STARCANADA 2018 - Developer
Customize your STARCANADA 2018 experience with sessions for software developers.
Tuesday, October 16
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. Max Saperstone 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, robust, and easy to maintain. Max introduces other tools that work with Selenium to help manage the data used to drive your tests, evaluate JavaScript-heavy applications, manage your test...
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...
Agile Leadership: Tips and Techniques
NewLeading 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...
Exploratory Testing in Practice
NewMany 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...
Test Estimation in the Face of Uncertainty
Anyone who has ever attempted to estimate software testing effort realizes just how difficult the task can be. The number of factors that can affect the estimate is virtually unlimited. The keys to good estimates are understanding the primary variables, comparing them to known standards, and normalizing the estimates based on their differences. This is easy to say but difficult to accomplish because estimates are frequently required even when we know very little about the project—and what we do know is constantly changing. Throw in a healthy dose of politics and a bit of wishful thinking,...
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)....
Web Security Testing: The Basics and More
Web applications are often security critical or serve as front-ends for security critical applications, making web testing for vulnerabilities an essential part of software testing. Unfortunately, most software testers have not been taught how to identify web security issues while testing applications. Join Jeffery Payne as he shares what you need to know to security test web-based applications as part of your overall testing process. Learn about the most common web security vulnerabilities and how they are introduced into web code and exploited by hackers. Explore test techniques for...
Wednesday, October 17
Everything I Know about Automation I Learned from Saturday Morning Cartoons
Do you remember sitting in front of the television as a kid, enjoying your favorite Saturday morning cartoons? Chris Loder shows you how the lessons we learned from those cartoons apply to our everyday work in test automation. Wait until you hear what we’ve learned from the likes of Scooby Doo, Wile E. Coyote, and many other favorites! Like Bugs Bunny, maybe we "should have taken that left turn at Albuquerque" and possibly done things a little differently. Discover how the animators in Spider-Man didn’t redraw every background but reused the animation cels, similar to our reusing pieces of...
How AI Is Transforming Software Testing
PreviewArtificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning concepts are rapidly being integrated into IT systems. Companies like Apple, Tesla, Google, Amazon, and Facebook have started investing more in AI to solve different technological problems in the areas of health care, autonomous cars, search engines, predictive modeling, and much more. Applying AI is real, it’s coming fast, and it’s going to affect every business, no matter how big or small. So, how do we as testers adapt to this change and embrace AI? Where should we start? And once we get to the era of wanting to automate...
Telling a Better Story: Finding Quality in the Agile User Story
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...
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...
Ditch Your Bug-Tracking Tool: 3 Solid Tactics to Minimize Bug Counts
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...
Combatting Threats to Payment Processing in the Era of Connected Ecosystems
PreviewIn an increasingly connected world, protection from security vulnerabilities and threats is essential. Yet providing that protection can be complex to understand, especially with changes in digital technology, consumer demands, and how social media influences consumer shopping and payment decisions. Consumer demands for a personalized experience, together with regulatory and industry initiatives, force innovation, openness, and collaboration in the payment industry, while new models, new digital ecosystems, and cross-border payments are being transformed by blockchain technology....
Strategies for Selecting the Right Open Source Framework for Cross-Browser Testing
Organizations today are required to test their web application across browsers and mobile devices. Choosing the right framework is a matter of organizational as well as technical fit. With a plethora of test frameworks that span across practices such as behavior-driven development, unit tests, UI, and others, it can be a struggle to select the right tool. In this session, Eran Kinsbruner will provide an overview of the market and cover the top ten open source test frameworks, with a comparison table of pros and cons about when and why to use one tool over another. Eran will focus on both...
Improve Testing of AI Systems with "Grey-Box" Testing Technique
There are two main challenges to testing systems that incorporate elements of artificial intelligence. First, the same input can trigger different responses as an AI system learns and adapts to new conditions, and second, it is difficult to understand what the correct response really should be. Such behavior violates one of the main principles of traditional testing: the repeatability of test case execution. It's like shooting a moving target and not knowing whether you missed. Testers lose confidence in the outcome of their testing when traditional approaches no longer apply. Yury...
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...
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...
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...
5 Ways to Make Load Testing Work for You
PreviewWhile organizations understand the need for load testing, and many even have the necessary tools to manage it, they still fail to execute it well and “do the job” for end-users. Frustration at a poor user experience is increased by the IT organization's failure to explain the root cause of load issues, simply passing them off to users as generic "technical issues." Join Israel Rogoza as he shares five ways to achieve load testing success that focuses on the users’ needs. Based on his load test experiences, Israel will introduce strategies to help you decide who should carry out...
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....