STAREAST 2016 - Project Manager
Sunday, May 1
Integrating Test with a DevOps Approach (2–Day)
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...
Testing the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the next big technology challenge for software testing. IoT testing uses not only concepts from traditional and mobile environments but also has new testing problems and new patterns. Jon Hagar begins by examining how to use data analytics from error profiles and social media to discover the new error patterns in IoT systems. Usage data on IoT devices is growing rapidly and becoming a big data issue. Through hands-on exercises, Jon explains how teams can use data analytics to improve development and testing. Next, he uses the analytics to define real-world...
Successful Test Automation: A Manager’s View
Many organizations never achieve the significant benefits that are promised from system level automated test execution. Surprisingly often, this is due not to technical factors but to management issues. In this overview, Dot Graham describes the most important management issues you must address for test automation success, particularly when you are in the early stages of automation, and helps you understand and choose the best approaches for your organization—no matter which automation tools you use. Focusing on...
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
What’s Your Leadership IQ?
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. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies, explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can improve competencies that are not in your core set of strengths, and describes...
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...
Measurement and Metrics for Test Management
To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he addresses common metrics—measures of product quality,...
Wednesday, May 4
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Lessons Learned in (Selling) Software Testing
In 2013, Keith Klain quit his job as Head of the Global Test Center at Barclays Investment Bank to start a test consulting business based on context-driven testing principles. Keith has spent the past two years wading through industry dogma, pitching new ideas about testing to clients, hiring—and firing—testers, and trying to turn context-driven testing into a viable commercial approach. Succeeding in such a setting requires a balance of practical approaches that can driving improvements against “sunk cost”...
Nature vs. Nurture: Building Great Test Teams
When organizations expand internal test teams, hiring managers sort through piles of résumés hoping for a few gems. But scanning for coveted technical skills and relevant experience often leads to disappointment. With the proliferation of new software and the explosion of mobile devices, the QA industry is surging, and experienced testers are becoming harder to find. What inherent qualities do great testers really possess? Do those attributes show up on résumés? Should technical expertise or tool/application...
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”...
The Internet of Things in Action: Testing Anki’s OVERDRIVE Racing Game
As products like Anki’s OVERDRIVE race car game and others such as Fitbit and Skylanders pop up all over, we testers need to be prepared for the wave of Internet of Things (IoT) products. Although the IoT doesn’t necessarily require new testing methodologies, it does require creativity when it comes to the tools we need to get our testing and QA work done. Jane Fraser describes and demonstrates the tools Anki’s teams use to develop and test their games, especially OVERDRIVE. From test consoles that can change game parameters on the fly, to test fixtures that can change vehicles from race...
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...
Continuous Integration Testing Techniques to Improve Chef Cookbook Quality
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...
Ensuring Maximum Quality in the Era of IoT and Wearables
Until recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) was just an idea that techies talked about. Unlike innovations in the past, development and testing of the IoT is significantly more elaborate. After introducing the technology of wearables and IoT, Gauri Arondekar delves into the components and architectures that make it work. Focusing on tools and solutions that accelerate the testing processes, Gauri shares the success story of an end-to-end testing strategy for a leading...
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...
Lightning Strikes the Keynotes
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. Get multiple keynote presentations for the price of one—and...
Thursday, May 5
Telling Our Testing Stories
As software practitioners focus on technology issues, we often find that our messages to management and the business are either not heard or are misinterpreted. And sometimes we do not hear the messages that they need us to hear. Isabel Evans examines our natural ability to tell stories and how everyone’s built-in receptiveness to narratives will help you communicate productively about testing and quality. Isabel looks at how we can tell our testing stories in a way that is appealing to our audience. That means thinking about the role of oral, written, and visual representations of testing...
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...
Combine Test Automation Code with Product Code: The Good, the Bad, and the Lessons Learned
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...
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...
Testing at Startup Companies: What, When, Where, and How
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...
Don’t Be Another Statistic! Develop a Long-Term Test Automation Strategy
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...
Uncover Untold Stories in Your Data: A Deep Dive on Data Profiling
How well do you know your data? Organizations are discovering the value in their data—as evidence of what they have done and a clue to how they can improve the bottom line. With the increase in analytics, it is no secret that there are more eyes on the data. And analyzing data can give valuable insight into patterns that drive efficiencies or errors. It is important to use this information and make sure it is being used correctly. However, excavating the data is not always...
Reception and Summit Kickoff: As a Leader, What Is Keeping You Up at Night?
Kickoff the Testing & Quality Leadership Summit with a reception and some networking.
Friday, May 6
Creative Leadership for Creative Teams
As developers and testers, we're uniquely creative, we're inspiration driven, we obsess over every detail, and we can rarely turn it off. We are creatives, and we are different. We think differently, we perform differently—and we need to lead differently. Join Martin Ringlein for a rant, a rave, and a reality check on how to build and lead creative teams. Learn how to manage collaboration and fuel inspiration. Leave the Leadership Summit with not just data points and facts and figures about leadership, but how changing our perspective of the world around us results in more effective ways...
Leading through Change
The ability to change to meet the evolving business environments is critical to the success of any organization. Leading an organization through change is one of the greatest challenges leaders face. In this interactive presentation, Cynthia Gilmer discusses some of the most critical aspects of corporate change and a leader’s role in realizing a successful transformation. Take home valuable lessons on how to be a leader and manage in a crisis or during changing circumstances.