STARCANADA 2018 - Career & Personal Development
Tuesday, October 16
The Tester's (New) Role in Agile Development
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...
Innovation: 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 17
Gaining Consciousness
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...
Reinventing Test Leadership
In the age of agile and DevOps, many organizations are eliminating the role of test manager. Fiona Charles, a people- and project-focused leadership consultant, reviews what this means for testing and test leadership. Fiona shares her experience working with skilled test leads in adapting and inventing test methodologies and selecting techniques to fit evolving organizational frameworks, new technologies, and increasingly streamlined software delivery methods. Fiona has helped develop test coaches and mentors who inspire testers to grow their skills, and with her guidance, many agile test...
Thursday, October 18
Automation in Aviation and Mission-Critical Software
PreviewAre you confronted with automating tests of large, complex systems? Are there more conditions to test than you can do in a lifetime? Are auditors demanding compliance to a never-ending collection of regulations? Do stakeholders want slick dashboards tracking abstract key process indicators? Join Alexandre Bauduin as he shares his experience leading the complex system testing challenges of a real-time Boeing 777 Flight Simulator. Alexandre will outline how he overcame the many challenges faced by combining his skills in test design and his expertise as an airline pilot, including...
Test Management in Agile—What Happened to All My Testers?
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...
Devices and Desires: As Humans How Do We Experience Software?
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...
Why Military Veterans Make Exceptional Testers
PreviewHiring trained talent has been a challenge for IT organizations for several years now. How do you find a steady source of qualified candidates for entry-level QA and QE positions, especially considering colleges and universities don't include a software quality assurance curriculum? Enter the returning veteran! Our veterans often find the search for jobs a daunting challenge, but Brenda Hall discovered just how well veterans are suited for work in software quality. She will share her insights into solving two challenges—our companies needing talent, and returning veterans needing...
Friday, October 19
Creative Trespassing: Sneaking your Spark into your Work Without Getting Busted
As co-creator of the internationally viral campaign #ItWasNeverADress, Tania Katan knows the power of sneaking creativity into spaces where it belongs but isn’t always a priority in order to start a creative revolution! She will share uniquely developed exercises for flexing your creative muscles, funny stories from the frontlines of a productive disruptor and enough inspirational shouting to make your high school soccer coach crack a smile. You will leave this talk with tools for embracing your inner cape crusader and engaging in your everyday work and life with more gusto, curiosity,...