STARCANADA 2019 - Concurrent Session | TechWell

Conference archive

STARCANADA 2019 - Concurrent Sessions

Concurrent sessions offer attendees the flexibility to follow a specific track or to explore various topics throughout the conference in order to customize their learning experience. Learn both enterprise foundations and new methodologies to grow your skills, supercharge your knowledge, and re-energize your career growth.

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Wednesday, October 23

Jeff_Cheezy_Morgan
Industrial Logic Canada
W1

Continuous Delivery Requires Radical Changes for Testers

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 10:15am to 11:15am

What do testing and quality look like in a continuous delivery world? Who does what and how? Is there still a need for testers, or do developers do all the testing? Is it really possible to achieve quality when you deploy to production many times each day? What should testers do when there is no time for a “testing phase”? These are some of the questions people in the testing community ask as the software development industry moves toward this new paradigm of design and delivery. Continuous delivery is a radical change in the way we build and deliver software, so it requires a radical...

Gene Gotimer
Coveros, Inc.
W2

How Fast Is My App? Performance Testing 101

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 10:15am to 11:15am

Product owners and stakeholders love to ask about performance. “Is the app fast? How fast?” What do those questions even mean? Are they interested in the number of transactions per second? The time for the page to load? How many users it can support at once? Performance testing is a much broader topic than just being able to say an application is “fast” or “slow.” There is load testing, stress testing, and soak testing. You can measure transaction times, concurrency, and capacity. You can address some performance issues with more systems, others with more memory or faster processors or a...

Iryna Suprun
Xandr
W3

Destroying the Horcruxes of Full-Stack Automation

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 10:15am to 11:15am

Testing complex, distributed systems that consist of many layers and different types of software is a challenge. Creating a successful automation solution for such systems is like battling Voldemort: You need to pay attention to flying curses while fighting. Automation teams often concentrate on solving technical issues but forget about the evils popping up that can harm their project. Just like in the Harry Potter books, there are Horcruxes that can curse a robust, high-quality framework unless the QA team finds and destroys them. Fortunately, we are luckier than Harry because we...

ThoughtWorks Canada
W4

Advanced Principles of API Testing | Part 1

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 10:15am to 11:15am

When your enterprise application is moving from a monolithic to a microservices architecture, migrating your testing approach, design and framework can be quite an undertaking. This interactive workshop will introduce you to new advanced techniques and design patterns. Varuna Srivastava will introduce you to how to use design patterns and teach you how to apply those in your test automation code. Come learn how to put together the advanced concepts of an API test in a framework that is scalable, robust, and easy to read and eliminates the brittleness in your checks. You will leave with...

Eran_Kinsbruner
Perfecto
W5

Stabilizing Continuous Testing in DevOps

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Organizations have matured their software development practices over the past few years. Despite advancements and innovations, testing remains one of the biggest challenges in DevOps. To increase test automation coverage and scale agile, we need to match software testing deliveries with the right testing tool, the right skill set, and the right testing persona. This could be a developer, a software development engineer in test (SDET), or a test engineer. Eran Kinsbruner will address the most painful challenges developers and testers face and offer an agile testing approach that examines...

Phil Wells
New York Times
W6

Automating the New York Times Crossword

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

The New York Times digital crossword has more subscribers than the population of Iceland. The team responsible for this media mainstay add new features all the time. They release new games, like Spelling Bee and Letter Boxed. They introduce new features, like leaderboards and vertical streaks. They add engaging bonuses like milestone animations to the crossword. How does a team doing so much, with a product so renowned, ensure that they're building in quality with every new release? Join Phil Wells, a software engineer in test for the Games team, as he discusses that very topic. Phil...

W7

Taming Your Dragon: From No QA to Fully Integrated QA

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Many companies struggle with their QA processes and think of them as bottlenecks to their releases. Join Priyanka on her journey of transforming QA and improving its reputation and reliability. Transforming QA has required Priyanka to take deep dives into some of the technical challenges organizations face when a company tries to integrate an automation-focused QA team. She talks about 3 stages of QA adoption: Strategies on smart learnings from failure, pre-planning for success, and key action points for successful implementations (POC, tools, team structure). Priyanka also reviews how she...

