Skip to main content

Project Manager

Tutorials

MB The Challenges of BIG Testing: Automation, Virtualization, Outsourcing, and More SOLD OUT
Hans Buwalda, LogiGear
Mon, 05/05/2014 - 8:30am

Large-scale and complex testing projects can stress the testing and automation practices we have learned through the years, resulting in less than optimal outcomes. However, a number of innovative ideas and concepts are emerging to better support industrial-strength testing for big projects. Hans Buwalda shares his experiences and strategies he's developed for organizing and managing testing on large projects. Learn how to design tests specifically for automation, including how to incorporate keyword testing and other techniques.

Read more
MF What’s Your Leadership IQ? NEW
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Mon, 05/05/2014 - 8:30am

Have you ever needed a way to measure your leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that.

Read more
MG Take a Test Drive of Acceptance Test-Driven Development NEW
Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans
Mon, 05/05/2014 - 8:30am

The practice of agile software development requires a clear understanding of business needs. Misunderstanding requirements causes waste, slipped schedules, and mistrust within the organization. Jared Richardson shows how good acceptance tests can reduce misunderstanding of requirements. A testable requirement provides a single source that serves as the analysis document, acceptance criteria, regression test suite, and progress-tracker for any given feature. Jared explores the creation, evaluation, and use of testable requirements by the business and developers.

Read more
TA Testing Mobile Applications from All Angles NEW
Randy Rice, Rice Consulting Services, Inc.
Tue, 05/06/2014 - 8:30am

As the need for testing mobile applications increases, so does the need to understand and apply test practices that cover more than just functional correctness. Randy Rice leads you through techniques for designing the right tests for your mobile applications, whether they are on the device or on a website. Learn how to know which items of functionality are important to test based on relative risk. Randy presents his visual method of how to rank important attributes including usability, compatibility, accessibility, and security, and then how to design tests for them.

Read more
TE Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities NEW
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Tue, 05/06/2014 - 8:30am

Innovation is a word tossed around frequently in organizations today. The standard clichés are Do more with less and Be creative. Companies want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, implement, prioritize, and track their innovation efforts. Using the Innovation to Types model, Jennifer Bonine will help you transform your thinking regarding innovation and understand if your team and company goals match their innovation efforts. Learn how to classify your activities as "core" (to the business) or "context" (essential, but non-revenue generating).

Read more
TF Testing Cloud Services: SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS NEW
Martin Pol, Polteq
Jeroen Mengerink, Polteq
Tue, 05/06/2014 - 8:30am

Cloud computing has changed the environment of testing. Its use is increasing for hosting business applications (SaaS) and testing (TaaS). Martin Pol and Jeroen Mengerink focus on SaaS, describing the relevant infrastructure and platform services (IaaS and PaaS). How do we test performance of the cloud itself? How do we make sure that the continuity of services is guaranteed? How do we cope with elasticity and the philosophy of bring-your-own-device (BYOD)? Martin and Jeroen discuss the risks that arise when implementing cloud computing―some traditional, but others completely new.

Read more
TR Test Estimation in Practice NEW
Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
Tue, 05/06/2014 - 1:00pm

Anyone who has ever attempted to estimate software testing effort realizes just how difficult the task can be. The number of factors that can affect the estimate is virtually unlimited. The key to good estimates is to understand the primary variables, compare them to known standards, and normalize the estimates based on their differences. This is easy to say but difficult to accomplish because estimates are frequently required even when very little is known about the project and what is known is constantly changing.

Read more

Concurrent Sessions

W2 Testing Lessons Learned from Monty Python
Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
Wed, 05/07/2014 - 11:30am

And now for something completely different. Monty Python's Flying Circus revolutionized comedy and brought zany British humor to a worldwide audience. However, buried deep in the hilarity and camouflaged in its twisted wit lie many important testing lessons—tips and techniques you can apply to real world problems to deal with turbulent projects, changing requirements, and stubborn project stakeholders.

Read more
W11 Succeeding as an Ethnic or Minority Tester
Yousef Harfi, Medavie Blue Cross
Wed, 05/07/2014 - 1:45pm

No one wishes to see himself as different or treat other people differently because of his uniqueness. Unfortunately, we are frequently judged and our skills presumed based on our ethnicity, beliefs, politics, appearance, lifestyle, gender, or sexual orientation. Our professional success and our projects’ success can be derailed because of lack of understanding, stereotyping, or fear. Our professional environment includes us all―brown, black, white, tall, short, male, female, straight, gay, extroverts, and introverts.

