STAREAST 2017 - Special Topics
Wednesday, May 10
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...
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...
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
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...
Establishing 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...
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,...
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...