STAREAST 2017 - Concurrent Sessions
Concurrent sessions offer attendees the flexibility to follow a specific track or to explore various topics throughout the conference in order to customize their learning experience. Learn both enterprise foundations and new methodologies to grow your skills, supercharge your knowledge, and re-energize your career growth.
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Wednesday, May 10
The Tester's Three C’s: Communication, Criticism, Confidence
Whether you are in an independent testing team and need to communicate formally or in an agile context communicating face-to-face, it can be difficult to do your job well when you are telling people what they don’t want to hear. Dot Graham presents examples of different types and styles of communication, including Virginia Satir’s communication interaction model, that can help you get your points across without rancor. Dot examines criticism—what it is, different types, and the DASR (Describing, Acknowledging, Specifying, and Reaffirming) model for sharing criticism. Since testers are...
The Lost Art of Acceptance Testing
VideoAcceptance testing is often thought of as the little brother of system testing and, in many projects, it ends up as a little phase at the end. Having worked in system testing for most of her testing career, Bettina Faldborg found it was a bigger jump than you might think to move to acceptance testing. She had this overwhelming urge to test it ALL. Like most testers, she did not assume that what has been tested before was done well enough, but that is one of the preconditions to accept going into an acceptance test. With regard to acceptance testing Bettina presents four basic...
World-Class Test Automation: You Can Build It Too
Join Chris Loder as he describes the test automation framework they have created from the ground up at Halogen Software. Chris shares the environment they have put together to run in virtual machines, physical hardware, and mobile devices—with Jenkins keeping track of it all. He explains their use of the keyword driven and page object approaches, and how that has allowed a high rate of automated test case development from all members of the quality team. At Halogen, they run 6,000 unique regression web tests daily—quickly and consistently. Chris shows how they built their automation with...
Pairing: The Secret Sauce of Agile Testing
VideoFinding time to learn test techniques, mentor other testers, grow application knowledge, and cross-train your team members is a daunting task with a complicated recipe. What if you could do these things while testing and finding bugs? Enter Pair Testing. What’s that? Well, maybe you’ve heard of pair programming. It’s like that—only you’re testing rather than programming. And it’s the secret sauce of agile testing because it makes your routine, bland testing so much more fun! Testers on Jess Lancaster’s team use pair testing not only to make better software but also to foster better...
Use Docker to Enhance Your Testing
Wonder how you can make your testing more efficient? Join Glenn Buckholz as he explores Docker, a technology that allows rapid development and deployment via containers. First, he explains exactly what composes a container, and discusses the differences between a container and an image. Once this is clear, Glenn demonstrates how Docker solves the problem of what he calls the state capture problem. When a test case produces a failure, the developer and testers often expend significant effort reproducing the issue so the developer can see the issue and fix it. Glenn demonstrates how Docker...
AI and Machine Learning for Testers
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the most important technology for software testers to understand today. All software will soon have AI-powered components, and they are unlike anything you’ve ever tested before. As risky as AI can be, it is a powerful weapon for testers to solve some of their most painful testing challenges today. The web was great, mobile is interesting, but AI will truly change the way you build and test all software. Jason Arbon gives a brief introduction to AI and machine learning (ML) so you can nod your head knowingly when the topics come up. Explore how products that...
Effective Test Estimation
VideoWe have experience with testing projects, both large and small. Sometimes our test estimates are accurate—and sometimes they’re not. We often miss deadlines because there are no defined criteria used to create our estimates. Sometimes we miss our schedules due to crunched testing timelines. Shyam Sunder briefly describes the different test estimation techniques including Simple, Medium, Complex; Top Down, Bottom Up; and Test Point Analysis. To assist in better estimating in the future, Shyam has prepared test estimation templates and guidelines, which can significantly help...
Service Virtualization: What Testers Need to Know
VideoUnrestrained access to a trustworthy and realistic test environment—including the application under test and all of its dependent components—is essential for achieving “quality @ speed” with agile, DevOps, and continuous delivery. Service virtualization is an emerging technology that provides teams access to a complete test environment by simulating the dependent components that are beyond their control, still evolving, or too complex to configure in a test lab. Arthur Hicken covers the ABCs of service virtualization—what it is and how it impacts Access, Behavior, Cost, and Speed....