Read more
W18 Making Numbers Count: Metrics That Matter
Mike Trites, Professional Quality Assurance, Ltd.
Wed, 05/07/2014 - 3:00pm

As testers and test managers, we are frequently asked to report on the progress and results of our testing. The question “How is testing going?” may seem simple enough, but our answer is ultimately based on our ability to extract useful metrics from our work and present them in a meaningful way. This is particularly important in agile environments, where clear, concise, and up-to-date metrics are potentially needed multiple times per day.

Read more
T1 A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to User Acceptance Testing
Randy Rice, Rice Consulting Services, Inc.
Thu, 05/08/2014 - 9:45am

On large enterprise projects, the user acceptance test (UAT) is often envisioned to be a grand event where the users accept the software, money is paid, and the congratulations and champagne flow freely. UAT is expected to go well, even though some minor defects may be found. In reality, acceptance testing can be a very political and stressful activity that unfolds very differently than planned.

Read more
T12 DevOps: Where in the World Is Test?
Erik Stensland, Pearson Learning Technology
Thu, 05/08/2014 - 11:15am

As the world of software development changes, software testing organizations are challenged to be more innovative to match the speed at which software releases are being deployed. The new software industry buzzword is DevOps; so you might wonder if your software testing organization is still important and how it fits in to this new industry trend. Erik Stensland shares his research into what the DevOps model is, the three ways of implementing DevOps, testing solutions for DevOps, and the benefits of DevOps.

Read more
T13 Top Challenges in Testing Requirements
Lloyd Roden, Lloyd Roden Consultancy
Thu, 05/08/2014 - 1:30pm

Studies show that at least half of all software defects are rooted in poor, ambiguous, or incomplete requirements. For decades, testing has complained about the lack of solid concrete requirements, claiming that this makes our task more difficult and in some instances—impossible. Lloyd Roden challenges these beliefs and explains why having detailed requirements can be at best damaging and at worst can even be harmful to both testing and the business.

Read more
T14 Build the Right Regression Suite with Behavior-Driven Testing
Anand Bagmar, ThoughtWorks
Thu, 05/08/2014 - 1:30pm

Manual functional testing is a slow, tedious, and error prone process. As we continue to incrementally build software, the corresponding regression test suite continues to grow. Rarely is time allotted to consolidate and keep these test cases in sync with the product under development. If these test cases are used as the basis for automation, the resulting suite is composed of very granular tests that are often quite brittle in nature.

Read more
T15 Designing and Implementing Automation at a Large Financial Institution
Michael Sowers, SQE
Thu, 05/08/2014 - 1:30pm

Planning, designing, implementing, and tracking results for QA and test automation can be challenging. It is vital to ensure that any tools selected will work well with other application lifecycle tools, driving the adoption of automation across multiple project teams or departments, and communicating the quantitative and qualitative benefits to key stakeholders. Mike Sowers discusses his experiences creating an automation architecture, establishing tool deployment plans, and selecting and reporting tool metrics at a large financial institution.

Read more
T16 Mobile Testing in the Cloud
Rachel Obstler, Keynote DeviceAnywhere
Thu, 05/08/2014 - 1:30pm

Today, organizations are rapidly deploying mobile versions of their customer-facing and internal applications. With the prevalence of more agile-based approaches and the challenge of an ever-increasing diversity of devices and OS versions, testers are being asked to accomplish more testing in less time. Rachel Obstler shares how leading enterprises are improving the efficiency of their mobile testing using automation, and how they identify the right processes and tools for the job.

Read more
T17 Continuous Test Automation
Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans
Thu, 05/08/2014 - 1:30pm

Today’s test organizations often have sizable investments in test automation. Unfortunately, running and maintaining these test suites represents another sizable investment. All too often this hard work is abandoned and teams revert to a more costly, but familiar, manual approach. Jared Richardson says a more practical solution is to integrate test automation suites with continuous integration (CI). A CI system monitors your source code and compiles the system after every change. Once the build is complete, test suites are automatically run.

