STARCANADA 2018 - Test Automation Engineer | TechWell

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STARCANADA 2018 - Test Automation Engineer

Customize your STARCANADA 2018 experience with sessions covering test automation for engineers.

Tuesday, October 16

Coveros
TA

Selenium Test Automation: From the Ground Up

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Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

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...

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...

Seretta Gamba
Freelancer
TC

Technical Test Automation Challenges: Patterns and Solutions

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

Many organizations find that test automation does not work as well as they thought it would. In many cases, these failures are due to generic technical reasons, which can be fixed with relative ease. Other solutions that have worked well are patterns, common to automation efforts at any level with whatever tools you are using. Seretta Gamba focuses on often-neglected technical issues—i.e., non-management issues—and the patterns that help solve them. These are not development or code patterns—this is a code-free tutorial. Using a set of patterns developed with Dot Graham, Seretta...

Isabel Evans
Independent Consultant
TI

Success with Test Automation Projects: A People-driven Approach

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

As we face increased demands for speed, change and technical excellence—the pressure, and the need for automating aspects of testing increases. But, successful test automation is not just about selecting and implementing tools and a technical infrastructure. People ensure the success or failure of the automation project; they must drive the project. Join Isabel Evans as she shows you how to make your test automation projects people-driven, by focusing on two vital but often neglected elements of any automation project: attitudes towards automation and experiences of automation. What...

TJ

Innovation: Evolving and Expanding Your Creative Capabilities

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

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)....

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...

Seretta Gamba
Freelancer
W1

7 Sure-fire Ways to Ruin Your Test Automation

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Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - 10:15am to 11:15am

Test automation projects fail, but why? Could you stop it from happening? In this tongue-in-cheek talk, Seretta Gamba will share seven proven methods to disrupt or utterly ruin a test automation project, including letting a lone champion keep important knowledge to themselves, ignoring good programming practices, setting impossible goals, and feigning support. Seretta’s humorous recommendations provide managers, testers, and automators alike with the early signs of an automation project in danger. By “warning” that the most effective defenses are found using the test automation...

Coveros
W4

The Test Expert's Role in DevOps

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Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - 10:15am to 11:15am

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...

Chris_Loder
InGenius Software
W5

Everything I Know about Automation I Learned from Saturday Morning Cartoons

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

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...

Raj Subramanian
Testim.io
W6

How AI Is Transforming Software Testing

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

Artificial 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...

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...

Eran_Kinsbruner
Perfecto
W13

Strategies for Selecting the Right Open Source Framework for Cross-Browser Testing

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Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Yury Makedonov
Accenture
W14

Improve Testing of AI Systems with "Grey-Box" Testing Technique

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Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Alexandre Bauduin
House Of Test
W15

Testing at 43,000 Feet: Reporting Risk That Matters

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Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Testing dashboards can give stakeholders the false impression that projects are under control. But are they really? As a tester, you can see a counter indicating a high percentage of passing tests but know that you may still have critical failures in the product. Alexandre Bauduin will share his experience with test reporting, which goes beyond tallying bugs, counting test cases, and computing a variety of coverage measures. Alexandre will demonstrate how teams can report meaningfully on whether we are testing the right thing well. He will share different reporting strategies in...

Griffin Jones
Congruent Compliance
W16

Delivering the Goods: Harmonizing Regulated and Agile Practices

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Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Fiona Charles
Quality Intelligence
K2

Reinventing Test Leadership

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Wednesday, October 17, 2018 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

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

Alexandre Bauduin
House Of Test
K3

Automation in Aviation and Mission-Critical Software

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Thursday, October 18, 2018 - 8:30am to 9:30am

Are 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...

Isabel Evans
Independent Consultant
T1

No More Shelfware—Let's Just Drive Test Automation

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

When Isabel Evans learned to drive a car, she also learned how to check, clean, and change spark plugs, mend the fan belt with a stocking, and indicate speed and direction changes with arm and hand signals. Now, we don’t expect to have to do any of those things; we just drive the car. That’s how test tools and automation could be: Just drive and concentrate on the journey of delivering software continuously—concentrate on engineering the solutions, not on the automation. To be effective engineers, we need the support of a powerful toolset that we understand. Is that what we have? Or do we...

Julie_Gardiner
Independent Consultant
T3

The Importance of When: How to Effect Change in Your Team

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

Have you ever had lots of ideas to improve software quality, but your project team seemed less than responsive? Does your team struggle to work well together? Do you already have lots of actions to take from the conference and you don’t know how these changes will be received? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then this session is for you. Join Julie Gardiner as she shares ways of getting your message across and how to play to people’s strengths to make your team work more efficiently and effectively. She will demonstrate an effective communication style model and explain why...

Nimesh_Patel
Valtech Canada
T6

Testing Retail VR Applications

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

Traditional test approaches break down when applied to retail virtual reality systems. In this presentation, Nimesh Patel will share his experience developing a novel approach to retail VR testing that uses a blend of exploratory research and business- and user-focused testing strategies. Nimesh juggles the needs of a rich collection of company stakeholders, diverse clients, and highly specialized VR team members in order to draw critical insights from VR testing. Exploratory research of other retail VR applications was used to identify many domain-specific risks by studying their...

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...

Israel Rogoza
IncrediBuild
T12

5 Ways to Make Load Testing Work for You

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

While 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...

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....

Friday, October 19

Alison Wade
TechWell Corp.
Jessie Shternshus
The Improv Effect, LLC.
WWT3

The Power of Collective Experience

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Friday, October 19, 2018 - 10:45am to 12:30pm
Bring your biggest challenges to this session and tap the wisdom of others. In this immersive session, you will tackle some of the most widely mentioned challenges brought to light from the group. We will use experiential techniques to unlearn outdated mental models, uncover assumptions and break through obstacles with new ideas. Whether it’s a software testing conundrum, a project setback, a management blocker, a group or team dysfunction or an interpersonal hurdle, all of these can slow our progress and reduce our effectiveness. When we hunt for options, we all have blind spots and biases...