STARCANADA 2017 - Test Strategy, Planning, Metrics
Sunday, October 15
Software Tester Certification—Foundation Level (3-Day)
Tuesday, October 17
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 puzzles that help you practice...
Test Estimation in the Face of Uncertainty
NewAnyone who has ever attempted to estimate software testing effort realizes just how difficult the task can be. The number of factors that can affect the estimate is virtually unlimited. Rob Sabourin says that the keys to good estimates are understanding the primary variables, comparing them to known standards, and normalizing the estimates based on the differences. This is easy to say but difficult to accomplish because estimates are frequently required even when we know very little about the project—and what we do know is constantly changing. Throw in a healthy dose of politics, add a bit...
System-Level Test Automation: Ensuring a Good Start
NewMany organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems later on. As a manager, how can you ensure that your new automation efforts will get off to a good start? What can you do to ensure that your automation work provides continuing value? Dot Graham describes the most important management issues you must address for test automation success, particularly when you are new to automation. Dot helps you understand and choose the best approaches for your organization—no matter which automation tools you use. Focusing on system level...
Measurement and Metrics for Test 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—measures of product quality,...
Human Factors for Test Automation: How People Affect Project Success
Preview NewInnovation: 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 non-revenue generating)....
Wednesday, October 18
Blunders in Test Automation
In chess, the word blunder means a very bad move by someone who should know better. Even though functional test automation has been around for a long time, people still make some very bad moves and serious blunders. The most common misconception in automation is thinking that manual testing is the same as automated testing. And this misguided thinking accounts for most of the blunders in system level test automation. Dorothy Graham takes you on a tour of these blunders, including the Stable-Application Myth (you can’t start automating until the application is stable), Inside-the-Box...
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...
The Three Pillars Approach to an Agile Testing Strategy
PreviewApplying Earned Value Management to Testing
Preview NewMachine Learning: Will It Take Over Testing?
Preview NewTransforming Your QA and Test Team
Preview NewStory 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...
Succeeding with Rapid and Continuous Testing
All organizations are running to keep pace with the transformative changes in software development and delivery. You’re on the hook for immediately automating more and more tests to support a more rapid or continuous flow of new features, delivered into production. So, where do you start? Must testers become coders and automate to survive? Must everything be automated? Jeffery Payne argues that the need to automate almost all tests is a misconception. Jeffery explores how automated testing and manual testing are best balanced during rapid and continuous testing. See how you can employ...
Thursday, October 19
Leading, Following, or Managing? You Can Help Your Group Thrive
As testers or test managers, being effective mentors, coaches, and leaders is critical to our team’s success. Quite often we also play important roles in driving change, influencing others, and helping individuals, teams, and the business move from where they are to a higher level of excellence. We must interact with many people and work together in project teams made up of individuals with diverse perspectives. Join Isabel Evans as she reviews the range of interaction approaches of leadership and management, explores what styles we feel most comfortable with, discusses how we react to...
Seven Questions to Ask for Successful Change Management
Preview NewJump Start Agile Testing with Acceptance Test Driven Development
PreviewImplementing a Test Dashboard to Boost Quality
PreviewScale Your QA & Test: Testing with Multiple Teams in Large Agile Organizations
PreviewArchitecting an Agile Test Transformation Program
Preview NewKey Skills and Attributes for Everyone Who Tests Software
As organizations continue to refine their software development and testing approaches, the skills and attributes for the tester role must keep pace with these rapid changes. Many people other than traditional testers are now being asked to conduct testing. Whether you’re a lifelong tester or are just embracing testing from another discipline, there are key skills everyone requires. Janet Gregory presents some key skills and attributes testers need, whether they are practicing agile or more traditional methods. She explores skills such as effective communication as well as technical and...
Friday, October 20
It's Not All Rainbows & Unicorns (The Picture This Clothing Story)
When Picture This Clothing launched in August of 2016 and instantly went viral, the media made it sound like Jaimee was a "simple mom" who stumbled upon a great idea and struck gold. What they didn't share is the teamwork, the trials-and-error, and the years of work that happened before this viral success. While her current day-to-day is quite literally surrounded with imagination, unicorns, and rainbows, Jaimee delves into the struggle of self-worth, re-designing her life, and how her compass of intention positioned everything that has unfolded as she shares the story of how Picture This...
The Tester’s 3 C's: Criticism, Communication and Confidence
Communication in agile teams is supposed to be seamless and much better than the “old days”. Whether you are in an independent testing team and need to communicate more formally, or communicating face-to-face in an agile context, how can you be effective when you are sometimes telling people what they don’t want to hear? What do testers do? They are critics, often of other people’s work; they need to communicate their findings successfully with confidence. In this talk, Dorothy Graham looks at what criticism is, its different types and “DASR”, an effective script for giving criticism (...
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 best ideas come from...
Create the Life You Want: How Asking the Right Questions Will Open Doors to Your Future
The definition of a realist is someone who makes decisions based on past data. The definition of genius is someone who creates the future. In a world of data analytics and visualizations, the world (at least in my world of Business Intelligence) seems obsessed with measuring three things: what happened, what is happening and trying to predict what could happen next. What if instead we asked the question, "What do we want to have happen here and in doing that created our desired future?" Through the creative practices of journaling, art, movement and stillness, we can open a door to...
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 2017 and going forward.