ThoughtWorks Canada
W8

Advanced Principles of API Testing | Part 2

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

When your enterprise application is moving from a monolithic to a microservices architecture, migrating your testing approach, design and framework can be quite an undertaking. This interactive workshop will introduce you to new advanced techniques and design patterns. Varuna Srivastava will introduce you to how to use design patterns and teach you how to apply those in your test automation code. Come learn how to put together the advanced concepts of an API test in a framework that is scalable, robust, and easy to read and eliminates the brittleness in your checks. You will leave with...

Roy Tuason
Zap Surgical Systems
W9

Safety-Critical Software the Quality Agilist’s Way

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Delivering hundreds of laser beams to brain tumors with sub-millimeter precision requires accurate, safe, and effective software that is developed and tested carefully and meticulously. But to be competitive in the market and responsive to customer needs you’ve got to be fast. How do you satisfy this contradiction? How do you know when the software is ready? When is good enough, truly good enough? Are you fast enough, and are you compliant? In two-week sprints, Zap Surgical develops software for planning brain cancer treatments, and then delivering those treatments on its new gyroscopic...

Valentin Guerlesquin
National Bank of Canada
W10

Performance Testing in a Containerized World

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Containerizing applications introduces major changes to the way we run those applications. With Docker and other container orchestrators, we can now share infrastructure and resources, but this introduces the need to control the way resources are used—from a sanity perspective first and a financial objective second. There are several use cases for containerization, from the legacy application replatforming to the creation of a new stateless microservice. Any of those may lead to a specific approach, depending of the risk it brings. This presentation will expose typical risks of...

Mike Cullen
Wawanesa Insurance
W11

Enabling Enterprise Quality

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Too often quality is identified as solely owned by the quality assurance team. By taking a broader approach to roles, tools, and ideology, you can restructure your vision of how to provide rapid, frequent releases that empower all delivery team members. From advancing the QA role to developing in-house frameworks to facilitate developer testing, you can make significant strides to become a leader in software development. Learn how Mike Cullen's team built and deployed an automated test framework that allows developers to write supplementary UI tests that reside within their code base...

Adam_Sandman
Inflectra Corporation
W12

API Testing Is Critical—Here's How to Do It Right

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

It is important to make sure you have a sound API testing strategy because it relates to the critical operation of today’s connected businesses. But all too often, API testing is overlooked. Adam Sandman will provide practical techniques for how to ensure you have sufficient test coverage of your API endpoints, how to leverage realistic test data, and how to integrate API tests into your DevOps toolchain and overall test reporting environment. He will also cover API design patterns such as endpoint versioning, self-describing data formats, authentication, authorization, and mocking...

Jonathan Kauffman
Coveros, Inc.
W13

Document Generation for Regulated Industries

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

One of the lines in the Agile Manifesto is "Working software over comprehensive documentation." This doesn't mean that no documentation is produced, but instead that only documentation that brings value to the team and the customer should be created. So what do you do when you are working in a regulated industry and you need to produce extensive documentation to prove that the system works correctly? Jonathan Kauffman recently worked with a company that produces FDA Class II medical devices and wanted to reduce the overhead of creating the documentation required by regulatory...

Josh_Gibbs
Contrast Security
W14

Continuous Application Security Testing

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Because of its specialized nature, many aspects of application security testing are often assigned to testers from another team or another company who may be brought in to perform a point-in-time assessment prior to a release. If your team is interested in implementing continuous deployment, automation seems like the obvious answer. But when attempting to automate your security tests, you may run into a wide variety of challenges beyond simply adding a tool into your build system. Josh Gibbs will help you navigate these potential roadblocks and be prepared to overcome them. We'll...