Read more
T19 Ambiguity Reviews: Building Quality Requirements
Susan Schanta, Cognizant Technology Solutions
Thu, 05/08/2014 - 3:00pm

Are you frustrated by the false expectation that we can test quality into a product? By the time an application is delivered to testing, our ability to introduce quality principles is generally limited to defect detection. So how do you begin to shift your team’s perceptions into a true quality assurance organization? Susan Schanta shares her approach to Shift Quality Left by performing ambiguity reviews against requirements documents to reduce requirement defects at the beginning of the project.

Read more
T20 Making Testing at eBay More Realistic
Kamini Dandapani, eBay, Inc.
Thu, 05/08/2014 - 3:00pm

Have you had customers report issues that cannot be reproduced in the test environment? Have you had defects leak into production because your test environment is not equivalent to production? In the past, the eBay test environment didn’t mirror production data and had security, feature, and service fidelity issues. Kamini Dandapani shares how eBay solved these problems. They now dedicate a portion of their production environment to enable eBay engineers to do more realistic testing.

Read more
T21 Using DevOps to Improve Software Quality in the Cloud
Glenn Buckholz, Coveros
Thu, 05/08/2014 - 3:00pm

DevOps is gaining popularity as a way to quickly and successfully deploy new software. With all the emphasis on deployment, software quality can sometimes be overlooked. In order to understand how DevOps and software testing mesh, Glenn Buckholz demonstrates a fully implemented continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) stack. After describing the internals of how CI/CD works, Glenn identifies the touch points in the stack that are important for testing organizations.

Read more
T22 Top Practices for Successful Mobile Test Automation
Fred Beringer, SOASTA
Thu, 05/08/2014 - 3:00pm

Mobile apps bring a new set of challenges to testing—fast-paced development cycles with multiple releases per week, multiple app technologies and development platforms to support, dozens of devices and form factors, and additional pressure from enterprise and consumers who are less than patient with low quality apps. And with these new challenges comes a new set of mistakes testers can make! Fred Beringer works with dozens of mobile test teams to help them avoid common traps when building test automation for mobile apps.

Read more
T23 Ensuring Security through Continuous Testing
Jeremy Faircloth, UnitedHealth Group
Thu, 05/08/2014 - 3:00pm

Many companies develop strong software development practices that include ongoing testing throughout the development lifecycle but fail to account for the testing of security-related use cases. This leads to security controls being tacked on to an application just before it goes to production. With security controls implemented in this manner, more security vulnerabilities will be found with less time to correct them.

Read more
T24 Game On: Automating Sports Video Game Testing
Fazeel Gareeboo, EA Sports
Thu, 05/08/2014 - 3:00pm

Sports video games are generally on a short cycle time—tied to the start of a particular sport’s season. Like all video games, the pressure is always on to add more features to sell more games, and the list of “cool” features is endless. Getting buy-in to implement automated testing in this environment can be a challenge. And once you get that buy-in, your next challenge is to ensure it provides significant value to the game team. Fazeel Gareeboo shares the lessons they learned at EA Sports—lessons you can take back to your project.

Read more

Keynotes

K3 Lightning Strikes the Keynotes
Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
Wed, 05/07/2014 - 4:15pm

Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR conferences. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consists of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. And now, lightning has struck the STAR keynotes.

Read more
K4 Extreme Automation: Software Quality for the Next Generation Enterprise
Theresa Lanowitz, voke, inc.
Thu, 05/08/2014 - 8:30am

Software runs the business. The modern testing organization aspires to be a change agent and an inspiration for quality throughout the entire lifecycle. To be a change agent, the testing organization must have the right people and skill sets, the right processes in place to ensure proper governance, and the right technology to aid in the delivery of software in support of the business line. Traditionally, testing organizations have focused on the people and process aspect of solving quality issues.

Read more
K5 The Art of Testing Transformation: Blending Technology with Cutting-Edge Processes
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Thu, 05/08/2014 - 4:15pm

Technologies, testing processes, and the role of the tester have evolved significantly over the past several years. As testing professionals, it is critical that we evaluate and evolve ourselves to 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, like a skilled painter, help you artfully blend people, process, and technology into a masterpiece, woven together to create a synergistic relationship that adds value to your organization.

Read more