Seven Fundamentals of a Successful Testing Team
VideoSo you want to build an effective testing team and you’re asking yourself, “Where do I begin?” Greg Paskal, a quality assurance engineer with thirty years of testing experience, shares seven keys to building a successful testing team. Learn the fundamentals every tester should know and how to build on them to achieve an effective manual and automated testing strategy. Greg shares his Minimal Essential Testing Strategy (METS)—coupled with proven experience—to help you build an amazing testing organization. He also provides specific instruction through each, including fundamentals of...
Agile Testing at Scale
Over the past twenty years, Mary Thorn has had the opportunity to work at many startups, creating several QA/test departments from scratch. For the past ten years, she has done this in agile software companies. Recently Mary moved from leading small agile test organizations to leading a large agile test organization. She has learned how to lead agile testers and agile testing in large contexts. Mary takes you through what she has learned, identifies the keys to transitioning your test organization as it grows, and discusses the techniques required to lead it through the changes. Agile...
Deliver Enterprise Quality in an Agile and DevOps World
VideoEnterprises are adopting agile and DevOps methodologies because they focus on minimizing the latency of software delivery and the distance between “aha” and “ka-ching.” Jacob Ukelson says that judicious adoption of these methodologies can increase both velocity and quality, but inappropriate adoption can be disastrous—from an end-to-end quality perspective. Agile’s focus on iterative development and user involvement already has affected testing by increasing the emphasis on testing by developers themselves, component test automation, and by embedding testers in agile teams. DevOps...
Continuous Context Driven Test Improvement
Classical test process improvement is often not today’s best solution. With virtualization, SOA, web, cloud, mobile, and integration with social media, the way we develop, test, and manage has drastically changed. Jeroen explores why Agile, context-driven testing, SCRUM, continuous integration/development and DevOps require a flexible and pragmatic context-driven approach to test improvement. Context-driven test improvement is organized on two levels. [1] The improvement architecture level starts by clarifying the goal, scope, and context. This results in the improvement approach, a...
Software Quality: A Cross-Organizational Competency
Historically, testers have served as the last line of defense and have been tasked with identifying and driving software defect resolution before promoting code into a production environment. Kevin Dunne explains that in this model, testers have been responsible for testing the code produced by the developers and getting the code—whether good, bad, or mediocre—customer ready. Without proper alignment from the development team, code was often pushed out to testing without much thought or evaluation, leaving testers improperly blamed for leaked defects or slippages in their timelines. With...
Microservices Testing Strategies: The Good, the Bad, and the Reality
Software development is trending toward building systems using small, autonomous, independently deployable services called microservices. Leveraging microservices makes it easier to add and modify system behavior with minimal or no service interruption. Because they facilitate releasing software early, frequently, and continuously, microservices are especially popular in DevOps. But how do microservices affect software testing and testability? Are there new testing challenges that arise from this paradigm? Or are these simply old challenges disguised as new ones? Join Tariq King as he...
Applying Agile Principles to Test Automation Development
Why do test automation implementations often result in budget and schedule overruns and often diverge from the test objectives they were meant to support? Because test automation is a form of software development—but rarely is treated as such. Lee Barnes discusses how the application of software development practices, specifically agile principles, to test automation efforts helps ensure a reliable and maintainable solution that is closely aligned with both testing AND business objectives. Benefits of incorporating agile practices in test automation development include: increased customer...
When the System Creaks: Lessons Learned in Agile Maintenance
We often talk about agile in terms of development of new systems, sometimes called greenfield projects. These scenarios present us with a “cleaner” version of agile. But Jim Peers is asking the question: What about agile methodologies when applied to the maintenance of a mature product? A mature product brings into play many more variables—addition or upgrading of features, addressing technical debt, bug fixing, security and accessibility concerns, and working with an aging codebase. And each variable brings its own challenges. By necessity, these scenarios can force us to adapt our work...