W15

Testers: The Unsung Data Heroes

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Data is the most valuable commodity in the world, and testers generate the most valuable data in the product development organization. When effectively tracked and presented, that data can inform release schedules, aid in decision-making, and shape the direction of the product. Connor Dodge will explain how testers can create and use real-time dashboards to analyze the status of agile projects and prove their quality to the organization. He'll discuss what metrics are important, how to pull the data to power those metrics from existing popular applications such as Jira and TestRail...

Melissa_Benua
mParticle
Chris_Loder
InGenius Software
Dawn_Jardine
Independent QA Consultant
Alison Wade
TechWell Corp.
W16

Ask Me Anything!

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Have you ever wondered how a conference program is put together? Did you always want to know what happens behind the scenes at a conference? Maybe you have an automation question for the self-proclaimed lazy Automator, Chris Loder? Perhaps you wanted to ask Melissa Benua about continuous testing, containers, or imposter syndrome? It may be that you are interested in asking Dawn Jardine about her career path, what she thinks about One-On-One meetings, or how you too can be a speaker? Or conceivably your very curious mind wants to know "so why did Alison Wade start Women Who Test?" During...

Thursday, October 24

T1

3 Steps to QA Success from a VP of Quality Assurance

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Thursday, October 24, 2019 - 10:15am to 11:15am

Are you a leader with a quality problem? Every organization struggles with quality at some point in their product lifecycle. Knowing what to measure and how to build a culture of quality with specific and actionable methods is key. Join Karen Holliday as she goes through the three steps you can take to ensure success. She'll begin by guiding you through an analysis of the issues, including product, customer, and organizational factors. Next you'll learn the five key quality differentiators to implement within your development process. Finally, focus on how to create your own customer...

T2

Authoring an Accessibility Story

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Thursday, October 24, 2019 - 10:15am to 11:15am

Anticipating the needs of users with visual impairments can be a challenge for sighted testers. We can draw insights from the principles of plotting novels: developing empathy for "characters" as they navigate a journey, confront obstacles, make decisions, and successfully realize their goals. Elizabeth Langston's company releases an accessibility product that allows users with visual impairments to access and analyze charts and graphs through sound. She will discuss the basics of writing fiction and how to apply them to creating use case tests. You'll learn character development...

Talia_Nassi
WeWork
T3

Testing in Production

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Thursday, October 24, 2019 - 10:15am to 11:15am

How do you know your feature is working perfectly in production? If something breaks in production, how will you know? Will you wait for a user to report it to you? What do you do when your staging test results do not reflect current production behavior? In order to test proactively as opposed to reactively, why not test in production?! By testing in production, you will have an increased accuracy of test results, your tests will run faster in production due to elimination of mock/bad data, and you will have a higher confidence before releases. You can accomplish this through feature...

Melissa_Benua
mParticle
T4

Peer to Peer Session: Solving Your Continuous Delivery Problems

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Thursday, October 24, 2019 - 10:15am to 11:15am

Peer-to-peer Discussion: How Do I Make CD Work in My Environment? Building a successful continuous delivery pipeline is very context specific. Large organizations with legacy code, existing physical environments, regulatory constraints, large monolithic applications, or stove piped organizations often struggle to find a continuous delivery approach that will work for them successfully. If this sounds familiar, this session is for you. Join facilitator Melissa Benua as conference participants work together to identify and solve difficult continuous delivery challenges. Learn how other...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.Com, Inc.
T5

Reality Driven Testing in Agile Projects

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Thursday, October 24, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Many agile teams rework previously deployed stories, even after plenty of in-sprint testing. Well groomed, refined, stories framed with typical, alternate and error scenarios, gracefully described in well formed gherkin, continue to encounter all sorts of bugs. Software engineering consultant, Rob Sabourin, often sees rework in over 20% of deployed stories. In this presentation Rob shows how agile teams can drive rework down dramatically, often achieving near Zero rework after a story is DONE. Rob teaches teams to identify and implement relevant testing activities above and beyond those...

