STARCANADA 2018 - Agile Testing | TechWell

Conference archive

STARCANADA 2018 - Agile Testing

Tuesday, October 16

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.com
TB

The Tester's (New) Role in Agile Development

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Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s so easy for agile teams to fall into the rut in which testers only do traditional testing activities, and programmers strictly do their time-worn coding activities. Rob Sabourin shares a number of examples of how testing skills can be applied to a wide variety of activities in an agile project. Testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Risk analysis in self-organized agile teams empowers testers to drive design decisions. A tester’s affinity analysis skills help clear the way for...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
TE

Agile Leadership: Tips and Techniques

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Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Leading agile teams and organizations is much different than leading more traditional software development efforts. The emphasis on self-directed teams shifts a leader's role from that of a line manager who tells everybody what to do, to a mentor, facilitator, coach, and servant leader. This tutorial discusses how to effectively lead self-directed teams either as a ScrumMaster or staff manager. Jeff Payne also addresses how management roles are defined in agile, as well as various organizational structures that support agile leadership. He will also give you practical tips and techniques...

Julie_Gardiner
Independent Consultant
TF

Getting a Grip on Cognitive Adaptive Testing

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Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Cognitive 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 omnichannel content delivery, utilization of big data and improved customer experience. Our software/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 vast amounts of unstructured data. Such scenarios put extreme pressure on IT systems and processes to be not only more responsive but...

Chris Blain
Medidata Solutions, Inc.
TG

Exploratory Testing in Practice

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Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Many traditional test teams are augmenting their documented test plans and test cases with a structured, exploratory approach. Teams adopting agile methods are replacing ad-hoc testing with exploratory techniques, allowing all development team members to effectively participate in product testing. Exploratory testing is all about simultaneously learning about the software you are testing while you are designing and executing the tests. It is used by developers for unit testing, independent testing teams for integration or system testing, and by customers implementing acceptance testing of...

Janet Gregory
DragonFire, Inc.
TL

Test Automation in Agile: The Path to More Consistent Releases

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Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Chris Blain
Medidata Solutions, Inc.
TM

Just In Time Testing

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Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Turbulent development projects experience almost daily requirements changes, user interface modifications, and the continual integration of new functions, features, and technologies. Keep your testing efforts on track while reacting to changing priorities, technologies, and user needs. This highly interactive workshop offers a unique set of tools to help you cope with—and perhaps even flourish in—what may seem to be a totally chaotic environment. Practice dynamic test planning and scheduling, test idea development, bug tracking, reporting, test triage, exploratory testing, and much more....

Wednesday, October 17

Janna_Loeffler
Carnival Corp.
K1

The Life of a Tester, from Once Upon a Time to Happily Ever After

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Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - 8:30am to 9:45am

Most fairy tales start out with a scary premise and move to a happy ending. Lately, we have heard lots of scary stories about the future of testing. As machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to gain prominence, we see even more concerns about the tester’s career. With the help of a famous animation team, Jennifer and Janna will take you through a wild animated journey from what it was like in the early days of software to where we are today. We’ll explore the evolution of the testing profession, as well as what it will become in the future. As this story moves from...

W7

Telling a Better Story: Finding Quality in the Agile User Story

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Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

When delivering agile software development projects and conducting quality assurance and testing assessments, it often seems that “solving the testing problem” doesn’t solve “the quality problem.” The testing problem is much broader than just code quality, testing tools, automation, and skills gaps. A common problem in many projects and teams is a lack of discipline during backlog grooming and sprint planning, leading to inferior user stories that leave the QA effort in peril and disrupt project delivery. In their interactive presentation, Stephan Marceau and Keith Turpin will dissect the...

Gil_Tayar
Applitools
W8

Docker and the Path to a Better Staging Environment

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Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Staging environments are notoriously difficult to set up and maintain. Unless you have a top-notch DevOps team, staging environments are usually different from production environments, and consequently, they are fraught with problems—failing deployments, "out of disk space" errors, and various other issues. Even when the staging environment is great, there's still a problem: There’s only one. If you want to test a feature branch, you must allocate time or, alternatively, install the feature branch and risk disrupting other testers. It’s time the testers took control about building their...

