STAREAST 2017 - Test Management
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....