STARCANADA 2017 - Developer
Sunday, October 15
Agile Tester Certification (2-Day)
Agile Test Automation—ICAgile (2-Day)
Fundamentals of DevOps Certification—ICAgile (2-Day)
Tuesday, October 17
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 provides 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, manage your test...
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,...
Agile Test Team Leadership: From Concept to Product
Preview NewIntegrating Automated Testing into DevOps
In many organizations, agile development processes are driving the pursuit of faster software releases, which has spawned a set of new practices called DevOps. DevOps stresses communications and integration between development and operations, including rapid deployment, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Because DevOps practices require confidence that changes made to the code base will function as expected, automated testing is essential. Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the unique challenges associated with integrating automated testing into continuous integration/...
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)....
Test Automation in Agile: The Path to Faster, Better Releases
NewAgile 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...
Agile Testing: Team Tactics that Deliver the Goods
Preview NewWednesday, 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
PreviewImprove 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 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
PreviewSucceeding 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
Leverage 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...
Architecting an Agile Test Transformation Program
Preview NewGreat 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,...
Key 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...