STARCANADA 2018 - Testing in DevOps
Tuesday, October 16
Getting a Grip on Cognitive Adaptive Testing
NewCognitive 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...
Wednesday, October 17
The Life of a Tester, from Once Upon a Time to Happily Ever After
PreviewMost 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...
The Test Expert's Role in DevOps
DevOps is a culture shift that emphasizes collaboration between software developers and other IT professionals while automating software delivery and infrastructure changes. It aims to establish an environment where building, testing, and releasing software can happen more rapidly, frequently, and reliably. Many see DevOps as an extension to agile. In this session, Mike Sowers suggests that for those in testing roles, we may still be running to keep up in order to contribute in an agile context, and DevOps just adds to that pressure. But we can and should still strive to contribute...
Docker and the Path to a Better Staging Environment
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...
Use BDD and Product Analytics to Change Your Vision of Quality
PreviewDevOps 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...
Delivering the Goods: Harmonizing Regulated and Agile Practices
Agile testing is hard. Testers contend with terse requirements, minimal process, little documentation, continually evolving business, technical and organizational factors. Auditors demand proof of compliance. Some teams have trouble conforming to regulations while preserving agile practises. Griffin Jones, a tenured regulated software testing consultant, says “not only can agile practices blend with regulatory compliance - they can be harmonized with them leading to high quality and more agility.” Griffin feels that regulators are project stakeholders, who join the product owner in...
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
Mobbing for Test Design: Connecting with Your Colleagues’ Test Ideas
PreviewDo 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...
Troubleshooting and Understanding Modern Systems: Tools Testers Need
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....