Arnika Hryszko
Polish Testing Board
T6

How to Ensure That Requirements Are Testable

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Thursday, October 24, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Everything starts with a requirement—a singular, documented need that a particular design, product, or process aims to satisfy. No other part of our work paralyzes the resulting system if it is done wrong, and no other part is more difficult to repair later. And yet we devote so little attention to requirements. By teaching people who create requirements, Arnika Hryszko learned a lot about their ways of working. She will share those lessons so that you will be able to improve your teams and projects by establishing detailed technical requirements. Discover practical ways to plan...

Noha_Gomaa
Aldo Group
T7

Testing as a Top-Notch Service

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Thursday, October 24, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Companies today must respond to the ever-increasing demand of delivering products in a fast-paced digital environment. As a result, many traditional system testing departments are being dismantled, teams are being split up, and individual testers are being distributed across multiple projects or functional teams. This transition can lead to workflows that are awkward and siloed, with team members trying to figure out what exactly to do with the tester. Noha Gomaa feels there must be a better way to handle the transition. She champions "testing as a service" to project teams, helping them...

Jeff_Abshoff
ANSYS Inc
T8

Providing Value as a Leader: More Than Just Being the Boss

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Thursday, October 24, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Being a test manager is more than just being the boss. Sure, there is direction to set, issues to address, hiring, performance reviews, and status updates. But does that mean there’s no real work for a manager to do? Managers want to empower their team members to make good decisions and execute well, but how do you provide value when specific testing tasks are done by others? How does a manager go beyond being the boss to actually helping their staff do amazing work? Join Jeff Abshoff as he shares his experience working with new and seasoned testers. Hear some of the struggles he has faced...

Carrie Hughston
SAS Institute
Lynneth Lohse
SAS Institute
T9

The Hidden Testers in Your Organization

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Thursday, October 24, 2019 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

The market demands that high-quality software is released at an increasing pace, yet resources remain fixed. How can organizations expand and improve testing under these conditions and help prevent costly and embarrassing bugs in production software? Why not invite internal staff to test-drive preproduction software? Structured testing events engage everyone across the company—sales, legal, day care workers, front desk receptionists—to exercise emerging software and give feedback directly to the development team. The results are incredibly valuable feedback for the development...

Dawn_Jardine
Independent QA Consultant
T10

The ROI of One-On-Ones

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Thursday, October 24, 2019 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Having regular one-on-ones is the key to supporting employee performance. As a leader, you know regular conversations are important. When can you find time? How can you make them more productive? What can you do to make them valuable to both you and your team member? What is the benefit to the organization? As a manager of a 50+ testing team, Dawn has successfully rolled out a one-on-one format that produced an increase in team performance across the organization. She will share her experiences and lessons learned from NOT having one-on-ones, and show you how you can use your one-on-ones...

Matt Weinstock
Align Technology
T11

Virtual Insanity: Overcoming the Pains of Managing Remote Test Teams

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Thursday, October 24, 2019 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Globally distributed software teams are no longer just a trend—they are industry commonplace. Creating these teams allows companies to lower their costs by tapping into developing markets and to provide support around the clock. While this seems like a great idea at a high level, the complicated nature of managing the test effort for remote teams can be quite daunting. If many test managers barely have enough time to dedicate to their local team, how can they support their remote teams properly? Join Matthew Weinstock as he shares his experience managing global remote test teams....

Rajni Singh
nagarro
T12

Testing Uncertainty—and a Chatbot Named Ginger

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Thursday, October 24, 2019 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Uncertainty has always been a key challenge for testers. But testing a chatbot adds a completely new level of uncertainty. There are a lot of platforms and tools available for chatbot development, but what we lack is a standardized chatbot testing strategy. The way testing is performed on chatbots differs a lot from "traditional" testing (like for an app or web portal) due to the apparent randomness of a conversation with a chatbot. From testing numerous clients' chatbots and her company's own, named Ginger, Rajni Singh has experienced that it is impossible to anticipate all the...