STARCANADA 2019 - Test Automation Engineer
Customize your STARCANADA 2019 experience with sessions covering test automation for engineers.
Tuesday, October 22
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. 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...
Critical Thinking for Software Testers
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...
Test Design for Fully Automated Build Architecture
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...
Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps
In many organizations, agile development processes are driving the pursuit of faster software releases, which has spawned a set of new practices—DevOps. DevOps stresses communications and integration between development and operations, including rapid deployment, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Because DevOps practices require confidence that changes made to the code base will function as expected, automated testing is essential. Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the unique challenges associated with integrating automated testing into continuous integration/continuous...
Shifting Our Testing to Embrace Customer Experience
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...
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Skills for the Testing World
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...
System-Level Test Automation: Ensuring a Good Start
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...
Continuous Testing Using Containers
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...
Success with Test Automation Projects: A People-driven Approach
NewAs 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...
Wednesday, October 23
Continuous Delivery Requires Radical Changes for Testers
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...
How Fast Is My App? Performance Testing 101
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...
Advanced Principles of API Testing | Part 1
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...
Stabilizing Continuous Testing in DevOps
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...
Automating the New York Times Crossword
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...
Advanced Principles of API Testing | Part 2
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...
Safety-Critical Software the Quality Agilist’s Way
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...
API Testing Is Critical—Here's How to Do It Right
PreviewIt 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...
Document Generation for Regulated Industries
PreviewOne 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...
Ask Me Anything!
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
The Lazy Student’s Guide to Test Automation
Do you loathe regression? Do you tire of the repetitive tasks that are part of your product's lifecycle? If you do, then you might be lazy like Chris Loder. Since his Grade 4 teacher wrote “Chris is lazy” on his report card, it has become his way of life. Chris will share how his “lazy” mindset has enabled him to produce world-class test automation with minimal effort. He’ll show examples of his work with software verification, documentation, reports, and analytical functionality, and even go into the archives to bring out some of his earliest automation efforts. You’ll leave with key...
How to Ensure That Requirements Are Testable
PreviewEverything 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...
Automation Face-Off
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...
