STARCANADA 2017 - Testing in DevOps

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...

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)....

Agile teams deliver “potentially” shippable software at the end of every iteration (one to four weeks) or possibly every day. Janet Gregory says that this goal can't be achieved without automated tests, and many teams struggle with test automation. The challenge of automating functional regression tests frightens many testers, who feel their skills aren’t up to the job. So, how can you deliver good quality when you have to release so often? By combining a collaborative team approach with appropriate tools and design approaches, you can not only automate your regression tests but also use...

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 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...

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...

Even 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...

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...