuous delivery. The emergence of cognitive adaptive testing is driven by trends towards omni-channel content delivery, utilization of big data and an improved customer experience. Digital business systems need to be extremely responsive to customer sentiment, work across a variety of devices, be resilient in the face of unpredictable failure modes, and process huge amounts of unstructured data. Such scenarios put extreme pressure on IT systems and processes to be not only more responsive,...
Scale Your QA & Test: Testing with Multiple Teams in Large Agile Organizations
PreviewArchitecting an Agile Test Transformation Program
Preview NewAmp Up Your Testing by Harnessing Test Data
The data tsunami is coming—or maybe it’s already here. Data science, big data, and machine learning are the buzzwords of the day. Data is changing our products and the way we build them, so we should also change the way we verify our products. In a world of increasing connectivity and accelerated deadlines, data can provide an edge. But what role should data play in assessing the quality of software? Where does it make sense to use data, and where is it inappropriate? Steve Rowe covers the history of how data fits into testing, explains why data is an important tool to have in your quality...
A Journey from DevOps to DevTestOps: Infusing Continuous Quality
As companies realize the need for rapid application development, they are embracing DevOps methodologies. But implementing DevOps practices without establishing a culture of quality often results in lower quality software or a poor customer experience, which impacts the business bottom line. Join Gajan Pathmanathan as he shares proven approaches for ensuring quality and testing throughout the software development and delivery pipeline, while still maintaining agility and speed. Gajan presents a roadmap for building quality into the fabric of DevOps and fostering a quality-driven mindset,...
Great Scripts I Have Known
NewAre there any great scripted tests? Rob Sabourin shares dozens of examples of test scripts from software development projects. In this talk you will be exposed to the good, the bad, and the ugly side of test scripting. You will see some test scripts which have helped to drive profitable businesses, and other test scripts which have almost brought about corporate ruin. Rob explores the many context drivers behind testing, highlighting when and how they can help you focus on what matters. You will see many types of test scripts: smoke tests, FAST tests, business facing regression tests,...