The DevOps Challenge: Now Is the Time to Be a Champion of Quality
VideoSoftware failures continue to make news headlines daily. Yet all the industry hype we hear is about DevOps, a set of practices that seems to exclude quality and testers. Does quality matter? Will it become part of the equation? We must take notice of exclusionary movements and become champions of quality. Lisa Dronzek shares voke’s DevOps survey data to provide insight about the realities and unintended consequences of this movement. Whether you are all-in or just feeling left out, join Lisa to explore DevOps—its challenges and its risks. Lisa explains why and how testers need to...
Changing Lives with Software Testing: The PLATO Testing Story
Aboriginal people across Canada face an unemployment rate more than twice the national average. Meanwhile, vacant IT positions continue to rise across the country, with an additional 218,000 new openings expected by 2020. Denis Carignan shares how PLATO Testing is building a network of Aboriginal software testers across Canada to help solve these problems. Students begin with intensive lab-based training, followed by an immersive internship, and end with full-time employment at PLATO Testing as professional software testers. As this initiative grows, so does the ability to capture large...
Thursday, May 11
Owning Quality: The Culture of Empowerment at Riot Games
VideoAt Riot Games, the League of Legends team faces the challenge of delivering content patches to a global audience on a tight timeline—every two weeks. By employing the tenets of the company’s core values (the Riot Manifesto), QA representatives work to ensure the highest possible quality player experience by working closely with developers in dynamic and challenging embedded roles. Jane Jeffers describes the five parts of the Riot Manifesto—Player Experience First; Challenge Convention; Focus on Talent and Team; Take Play Seriously; and Stay Hungry, Stay Humble—and how each is...
Rediscover Exploratory Testing
The testing community is caught between the devil and the deep blue sea when it comes to exploratory testing. Although exploratory testing has been around for ages, it often leads to more confusion than clarity. Is exploratory testing an activity—something that you do? Or is it an approach—a way or a style of doing something? Isn’t all testing exploratory? When do you do it? How do you do it properly? How does it relate to the entire software lifecycle? To answer these questions, Ingo Philipp outlines the most common confusions and controversies on this topic. He explains what exploratory...
Anyone Can Cook—Is the Same True for Test Automation?
Manual testing is becoming less needed as more companies realize the time and money to be saved by automating testing. But let’s face it. Test automation is scary and still new to many QA organizations, many of whom are unclear about where to begin. Do you need a degree or significant development training to write automated tests? What are the programming basics and required tools that a tester needs to know? Leo Laskin answers these questions with data on untrained Selenium and non-technical users and the time it took them to learn Selenium. Discover the programming basics needed to be...
The Future of Mobile Testing: Hybrid Code, Business Intelligence, and Device Farms
All organizations doing mobile development have critical decisions in common—selecting which devices to support and how to test their products across the growing range of devices. With the segregation of device brands, organizations are forced to support at least three code bases (Apple, Android, and Windows). This makes it three times more challenging for testing organizations to keep up with the minimum required testing efforts for their products. Ardy Signey says that test leadership has to look beyond conventional testing strategies and become more innovative. Companies that already...
Data Quality at the Speed of Work
VideoIn this fast-paced data-driven world, the fallout from a single data quality issue can cost thousands of dollars in a matter of hours. To catch these issues quickly, system monitoring for data quality requires a different set of strategies from other continuous regression efforts. Like a race car pit crew, you need detection mechanisms that not only don’t interfere with what you are monitoring but also allow for strategic analysis off-track. You need to use every second your subject is at rest to repair and clean up problems that could affect performance. As the systems in race...
Oil & Water, Peanut Butter & Jelly, DevOps & Regulatory Compliance
DevOps and regulatory compliance are two critically important ingredients in today’s connected organization. The first—DevOps—enables you to move quickly and respond to change in an era where change is increasing at an exponential rate with no sign of slowing down. The second—regulatory compliance—ensures that your organization takes the appropriate steps to follow relevant laws surrounding your software development lifecycle and appears to require adding burdensome processes and controls. At first glance, these two ideas seem to be incompatible, but they actually go together like peanut...
