STAREAST 2018 - Concurrent Sessions
Concurrent sessions offer attendees the flexibility to follow a specific track or to explore various topics throughout the conference in order to customize their learning experience. Learn both enterprise foundations and new methodologies to grow your skills, supercharge your knowledge, and re-energize your career growth.
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Wednesday, May 2
IT Poetry: Distilled Learning from Our Experiences
What Sue Uyetake calls IT Poetry—or distilled learning—is a great communications approach. A way of distilling “What Is” statements as a troubleshooting tool and a way to lighten the moment, IT Poetry has resonated with Sue and her teams. See how you can use IT Poetry to diffuse charged situations with no blame attached, get to the root cause of issues in a retrospective, or help resolve many of the little problems that crop up and can ruin your day. Join Sue as she sheds a new light on some highly charged and negative workplace situations. With examples from her own experience and those...
Migrating from Test Cases to Real-World Telemetry Measures
Ken Johnston sees today’s software ecosystem in the light of Everything as a Service (EaaS). Operating systems like Windows, Android, and Chrome OS all ship regularly like a service. Browsers automatically update every few weeks, and apps are constantly updating through all the app stores. Although getting a test to pass once and signing off has gone by the wayside for software testing, still we run test cases over and over again. Ken shares how Microsoft took millions of test cases—yes, actually millions—and turned the important ones into measures based on real world telemetry. Massive...
Automated Testing: Beyond the Basics
PreviewYou've been through some initial test automation training or bootstrapping, and now, a few months down the road, you find you’re spending a lot of time chasing intermittent test failures and maintaining your codebase. You're frustrated and losing trust in the automated tests. Sound familiar? Jim Holmes helps you find approaches that may save your sanity—all based on his years of experience and hard knocks. Beyond the test automation basics like waits, find logic, or basic page objects, Jim takes a dive into more advanced test automation approaches and methods—custom-designed APIs,...
AI-Driven Testing as a Service: Fad, Fiction, or Future?
Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are leading to a new generation of software, which is becoming self-adaptive, autonomous, and smart. Academic researchers and industry practitioners are investigating how these new AI and ML technologies can be leveraged to improve software testing and testing services. A handful of testing-as-a-service (TaaS) vendors already offer services that use AI bots to perform some functional and performance testing. How well do they live up to their claims? Can they be used as an effective substitute or supplement for human testers...
Thirteen Patterns of Testers Thriving in Agile Teams
PreviewFor many, testing in agile teams remains one of the great mysteries of the agile world. In some organizations, testers are marginalized; in others, testers are active, engaged, and highly valued. So, what’s up? In this interactive session, Shaun Bradshaw explores the mindset and practices of “fully empowered” agile testers on high-performance agile teams. Throughout his agile coaching experience, Shaun has seen it all—from totally dysfunctional teams to those running like well-oiled machines … and everything in between. He’ll share real-world tactics to help you guide your team...
Automated Security Scanning for Your Delivery Pipeline
PreviewAgile development and DevOps depend on an automated pipeline to build, test, and deploy code quickly. Security is all too often viewed as a manual task that is too difficult to automate and something to be left for later—not a good decision! Matt Grasberger says that, by leveraging automated security scans with open source scanners, you can reduce the risk of security vulnerabilities, get the most out of your pipeline, and increase software quality. Matt thoroughly explains and demonstrates several ways to implement automated security scans. Discover how to quickly test endpoints...
Make Your Team Awesome—Yes, You Can!
The key to creating high-performing teams is psychological safety—the ability to be vulnerable in front of others even when they hold diverse viewpoints, and the opportunity to take risks and trust that everything will be OK. However, creating this safety is easier said than done. Maaret Pyhäjärvi shares her story of working with software development and test teams to enable them to be awesome. She explains how to reinforce the positive while enabling great software product development by empowering others in your team. Maaret explores how to be brave when others are not, and how to care...
Mindmapping: A General Purpose (Test) Planning Tool
MindMapping is a general technique of organizing your thoughts, aligning your ideas, and breaking things down. It’s uses are, in fact, mind blowing. But in this session, join Bob Galen, as he takes you on a visual tour of mindmapping as applied in the software testing space. We’ll be using a free tool and be creating maps to illustrate test case design, test idea generation, sprint-level test planning, and release-level test planning using mindmaps. Along the way, you’ll also gain some new insights into risk-based testing with an agile twist, as we explore the 3-Amigos metaphor. You’ll...
