STAREAST 2017 Focus - Process & Metrics | TechWell

Conference archive

STAREAST 2017 - Process & Metrics

Monday, May 8

Tariq_King
Ultimate Software
MN

White Box Testing: What Every Tester Should Know

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Monday, May 8, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Do you want to take your testing skills to the next level? Are you trying to stay relevant on an agile team where testing is shifting to the left of the project timeline? Do you want to help your organization reap the full benefits of testing earlier? Join Tariq King as he explores the fundamentals of white box testing so can you find bugs as soon as they happen and do more thorough, targeted testing during software development. Learn how to apply white box testing techniques such as testing by looking, automated unit testing, mocking, and code coverage analysis. This introductory session...

Tuesday, May 9

Mike_Sowers
TechWell Corp.
TN

Measurement and Metrics for Test Managers

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Tuesday, May 9, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Wednesday, May 10

Sally Goble
The Guardian
K2

What Really Happens When You Deliver Software Quickly

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Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

The current trend in testing is to move away from traditional manual testing and toward test automation. To keep up with the rapid pace of continuous delivery today, test teams are urgently reskilling and reshaping themselves. Sally Goble shares her experience of what happened to the test team at the Guardian when the engineering team began the process of delivering software fast and at will—deploying software up to 400 times a day. Sally shares why her team reevaluated the role of testing in the software development cycle, what prompted the Guardian’s controversial decision to...

Shyam_Sunder
Sidra Medical and Research Center
W7

Effective Test Estimation

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Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - 1:45pm to 2:45pm

We 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...

Mary_Thorn
Ipreo
W10

Agile Testing at Scale

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Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - 1:45pm to 2:45pm

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...

Jeroen Mengerink
Polteq Testing Services B.V.
W12

Continuous Context Driven Test Improvement

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Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - 1:45pm to 2:45pm

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...

Kevin_Dunne
QASymphony
W13

Software Quality: A Cross-Organizational Competency

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Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Tariq_King
Ultimate Software
W14

Microservices Testing Strategies: The Good, the Bad, and the Reality

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Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Lee Copeland
TechWell Corp.
K3

Lightning Strikes the Keynotes

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Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

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 11

Jane_Jeffers
Riot Games, Inc.
T1

Owning Quality: The Culture of Empowerment at Riot Games

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Thursday, May 11, 2017 - 9:45am to 10:45am

At 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...

Brandon Carlson
Lean TECHniques, Inc.
T6

Oil & Water, Peanut Butter & Jelly, DevOps & Regulatory Compliance

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Thursday, May 11, 2017 - 9:45am to 10:45am

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...

Carl_Delmolino
Travelers Insurance
Infosys Ltd.
T18

Infrastructure Testing: The Ultimate “Shift Left”

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Thursday, May 11, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Organizations 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,...

John Hazel
Nokia
T19

Adapting Test Teams to Organizational Power Structures

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Thursday, May 11, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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....

 Prachi Maini
Morningstar
T20

An Agile Testing Dashboard: Metrics that Matter

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Thursday, May 11, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Has 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...

Gopal_Brugalette
Concur Technologies
Safi_Mohamed
J.C. Penney
T21

Improving Accuracy and Confidence in Workload Models

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Thursday, May 11, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Joel Montvelisky
PractiTest
T23

Communication and Testing: Why You Have Been Wrong All Along!

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Thursday, May 11, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Randy Rice
Rice Consulting Services, Inc.
K5

Navigating the Nuances of Detailed Test Strategy Creation

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Thursday, May 11, 2017 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

Software testers face a major challenge when designing test strategies and their related tests that effectively find software failures. With many techniques available, it is sometimes difficult to immediately apply them to real-life situations. What initially seems like a straightforward effort often turns into something resembling a winding road with no end. A test strategy may seem good at first, but once the testing begins, it may fail. Randy Rice believes there are ways to define a workable and flexible test strategy that will lead to tests that are creative and effective. Test...