Is Testing Dead? It Was (for a while) at Our Organization
VideoWith all the hype about DevOps, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and lean startups, test engineers tend to be forgotten. The notion that testers are not needed anymore is, well, false. Testing is needed today more than ever since applications are more dynamic with more integration points, which increase code complexity and make it more difficult to release quality software. Matt Robbins shares an experience in his organization which resulted in the elimination of testers—at least for a time—and what he learned and did to stay relevant until the organization finally...
Building a Performance Test Capability from Scratch
Have you ever been dragged into a production emergency that severely drains deadlines, budgets, morale, and weekends only to find out—yet again—that the problem is related to application stability and performance under load? Building a culture that embraces proactive and well-planned performance testing is no small feat. Tom Poirier shares a journey that begins with clarifying enterprise performance requirements, performing competitive analysis, cost-justifying purchases, and closing the deal with senior management. Tom walks through practical challenges including technical difficulties,...
Test Automation at the Speed of Agile: Making It Work Every Build
Join Danny McKeown, Paychex’s lead test enterprise automation architect, to see how a small tools group supports nearly one-hundred agile teams as they move toward achieving continuous delivery. Take part in the conversation to understand how Paychex is progressing in the third year of its agile transformation. Danny describes how this IT-wide initiative has impacted how the tools group supports so many teams and changed its own practices to provide more timely support. With the goal of increasing velocity, a solid automation strategy has become a powerful enabler. Danny describes how...
Appium, Test-Driven Development, and Continuous Integration
VideoJames Koch demonstrates how to apply test-driven development and continuous integration using Appium, an industry leading open-source automation tool. Appium was inspired by Selenium for web browser testing. Their philosophy—Why do anything different for mobile? Appium allows you to run tests without having to add any third party framework or extension into your application, so you are testing the same application you are shipping! With faster release cycles, the need for quality testing is more necessary than ever. Tools like Appium leverage continuous integration and test-driven...
Test Data Management and Its Role in DevOps
VideoEstablishing Trust in a Blockchain Ecosystem
The challenge for test teams in organizations that want to use blockchain technologies is to not only test chaincode that manages the execution of transactions on their blockchain networks but also to test the provision and scalability of the blockchain networks themselves. James Hunter presents new approaches that are emerging to test blockchain technology, supply-chain business processes and transactions, and APIs from multiple perspectives; to simulate the behavior of consensus within a blockchain network; and to test integrations at scale without affecting the distributed ledger. James...
Testing in the New Digital World: Digital Assurance
The software landscape is evolving rapidly to deliver higher quality software at an ever greater pace. Testing must keep up, and that means moving away from a traditional core IT approach. Shifting to an adaptive IT model calls for new practices that encourage accelerated communication, collaboration, integration, measurement, and automation. Whether you label this digital transformation or not, understanding the details of the journey is an essential part of every organization's criteria in becoming a digital enterprise. Join Julie Gardiner and Jonathon Wright as they explore what digital...
Optimize Performance Testing Using Cloud and DevOps
VideoTraditional performance testing practices don't scale when you begin delivering software using cloud computing and DevOps. Troy Marshall shares how Ellucian transformed their performance testing program using the same principles DevOps uses to deliver software. It isn't enough just to automate the execution of performance tests. You must continually optimize every step—from building the performance test tool infrastructure, configuring test scripts and scenarios, collecting metrics, and reporting results. In addition, by using cloud computing to implement performance testing, you...
Be More Effective: Test Automation below the UI
To maintain optimal product quality of large-scale enterprise systems, the regression test suite usually increases in size over time. Whether using automated or manual regression, this brings an additional maintenance and infrastructure cost that tends to get way out of hand, often defeating the purpose of regression suites. Sharing a case study, Ashish Mehta and Sohail Farooqui provide insights into analyzing enterprise application defects with associated gaps in relevancy and effectiveness of an existing regression suite. Ashish and Sohail implemented an automated solution to test...
The Cloud’s Impact on Testing: Are You Ready?
