STAREAST 2016 - Project Management
Sunday, May 1
Fundamentals of Agile Certification—ICAgile (2–Day)
Monday, May 2
Getting Started with Risk-Based Testing
Whether you are new to testing or looking for a better way to organize your test practices, understanding risk is essential to successful testing. Dale Perry describes a general risk-based framework—applicable to any development lifecycle model—to help you make critical testing decisions earlier and with more confidence. Learn how to focus your testing effort, what elements to test, and how to organize test designs and documentation. Review the fundamentals of risk identification, analysis, and the role testing plays in risk mitigation. Develop an inventory of test objectives to help...
Better Test Design for Great Test Automation
When we discover—often late in an automation effort—that the automated tests are cumbersome and costly to maintain, we often view this as a technical problem for the automator to solve. However, an often-overlooked cause is the role that testers who designed these tests play in making automation scalable and maintainable. In this interactive tutorial for both testers and automation engineers, Hans Buwalda explores how better test designs will result in much better test automation and can make the difference between automation success and failure. See why successful automated testing is not...
Service Virtualization: Making the Unavailable Available for Testing
Service virtualization—and how it can help testers begin testing earlier—is a hot topic in books and discussions. Now it’s time to demonstrate how service virtualization is more than just a buzzword. Join Carlos Pineda for this interactive session as he shares his experiences and proven practices for using service virtualization technology. Learn how to get started with service virtualization, how service virtualization fits into the overall delivery lifecycle, how to prioritize which services to stub out, and when to begin transitioning from testing with stubs to executing the real...
Tuesday, May 3
Testing Under Pressure: A Case for Session-Based Test Management
The nature of exploration, coupled with the ability of testers to rapidly apply their skills and experience, make exploratory testing a widely-used test approach—especially when time is short. Unfortunately, exploratory testing is often dismissed by project managers who assume that it is not reproducible, measurable, or accountable. If you have these concerns, you may find a solution in a technique called Session-Based Test Management (SBTM), developed by Jon Bach and his brother James. In SBTM, testers explore an area of a product, framing their testing in time-boxed “sessions” meant to...
Testing Cloud Services
Cloud computing is rapidly changing the way systems are developed, tested, and deployed. New system hosting capabilities—software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS)—are forcing us to review and revise our testing processes. At the same time, cloud computing is affording us opportunities to employ new test tooling solutions, which we call testing as a service (TaaS). In this technical session, Martin Pol and Jeroen...
Influence Diagrams: A New Way to Understand Testing
Influence diagrams provide a simple-to-create and easy-to-understand approach to address the complexities of real-life problems. For instance, as testers we may want to find more bugs, but does this have an unintended consequence for the developers? Developers now have more defects to debug, which affects their capacity to deliver new functionality. Influence diagrams provide a means of understanding and managing the complexities of key interactions among testers, developers, and business stakeholders. In the past few years, Isabel Evans has used influence diagrams as a practical tool to...
What DevOps Means for Testers: Tips for Getting Testers Involved
DevOps is more than a buzzword or passing fad. It's a radically new approach to rapidly delivering high-quality software applications. However, many organizations don’t fully grasp the magnitude of this change or what it means for everyone involved in the software development lifecycle. Jeffery Payne says that DevOps—when done right—drives higher quality and efficiency into software development, software testing, and application management activities. It empowers teams to remove impediments to quality and productivity throughout the entire software lifecycle. However, when DevOps is done...
Wednesday, May 4
Acceptance- and Behavior-Driven Development with Cucumber: Three Case Studies
Acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), behavior-driven development (BDD), and Cucumber promise many benefits related to your user story acceptance tests. They promise tighter collaboration between the product owner and the team. They promise the ability for the product owner and other stakeholders to write their own executable acceptance tests. They even promise an increase in the value produced by the efforts of your team as they focus on building the “right”...
Testing in the New World of Off-the-Shelf Software
Testing an off-the-shelf, sometimes called COTS, system? Often, project managers and stakeholders mistakenly believe that one benefit of purchasing software is that there is little, if any, testing required. This could not be further from the truth. Testing COTS software requires a different focus from traditional testing approaches. Although no software package will be delivered free of bugs, the testing focus from the purchasing organization’s perspective is not on...
