STAREAST 2016 - Concurrent Sessions

Patterns—proven, repeatable solutions to common situations that occur again and again—are commonly used in development and to a lesser extent in testing. In addition to patterns, various anti-patterns have been discovered. These are common responses to recurring problems that, while promising, are actually counterproductive. Hans Buwalda describes a set of such anti-patterns that he commonly sees in automated test design and that he feels inhibit scalability and...

Within large enterprise organizations, DevOps transformations can be daunting and complex if not implemented with innovation, creativity, and the support of leadership. Implementing DevOps best practices can be a challenge, even for those companies that sell software that addresses this particular discipline. Imagine approaching a team that develops quality assurance tools and challenging them to build a developer-centric team for continuous testing and delivery—but you can't use any of your own tools. Join Clint Sprauve and Eran Bachar to learn how Eran created a dev/test team to...

As test managers, we face challenging situations that require us to draw on our past experiences, principles, and good practices in order to have any chance at all for success.  Michael Wasielczyk faced this challenge immediately after joining T. Rowe Price. He started his new job, responsible for managing the testing effort on a mission-critical data warehouse, and he had no experience managing a data warehouse testing effort. In addition, Michael found there were no...

With the proliferation of mobile devices, browsers, and IoT devices, each with its own eccentricities, performing end-to-end automated testing is starting to feel like navigating a zombie apocalypse. You need to fight off the zombies but lack the right tools. You need a set of rules to live by. You wish you had a buddy who would teach you all those rules because alone, you feel like you’re being eaten alive. On the surface, the rules are simple—Limber Up, Don’t Be a...

Chef, Puppet, and other tools that implement “infrastructure as code” are great for configuration management and automated deployments, but it is difficult to test these infrastructure scripts before putting them into production. Since infrastructure as code is a relatively new technology, methodologies for its testing are not yet standardized. Glen Buckholz shares a way to solve the two major problems with testing Chef scripts—[1] capturing a start state similar to your...

Substantial confusion exists about the roles and responsibilities of test management when using an agile software development process. Agile seeks to streamline project management and leadership under the role of a ScrumMaster. But what does this mean for test managers? How do they stay involved in the process? What role do they fill? Is it possible that test managers are no longer needed? Join Jeffery Payne for a collaborative dialog to discuss the pros and cons of a variety of test management models he has seen used by companies who have adopted agile. Learn how to best position yourself...

In today’s environment of plummeting software delivery cycle times, test automation becomes a more critical and strategic necessity.  How can we possibly keep up with software delivery's explosive pace while retaining satisfactory test coverage?  How do we keep the reins on costs and reduce risk?  Carl Nagle maintains that the long-term solution is a greater level of “sustainable” test automation.  The Software Automation Framework Support (SAFS) method separates test...

DevOps promotes continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous deployment. And anything that breaks this continuity is a potential bottleneck. In many organizations, testing becomes that bottleneck for one or all of the following reasons:  unstable test environment, lack of good test data, and manual test processes. Tanya Kravtsov explores why treating test automation as a separate entity from development often results in a DevOps failure. She explores how integrating test automation with product...

Asad Faruqui and Moni Mau say that their old regression automation used to take three-to-four days of execution time as they ran against different browser versions, locales, and currencies. They wanted to make the automation framework more efficient so features could go to market faster. Symantec explored Selenium Grid which could reduce the run time by offering some parallelism, but Asad and Moni wanted even more efficiency. They explain how they created both a...

Is tracking metrics beneficial? What does it accomplish? How and what should be tracked with regards to software quality? Management wants software metrics to understand what the individual and/or teams are accomplishing and how they are doing with regards to management's expectations. Unfortunately, sometimes those metrics are used against the team and/or individuals. Join Annette Ash as she explores beneficial options to significantly increase software quality, excite...

Who owns DevOps? That's a question that many are asking as more and more organizations implement continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous monitoring capabilities—the essence of DevOps engineering. Join Jeffery Payne as he describes how leading-edge organizations are structuring cross-department DevOps teams and where those teams live within existing organizational structures. Learn who needs to be involved in a DevOps team, how the team works with...

At STAREAST 2015, Chris Loder spoke about the automation framework that he and his team built at Halogen Software. At the time, they had just moved the test automation code into the development code base so that everyone in R&D was able to use it. One year later, Chris returns to...

Are you looking for a simple, meaningful approach to gather and report defect metrics? Want to make your project defects more visible? Wondering how to report defects to management and show value? With an ever increasing demand to show the business value of your testing, David Bialek explores a simple step-by-step method for metric management of issues. This approach was developed and refined continuously to make software defects more visible as well as to analyze the...

Startups are becoming increasingly prolific—technology startups even more so. CEOs are recognizing the need for quality. Their users are their growth, and if they can't retain users, their growth slows or stops. So quality matters. How do you convince the rest of the company that test brings value? How do you convince developers and product owners that spending time on quality is important, particularly if they have never worked with testers before? Should startups even...

The Selenium Grid unleashes the full power of Selenium to run multiple automated tests in parallel across multiple platforms. Brian Long demonstrates the use of an open-source framework developed at Virginia Tech to get up and running with a Selenium Grid in about an hour. He begins by discussing the Selenium Grid configuration and then progresses to the installation of the framework. Starting with a clean Selenium installation, Brian uses Git to retrieve and install...

When I was in high school, I always enjoyed weekly poker games with my friends. As I began my testing career, I realized many poker skills that I honed years ago are similar to those I need to be a good software tester. In poker, resource allocation (betting with chips) is easier knowing if your opponent has won a World Series of Poker bracelet or if he is a novice. In testing, it helps to know how much business, testing, and technical knowledge each team member has so...

When you go on a road trip and want to plan your journey, you need to know where you are, where you want to go, and why you want to go there. You need the same things when you want to improve your test process. It doesn’t matter whether you are agile, waterfall, or part of a Test Center of Excellence, you need to assess the current state of the process, your goal, and how to implement the improvements. Gitte Ottosen takes you through some of test process improvement...

Choosing the appropriate tool and building the right framework are typically thought of as the main challenges to successful test automation. However, even after careful tool selection and advanced automation framework construction, many find long-term success elusive. Lee Barnes discusses the key strategy components that must be in place to avoid becoming another test automation statistic. Learn the importance of—and techniques for—assessing your organization’s...

With the advent of new technologies, agile methodologies, innovative tools, and a global workforce, the tester’s role is rapidly changing. Those who can adapt to the changing environment get the best jobs and assignments, and others get left behind. As the discipline of testing evolves, test professionals have to make decisions that will determine their success and job satisfaction. Is it better to specialize or be a generalist? Are you a better fit for a small start-up or...