Cloud computing continues to grow rapidly, and as everything moves to the cloud, testing must adapt and move to the cloud as well. The cloud enables building solutions that scale larger and faster than before—back when adding capacity in data centers took weeks or months. Now applications can be deployed to cloud servers not in days but minutes. The cloud enables new approaches that increase testing efficiency and quality while decreasing total testing time. Tom Chavez discusses the migration of applications to the cloud, and the new tools and services there—from web browser functional...
My Failures in Software Testing
In her more than thirty years in the IT industry, Isabel Evans says she has learned more from her failures than she has from her successes. Why is this? And what has she learned? That making mistakes is the way to learn, and that allowing yourself to be wrong allows you to grow. Join Isabel to enjoy her greatest failures, and learn not to make the same mistakes she has made. Recently, someone described Isabel as unusual in the technology industries as she is an “elderly woman,” so she has taken as her motto Bob Dylan’s line: “I was so much older then—I’m younger than that now.” Isabel...
Infrastructure Testing: The Ultimate “Shift Left”
VideoOrganizations worldwide are continually required to make significant investments in upgrading, re-engineering, and protecting their IT infrastructure. However, unlike application software development, many companies lack a structured quality assurance approach for infrastructure testing. Creating an infrastructure quality practice is an answer, but it's not without its challenges. However, if your company is interested in avoiding headline-grabbing outages, rooted in deployment problems with infrastructure—server, network, storage, middleware, telephony, hardware, IT security,...
Adapting Test Teams to Organizational Power Structures
Scapegoats, spin-doctors, white knights, and sycophants—have you found your test team playing these roles? Organizations, both large and small, often have distinct cultures and power structures with significant but insidious impact on how individual testers and teams are expected to operate. Sometimes the difference between doing what sponsors and stakeholders request and doing what is really needed becomes blurred. John Hazel helps you learn how to recognize the cultural characteristics of different types of software development teams, and how they drive expectations for the test team....
An Agile Testing Dashboard: Metrics that Matter
VideoHas your organization moved to agile but your metrics have not? Do you spend multiple hours each week generating separate sets of metrics for your agile squad, management, and C-level executives? Do you find yourself questioning the things you measure and actions you take as a result of those measurements? Prachi Maini introduces you to a set of lean but comprehensive metrics that show the efficiency and effectiveness of the squads, the primary activities of the squad, and that of the overall project. Learn the key evaluators for measuring quality of code, quality of quality...
Improving Accuracy and Confidence in Workload Models
The most critical component in capacity planning and performance engineering is the Workload Model, which defines the workflows, throughputs, and target performance your system must support at peak loads. As critical as it is, it can be difficult and particularly challenging to predict loads for new applications, features, or events. A typical approach starts with a wild-guess worst-case scenario—but overestimates waste time and money, and force you to engineer applications and infrastructure to support unrealistic loads. Low estimates can result in terrible customer experiences, lost...
Continuous Testing of Cloud Applications
With most organizations now using agile software development methodologies, the software development focus has changed to deliver faster releases—and this affects the way we test within the sprint. We largely develop applications using cloud and mobile technologies with short release cycles. Our challenges include frequent changes in requirements, the addition of incremental features to the product, and release at any point of time. Ganesh Iyer has found that continuous testing can seamlessly address most of these challenges. Continuous testing is the ability to run tests continuously in a...
Communication and Testing: Why You Have Been Wrong All Along!
You ran all the tests you planned for your team, you reported all the bugs with clear and to the point descriptions, and you sent a weekly email with a professional PowerPoint presentation including graphs and statistics pointing out the risk areas and project issues. However, you still feel the organization is not taking your testing seriously, management is unaware of what your team is achieving—and apparently no one is actually reading your reports. Sound familiar? Everyone else is not the problem; the way you are communicating your testing information is! Join Joel Montvelisky to...
Use Layered Model-Based Requirements to Achieve Continuous Testing
Requirements, test cases, and test data are still generally designed and created the same way they have been for the past thirty years—despite the evolution of testing techniques and tools. Requirements are still specified through written natural language, which leads to ambiguity and poor testability. Test cases are manually designed and are built on incomplete requirements. Test automation requires a human being to first manually create the automation scripts, which then have to be manually maintained sprint after sprint. Alex Martins shares how he helps organizations truly shift-left by...