STARCANADA 2019 - Test Techniques | TechWell

Conference archive

STARCANADA 2019 - Test Techniques

Tuesday, October 22

TA

Selenium Test Automation: From the Ground Up

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Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - 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. Matt 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. Matt introduces other tools that work with Selenium to help manage the data used to drive your tests, evaluate JavaScript-heavy applications, manage your test...

Michael_Bolton
DevelopSense
TB

Critical Thinking for Software Testers

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Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Critical thinking is the kind of thinking that specifically looks for problems and mistakes. Regular people don't do a lot of it. However, if you want to be a great tester, you need to be a great critical thinker. Critically-thinking testers save projects from dangerous assumptions and ultimately from disasters. The good news is that critical thinking is not just innate intelligence or a talent—it's a learnable and improvable skill you can master. Michael Bolton shares the specific techniques and heuristics of critical thinking and presents realistic testing puzzles that help you practice...

Isabel Evans
Independent Consultant
TE

Shifting Our Testing to Embrace Customer Experience

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Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

In today’s environment, customer and user experience (CX/UX) is overwhelmingly important—and is not just about the product. CX/UX describes all facets of a person’s interactions with and reactions to the product, the organization that supplies it, and the environment in which it is experienced. Isabel Evans says that in order to focus our tests appropriately, it is vital that we testers understand our users’ experiences. We need to explore and measure human, business, and societal impacts of products we develop, and how those aspects are underpinned by technical qualities. We need to shift...

Chris_Loder
InGenius Software
TG

System-Level Test Automation: Ensuring a Good Start

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Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Many organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems later on. As a leader, how can you ensure that your new automation efforts will get off to a good start? What can you do to ensure that your automation work provides continuing value? This tutorial covers both “theory” and “practice”. Chris Loder explains the critical issues for getting a good start and his experiences in getting good automation started at a number of companies. The tutorial covers the most important management issues you must address for test automation success...

Melissa_Benua
mParticle
TI

Continuous Testing Using Containers

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Tuesday, October 22, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Containers. Every manager thinks they want them, but few teams have experience in knowing what to DO with them. Used thoughtfully, containerization of your services can transform the way your organization thinks about testing. Gone can be the days of maintaining X different compute environments with Y different configurations. Imagine instead spinning up just the code you need, on the machine type it needs, and only for as long as you need it. In this technical training, Melissa will walk through what containerization means for a legacy code base attempting to practice continuous...

Wednesday, October 23

Jess_Ingrassellino
Salesforce.org
K1

A Framework for the Whole Team to Own Quality

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 8:30am to 9:45am

Enterprise software teams often keep testers in silos, only to be frustrated when testing is slow. A frequent answer is to make the whole team responsible for quality. But how does that work? How can testers engage key stakeholders in testing throughout the software development cycle? How can test managers build teams where everyone participates in a way that plays to individual strengths while simultaneously increasing collaboration? In this practical and inspiring talk, Jess Ingrassellino will share how she developed collaborative test charters when she started working as the first...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Michael_Bolton
DevelopSense
K2

The Logic of Verification

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Wednesday, October 23, 2019 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

Software testing is sometimes described as verification and validation—according to Wikipedia, “the process of checking that a software system meets specifications and that it fulfills its intended purpose.” Yet, if we examine the concept and logic of verification, we recognize that there are serious limitations to what can and cannot be checked and verified. This is not to say that checking is a bad thing—on the contrary; checking can be very valuable. Still, it’s important for testers and their clients to recognize the fundamental limitations of checking and to address those limitations...

Thursday, October 24

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...

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...

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...

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...

K5

Automation Face-Off

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Thursday, October 24, 2019 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm

What do you think about when you hear the words "test automation"? Are you considering developing your own tools to help you probe the product deeply, or will you apply a commercial tool for automated checking? Are “tools” and “automation” the same thing in your world, or do you see them as fundamentally different? Are you excited by new, powerful, enabling technologies, or do you worry that a robot will replace you? And are these our only choices? One thing is for sure: When we apply automation and tools, we may fundamentally change the context and the nature of the work we do. Our...