Laurent Py
Hiptest
Vincent Prêtre
Hiptest
W10

Use BDD and Product Analytics to Change Your Vision of Quality

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Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

DevOps teams struggle to ensure quality in multiple daily deployments. Traditional testing approaches have often failed in this context, but there are exciting new ways to test. Laurent Py and Vincent Prêtre will explain how, at Hiptest, DevOps teams combine behavior-driven development (BDD) techniques with product analytic analysis to continuously assert the quality of their product. BDD scenarios align teams to a common goal, and users provide feedback to ensure their needs are met. The team transforms usage scenarios into tests that enable developers to deliver the functionality...

Jerry Penner
Waterloo Hydrogeologic
W11

Ditch Your Bug-Tracking Tool: 3 Solid Tactics to Minimize Bug Counts

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Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

A bug-free product release is an ideal that testers, developers, and project managers strive for, but when it comes to the go/no-go decision, the balance is often struck between "good" and "good enough," leaving behind a rotting to-do pile in the bug-tracking tool that is rarely acted upon in the next release. How can testers stop adding new bugs to the ever-growing list and clean up the “bug dump”? Is it possible to speed development and deliver better software by sidestepping the bug-tracking tool? Join Jerry Penner as he shares his experiences in reducing the wasted time and effort of...

Fiona Charles
Quality Intelligence
W9

Gaining Consciousness

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Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Testers make difficult decisions with minimal information in turbulent times on critical projects.  Independent consultant, Fiona Charles, suggests that testers must learn to draw a line in the decision-making process between trained intuition and careless assumption.  In this presentation, Fiona shares her experience with helping testers train their instincts leading to better decision making. Skilled practitioners naturally make some decisions purely on instinct. For example, an expert medical doctor makes a dazzlingly accurate diagnosis in a complex case that baffles other physicians...

Thursday, October 18

Jeff Payne
Coveros
T2

Test Management in Agile—What Happened to All My Testers?

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Thursday, October 18, 2018 - 10:15am to 11:15am

Substantial confusion exists about the roles and responsibilities of test management when using an agile software development process. Agile seeks to streamline project management and leadership under the role of a ScrumMaster, but what does this mean for test managers? How do they stay involved in the process? What role do they fill? Is it possible that test managers are no longer needed? Join Jeffery Payne for a collaborative dialogue to discuss the pros and cons of a variety of test management models he has seen used by companies that have adopted agile. Learn how to best position...

Isabel Evans
Independent Consultant
T5

Devices and Desires: As Humans How Do We Experience Software?

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Thursday, October 18, 2018 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

We consume and still we desire more. More devices, more apps, more data, more bandwidth, more connectivity. The more we have, the more we want …. We assume that to be true – those of us who work in the software industry. But is that true? To understand what is really required of our products, we need to design and test a pyramid of interlocking quality attributes, that build together to make an optimum experience for the people who use our products, matching their needs, and their desires. It is not enough to test functional suitability, performance, and reliability. People also require...

Coveros
T8

Behavior-Driven Testing Using Page Object Models

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Thursday, October 18, 2018 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Does it feel like you spend half of every sprint fixing failing automated functional tests? Are programmers unwilling to work with automation code? Is test automation a maintenance nightmare? There is a better way. The Page Object Model (POM) is a powerful design pattern for building test automation. A lack of design discipline can lead to test automation code that is buggy, brittle, and almost impossible to maintain. Focusing on the fundamentals of the POM pattern, combined with some disciplined behavior-driven practices, leads to high-quality, maintainable automation code, saving teams...

Jeff MacBane
TechSmith
James Fogarty
TechSmith
T10

Mobbing for Test Design: Connecting with Your Colleagues’ Test Ideas

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Thursday, October 18, 2018 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Do you have trouble generating test case ideas? Are there seemingly obvious bugs getting through your test plan? Are you considering revamping your current test analysis and design? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this session is for you. You may have heard of mob programming as an extension of pair programming. Mob testing is the same principle: having the whole team test together on one computer, collaborating and throwing out ideas. You end up getting the best from everyone. Join Jeff MacBane and James Fogarty as they show you how to leverage mob test design...

Chris Blain
Medidata Solutions, Inc.
T9

Troubleshooting and Understanding Modern Systems: Tools Testers Need

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Thursday, October 18, 2018 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Successful agile testers collaborate with programmers as code is written, isolating problems, troubleshooting defects, and debugging code all along the way to getting the product to done. But modern systems are scaling beyond what traditional teams are able to understand using familiar tools. New appreciation for systems and complexity theory, as well as disciplines and tools around emerging areas such as observability and resilience engineering, are offering solutions that allow teams to actively debug their systems and explore properties and patterns they have not defined in advance....