STAREAST 2017 - Test Automation
Sunday, May 7
Mastering HP LoadRunner® for Performance Testing (2–Day)
Fundamentals of Agile Certification—ICAgile (2–Day)
Fundamentals of DevOps Certification—ICAgile (2-Day)
Real-World Software Testing with Microsoft Visual Studio® (3–Day)
Monday, May 8
Implement BDD with Cucumber and SpecFlow
NewWe’ve all been there. We work incredibly hard to develop a feature and design tests based on written requirements. We build a detailed test plan that aligns the tests with the software and the documented business needs. And when we put the tests to the software, it all falls apart because the requirements were changed without informing everyone. But Mary Thorn says help is at hand. Enter behavior-driven development (BDD) and Cucumber and SpecFlow, two tools for running automated acceptance tests and facilitating BDD. Mary explores the nuances of Cucumber and SpecFlow, and shows you how to...
Building Your Mobile App Quality and Test Strategy
Let’s build a mobile app quality and testing strategy together. Whether you have a web, hybrid, or native app, building a quality and testing strategy means (1) knowing what data and tools you have available to make agile decisions, (2) understanding your customers and your competitors, and (3) testing your app under real-world conditions. Jason Arbon guides you through the latest techniques, data, and tools to ensure your mobile app quality and testing strategy is awesome. Leave this interactive session with a strategy for your very own app—or one you pretend to own. The information Jason...
Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle
VideoIn test automation, we must often use several tools that have been developed or acquired over time with little consideration of an overall plan or architecture and no consideration for how to integrate those tools. As a result, productivity suffers and frustrations increase. Join Mike Sowers as he shares experiences from multiple organizations in creating an integrated test automation plan and developing a test automation architecture. Mike discusses both the good (engaging the technical architecture team) and the bad (too much isolation between test automators and test designers)...
BIG Testing: The Five Keys to Test Automation at Scale
Video NewTest automation has become a must, especially in agile and DevOps projects with their goals of continuous integration and fast deployment. We know that test automation is a deciding factor in achieving competitive strength, as it contributes to faster time-to-market and higher quality-to-market in software delivery. Even though powerful automation technologies like Selenium are available, they alone do not give you scalability in testing big and complex systems with their many components, workflows, and configurations. To help you learn how to achieve scalability in automated...
Test Automation Strategies for the Agile World
Sold Out!With the adoption of agile practices in many organizations, the test automation landscape has changed. Bob Galen explores current disruptors to traditional automation strategies and discusses relevant and current adjustments you need to make when developing your automation business case. Open source tools are becoming incredibly viable and often best their commercial equivalents in many ways―not only in cost but also in functionality, creativity, evolutionary speed, and developer acceptance. Agile methods have fundamentally challenged our traditional automation strategies. Now we must keep...
Testing Cloud Services
VideoCloud 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, Jeroen Mengerink focus on testing SaaS systems, linking relevant IaaS and PaaS capabilities along the way. He will discuss how to test...
Technical Test Automation Challenges: Patterns and Solutions
VideoNote: We will be working online with the wiki during this tutorial, so please bring a laptop, tablet, or similar web-enabled device.
Many organizations find that test automation does not work as well as they thought it would. In many cases, these failures are due to generic technical reasons, which can be fixed relatively easily. Solutions that have worked well for others are patterns; these test automation patterns are common to automation efforts at any level with whatever tools you are using. Dot Graham focuses on often-neglected technical issues—i.e., non-management issues—and...
Tuesday, May 9
Selenium Test Automation: From the Ground Up
Selenium expertise, the industry-standard tool for testing web applications, is a much sought after skill in today’s world of test automation. Many believe it is a must-have tool for test engineers. If you want to learn Selenium, then this tutorial is a great start. Cheezy Morgan shows you how to build test automation using Selenium. But he doesn’t stop there. He uses his years of experience to show you how to build automation that is clean and easy to maintain. Cheezy introduces other tools that work with Selenium to help manage the data used to drive your tests, work with JavaScript...
The Impact of IoT on Testing: What’s in Store
NewNo longer just a futuristic concept, the Internet of Things (IoT) has a strong presence in our world even today. If your business is not prepared for it, you’re already behind. With the proliferation of connected “things”—devices, appliances, cars, and even clothes—Jennifer Bonine says that the stage is set. IoT apps are here to stay. Testing, product management, and development teams must address developing and testing in this paradigm. Testers, accustomed to traditional platforms, are now asked to test on more complex devices and more advanced platforms. Testers must keep up with the...
Agile Testing: Team Tactics that Deliver the Goods
Video Sold Out!Let’s face it—agile testing is different. Challenges exist in successfully integrating within the teams themselves. Scrummerfall continues to run rampant. The dichotomy of testing v. quality and balancing both the team’s and your focus still exists. Delivering value is both an imperative and a challenge. In this dynamic workshop, join agile coaches Mary Thorn and Bob Galen to explore the tools, techniques, and mindset you need to bring to the table to successfully test in agile contexts. Mary and Bob examine risk-based testing, iterative test planning, exploratory testing, agile...
System-Level Test Automation: Ensuring a Good Start
Video NewMany organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems later on. As a manager, how can you ensure that your new automation efforts will get off to a good start? What can you do to ensure that your automation work provides continuing value? Dot Graham describes the most important management issues you must address for test automation success, particularly when you are new to automation. Dot helps you understand and choose the best approaches for your organization—no matter which automation tools you use. Focusing on system...
Agile Test Team Leadership: From Concept to Product
Sold Out!Today, many agile organizations are making a terrible error. They are assuming there is no place for test management and leadership in agile, self-directed team contexts. We beg to differ with this view and believe a strong need exists for testing leadership in agile organizations—just not the way we’ve typically approached it. Join Mary Thorn and Bob Galen as they explore what excellent test team leadership looks like in agile contexts. Explore the aspects of self-directed teams and the implications to your previous leadership styles. Look under the covers of Scrum and see where you...
Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps
Sold Out!In many organizations, agile development processes are driving the pursuit of faster software releases, which has spawned a set of new practices called DevOps. DevOps stresses communications and integration between development and operations, including rapid deployment, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Because DevOps practices require confidence that changes made to the code base will function as expected, automated testing is essential. Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the unique challenges associated with integrating automated testing into continuous integration/...
Human Factors for Test Automation: How People Affect Project Success
Video NewSuccessful test automation is not just about selecting and implementing tools and a technical infrastructure. People in teams make the changes that are required. People ensure the success or failure of the automation project. Understanding and managing expectations, attitudes toward change, teamwork, motivation, and communication are all vital if automation projects are to succeed. Isabel Evans identifies and discusses human factors around automation, teamwork, and human behavior to enable you to understand resistance to change, overcome mistrust of automation, and moderate...
Wednesday, May 10
What Really Happens When You Deliver Software Quickly
VideoThe 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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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
VideoOptimize 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...
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...
Navigating the Nuances of Detailed Test Strategy Creation
VideoSoftware 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...