End-to-End Automated Testing: Lessons from Zombieland
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...
Budgeting, Estimation, Planning, and #NoEstimates: They All Make Sense for Agile Testing
Many levels of estimation are practiced in agile, including budgeting, high-level estimation, and task planning (detailed estimation). That might seem like an anathema to agile, but it is not. Mike Harris shares a case study that provides an approach that “checks the box” for standard corporate...
Test Management in Agile
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...
Test-Driven Everything—with Deliberate Collaboration
You've heard that quality belongs to everybody on an agile team. You've heard that testers and developers should collaborate in order to drive quality higher. You've heard that automated tests help a team continuously validate the quality. Well, it's time to stop just thinking and talking about these things! It's time to make them happen! Watch Ardita Karaj and “Cheezy” Morgan do this in front of your eyes. Watch them build a web application, driven by acceptance and unit...
The Road to DevOps: Data, Environment, and Test Automation
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...
No More Exploratory Testing—Really?
Thirty years ago when Cem Kaner coined the term “exploratory testing,” it was largely ignored for almost a decade. Since then, the idea of exploratory testing has moved through recognition, controversy, hostility, tolerance, and acceptance. Yet questions remain: Is exploratory testing an activity? or is it a technique? or is it an approach? If the purpose of testing is to notice and reveal new information when the landscape of the product is poorly known, described, or understood, then isn't all testing...
Thursday, May 5
The Lean Startup Method and Its Value for Testers
A startup is an organization created to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Approximately 40 percent of all startups will cease operations with investors losing everything; 95 percent will fall short of their financial projections. And the number one cause of failure? No one wants to buy their product. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup...
Quality Metrics: The Dirty Word in the Room
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...
Customer Experience (CX): How to Build an Army of Fans
Your software works well, but that isn’t enough these days. Your customers aren’t coming just for solid software; they are coming for an end-to-end experience with your people, products, and services. An organization that delivers that experience will create an army of enthusiastic fans who promote it regularly; on the flip side, an organization that creates solid software without...
Build a Cross-Department DevOps Team
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...
A Tester’s Experience with User Experience Mapping
Let's take an off-the-beaten-path approach to quality—testing based on actual user experiences. Being aware of surroundings and emotions while using intuition and instincts are attributes of great testing. With the right tools and approaches, we can learn to tap into users’ experiences to understand and exploit their underlying emotions. Marjana Shammi explains the basics of experience mapping and describes how testers can use that information to generate great test...
Cross-Platform Mobile Test Automation Using Appium
Mobile devices are taking over the world and quickly outpacing the use of traditional desktop machines. But how should we test them? Jonah Stiennon has spent the past two years working with a team of open source contributors at Sauce Labs to establish Appium as the industry standard for cross-platform mobile test automation. A Node.js application, Appium uses a superset of the JSON wire protocol, the same protocol on which Selenium is built, to automate both iOS and...
Defect Metrics for Organization and Project Health
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...
Continuous Integration: A New Way of Life
Continuous integration is the new buzzword in software development because it opens up opportunities well beyond making sure all your team's code compiles cleanly. What if this pipeline could improve everything from the quality of code reviews, to how you monitor your product “in the wild,” and when your automated tests are executed? What if it could provide insight into how well those tests are performing? Melissa Benua explores how to setup a basic integration...
The Selenium Grid: Run Multiple Automated Tests in Parallel
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...
Stay Ahead of the Mobile and Web Testing Maturity Curve
Join Danny McKeown, Paychex’s lead test enterprise automation architect, to learn how to climb the testing maturity curve and increase predictability and reuse, all while accelerating repeatable and reliable testing. Learn how Paychex iteratively built a well-defined web and mobile app test automation architecture. By evolving the areas of strategy, environment pre-conditions, continuous integration, and understanding their IT users, Paychex executes a mature program...
Git and GitHub for Testers
GitHub is the repository for the vast majority of today’s open-source software. And that is why many interviewers look at applicants’ public GitHub.com accounts to assess their interests, popularity, helpfulness, and consistency. To collaborate with developers, today’s testers need git and a GitHub account. Unfortunately, esoteric command lines often confuse those new to the tool. Join Wilson Mar as he provides advice on how to be immediately productive. He begins with...