STARCANADA 2019 - Test Transformation | TechWell

Conference archive

STARCANADA 2019 - Test Transformation

Tuesday, October 22

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...

Melissa_Benua
mParticle
TC

Test Design for Fully Automated Build Architecture

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

Imagine this … As soon as any developed functionality is submitted into the code repository, it is automatically subjected to the appropriate battery of tests and then released straight into production. Setting up the pipeline capable of doing just that is becoming more and more common and something you need to know about. But most organizations hit the same stumbling block—just what IS the appropriate battery of tests? Automated build architectures don't always lend themselves well to the traditional stages of testing. In this hands-on tutorial, Melissa Benua introduces you to key test...

Tariq_King
Self-Test.IO
TF

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Skills for the Testing World

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

Software continues to revolutionize the world, impacting nearly every aspect of our work, family, and personal life. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are playing key roles in this revolution through improvements in search results, recommendations, forecasts, and other predictions. AI and ML technologies are being used in platforms for digital assistants, home entertainment, medical diagnosis, customer support, and autonomous vehicles. Testing practitioners are recognizing the potential for advances in AI and ML to be leveraged for automated testing—an area that still...

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...

Chris_Loder
InGenius Software
TK

Automation Framework Essentials

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

Automation is critical in today’s software delivery lifecycle, and yet many organizations struggle to keep their automation running. How can we mitigate difficulties and get consistent automation runs and results we can trust? The secret is implementing a solid automation framework, but that isn’t as easy as it seems. Chris Loder has built several automation frameworks over his career and has learned what works—and, more importantly, what doesn’t. This tutorial will cover what an automation framework is, the benefits of having one, and the keys to a successful framework, including...

Mike_Sowers
Coveros
TL

Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics

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

To be most effective, leaders—including development and testing managers, ScrumMasters, product owners, and IT managers—need metrics to help direct their efforts and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important evaluation activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, the progress and results of both development and testing must be measured. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because developers and testers often are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he...

Jennifer Bonine
PinkLion AI
TM

Testing Transformation: The Art and Science for Success

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

Technologies, testing processes, and the role of the tester have evolved significantly in the past few years with the advent of agile, DevOps, and other new technologies. It is critical that we testing professionals evaluate ourselves and continue to add tangible value to our organizations. In your work, are you focused on the trivial or on real game changers? Jennifer Bonine describes critical elements that help you artfully blend people, process, and technology to create a synergistic relationship that adds value. Jennifer shares ideas on mastering politics, maneuvering core vs. context...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Friday, October 25

Jessie Shternshus
The Improv Effect, LLC.
WWT2

Unlearning: The Challenge of Change

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Friday, October 25, 2019 - 9:45am to 10:30am

The world we live in requires us to acquire new skills and absorb new knowledge in order to stay afloat. We must learn to SHIFT as things around us are changing. We see this on individual, team and organizational levels. However, we are leaving out one crucial piece of the puzzle: we are forgetting to forget, or rather, UNLEARN. Even though old habits are hard to break, the more we can unlearn the more likely we are to experience a sense of growth. In this interactive talk, Jessie will share learnings and unlearnings from her own career, stories from the companies she has worked with, and...

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

The Power of Collective Experience

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Friday, October 25, 2019 - 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...
Jennifer Bonine
PinkLion AI
WWT4

Building Your Personal Brand for Success

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Friday, October 25, 2019 - 1:15pm to 2:00pm
Building the right personal brand is one of the critical success factors in today’s workplace. Organizations develop a brand and image, but not many individuals think about their personal brand and how it can affect their career. As we interact with people, we want to influence them to support our efforts—approving projects, budgets, and funding; supporting our next career move; or recommending us for that promotion or raise we want. As a professional, it is critical to understand how you are being perceived by your “target audience.” During this interactive session...
Alison Wade
TechWell Corp.
WWT5

Panel–Career Superpowers

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Friday, October 25, 2019 - 2:15pm to 3:15pm

Let’s discuss and define the most important career superpowers for women. Hear what industry professionals, leaders, and idea disruptors think the important career superpowers are for women in 2019 and going forward.