STAREAST 2017 - Project Manager

We’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...

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...

Test 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...

As test managers and test professionals, we're constantly dealing with fragile egos, highly-charged situations, and pressured people playing a high-stakes game under conditions of massive uncertainty. We're often the bearers of bad news and are sometimes perceived as critics, activating people's primal fear of being judged. The concept of emotional intelligence (EI), popularized by Harvard psychologist and science writer Daniel Goleman, has much to offer test managers and testers. Key EI skills include self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Julie...

Many 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...

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/...

Testers often participate in requirement reviews, review requirements for testability, and then use requirements—in the form of user stories—as the basis of test cases. In an agile environment, most testers contribute to the development of user stories and acceptance criteria. Erik van Veenendaal says that unfortunately many testers have little knowledge or skill in requirements engineering. What level of quality and detail is realistic to expect for requirements and user stories? What does testability really mean? How can testers help improve requirements? Erik illustrates...

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...

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...

Unrestrained 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....

Enterprises 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

James 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...

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...

Traditional 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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...