Project Management

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. Some of the best-known experts in testing will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning.

Chris Loder shares how his team at Halogen Software has implemented Selenium in a framework that everyone in his company's R&D group can use. With an ever-increasing amount of manual regression testing, the team needed an easy-to-use automation framework. Chris presents an example of how the framework they developed at Halogen Software is used and, while doing so, shows parts of the supporting code that automation developers will find interesting. Written in Java, the framework is using Selenium in some pretty cool ways.

Modern software delivery involves the decomposition of a problem into packets of business and technical analysis, design, architecture, programming, testing, integration, deployment, documentation, and training. No matter how well-intentioned our iterative or sequential approach is to these activities, our success rate of software delivery is still far below what it should be. Advances in these disciplines haven’t reduced the unpleasant surprises that occur uncomfortably late in projects.

Many projects implicitly use some kind of risk-based approach for prioritizing testing activities. However, critical testing decisions should be based on a product risk assessment process using key business drivers as its foundation. For agile projects, this assessment should be both thorough and lightweight. Erik van Veenendaal discusses PRISMA (PRoduct RISk MAnagement), a highly practical method for performing systematic product risk assessments. Learn how to employ PRISMA techniques in agile projects using Risk Poker.

Most traditional teams do testing at least twice—once during development as new features are created and again during release candidate testing right before release. As a system grows, regression testing takes more and more time, making tight releases impossible—or at least risky—and adding to the burden of maintaining automated tests. Matt Heusser suggests that adopting continuous integration (with its continuous testing) and continuous delivery (with its associated production monitoring) can eliminate the need for classic regression testing.

Have you found yourself forced to use outdated test tools because the cost to migrate was prohibitive? Have you abandoned or rewritten existing tests because it was easier (and cheaper) than migrating? With technology ever changing, most businesses struggle to keep up with producing high-quality products for the lowest price possible. And it is usually testers who suffer the most, as they are forced to use tools that are outdated, or no longer supported, because the company cannot afford the migration cost.

Mobile app testing has lots of good practices, some not so useful (bad) concepts, and some really ugly, don’t-ever-do ones. In the tradition of James Whittaker’s How to Break Software books, Jon Hagar applies the testing “attack” concept to mobile app software. Jon starts by defining the big problems and challenges of testing mobile app software and examines the patterns of product failures that you must attack. He then shares a set of good, bad, and ugly test techniques, which testers and developers can direct against their software to find important bugs quickly.

Test process improvement can be done in many ways. In a top-down approach a central organization does all the planning, and then implementation is done when everything is ready. In a bottom-up approach the improvements, developed and implemented in individual projects, are then spread throughout the organization.

Every day thousands of mobile apps are built, and many are released with poor quality. Dozens of new mobile devices become available every day. Immense pressure mounts on organizations to test mobile apps with shorter go-to-market cycles. Mobile app testing becomes overwhelming due to multiple platforms, varying OS versions, device manufacturers, screen resolutions, and more. Parimala Hariprasad presents an approach to designing test strategies for mobile apps. She addresses such questions as: What devices to test? How to select them? Can we use simulators/emulators?

Classical test process improvement models no longer fit in organizations adopting the newest development approaches. Instead, a more flexible approach is required today. Solutions like SOA, virtualization, web technology, cloud computing, mobile, and the application of social media have dramatically changed the IT landscape. In addition, we are innovating the way we develop, test, and manage. Many organizations are moving toward a combination of agile/scrum, context-driven testing, continuous integration and delivery, DevOps, and TestOps.

Suddenly, application performance is important to your business, and you have been given the budget to improve it. You’re in a hurry because customers are complaining or because you expect jumps in transaction volume and your application needs to scale quickly. Do you know where to start? Join Ryan Riehle as he shares his experiences developing enterprise performance testing programs. Ryan covers the key techniques and heuristics that lead to an effective performance improvement effort.