Continuous Testing vs. Test Automation: Three Key Differences
The past few years have brought a sea change in the way applications are architected, developed, and consumed—increasing both the complexity of testing and the risk of software failures. Given the trends that impact both architectures (cloud, microservices, and APIs) and processes (DevOps, agile, and continuous delivery), how can software testing keep pace with modern application delivery? Enter continuous testing. Wayne Ariola explores the three main differences between continuous testing and test automation. He explores why and where traditional test automation falls short in today’s...
Machine Learning Heralds the End of Selenium
PreviewSelenium has been the cure for free and low-cost browser testing for years, and—in the world of agile, mobile, DevOps, and browserless interfaces—it is showing its age. Comparing Selenium to what’s coming, Jason Arbon says that machine learning and data analytics will become the new standard for test automation. With Selenium, test engineers suffer from the pains of broken element identification; broken, buggy, and partially implemented mobiletest capabilities; exploding costs of building abstraction layers on their apps; brittle test code when the application under test changes;...
Agile Testing in Large Scale Organizations
Mary Thorn has had the opportunity in the past twenty years 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 where 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...
Elegant Test Weapons for a More Civilized Age
PreviewSoftware Engineering as a discipline is always evolving. The technologies and tools that were in vogue yesterday are passé today and gone altogether tomorrow. Despite this high churn, there are a number of skills that software testers, in particular, possess that are eternally useful. They cut across time and tools and even job titles. Melissa will help software testers look past technologies and titles to explore the skills that they may already possess that are in high demand. She will explain some of the hottest job titles and technologies in the market today, and go in-depth...
Building a Modern DevOps Enterprise Testing Organization
The DevOps movement is front and center across enterprises. Companies with mature systems are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams and departments. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, development organizations have been filled with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. Adam Auerbach says this has to change. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and...
The Four Cs and One T of Requirements “Testing”
PreviewIt is important to know that written requirements are good, but few employ a practical, repeatable approach for “testing” their requirements. Evgeny Tkachenko says his company has introduced a requirements analysis step which is done before coding of functionality begins. Checking for requirements completeness, clearness, correctness, consistency, and testability helps ensure that developers create the right features the first time. To demonstrate this process, Evgeny presents examples of buggy requirements and plays games with participants who solve logic puzzles to practice...
Selenium Hacks: Improving Your Skills
PreviewAlthough Selenium has become the open source standard for simulating user interactions with the browser, Andrew Krug likes to think of it as more than one tool in your toolbelt. Andrew says Selenium is like the Craftsman Bolt-On tool—with one battery and one grip, it can become a circular saw, drill, jig saw, or even a tire inflator. He’ll cover thirty or more Selenium hacks in this fast-paced session. Find out how you can employ Selenium for security testing, visual testing, email testing, easy content testing, performance testing, load testing … you get the drift. Briefly...
Machine Learning and Data Science for Quality and Performance Engineering
PreviewManaging the quality and performance of complex systems requires more than simply executing test cases and running load tests. You need to perform careful analysis of test results and production metrics. The sheer amount of data generated in production and testing makes analysis a huge challenge that is often left wanting. With the magic of machine learning (ML) and the application of data science techniques, you have the opportunity to derive valuable and actionable information from big data. Gopal Brugalette shares the basic concepts behind ML, covering clustering, classification...
Test Management in Agile—What Happened to All My Testers?
Substantial confusion exists about the roles and responsibilities of test management when using an agile software development process. Agile seeks to streamline project management and leadership under the role of a ScrumMaster. But what does this mean for test managers? How do they stay involved in the process? What role do they fill? Is it possible that test managers are no longer needed? Join Jeffery Payne for a collaborative dialog to discuss the pros and cons of a variety of test management models he has seen used by companies who have adopted agile. Learn how to best position yourself...
How to Test Serverless Cloud Applications
Cloud providers are now offering serverless technology, introducing significant changes to how applications are structured and, importantly, tested. The serverless cloud makes certain parts of testing serverless applications opaque. Glenn Buckholz explains the boundaries of each cloud provider’s black box service to expose what can and cannot be tested ahead of time, and what can be evaluated locally and what requires the cloud provider’s platform. Join Glenn as he focuses on answering key testing questions for serverless cloud applications: How and where do I do unit testing? What...
Thursday, May 3
Leave Behind Us vs. Them: Transforming a Product Team
PreviewFor most of his career in test/QA, Jason Wick found the prevailing sentiment to be us vs. them—testers vs. developers or the project team vs. the business. And this mindset does not work on a cross-functional product team where everyone must share goals and be willing to put the team goals ahead of all other agendas. During his past year of leading a product delivery team, Jason Wick has discovered that establishing this team goals mindset is no easy task. However, with hard work—and, yes, some setbacks—his team members have indeed transformed from a group of people doing work into...
Machine Data Is Everywhere: Use It for Testing!
As more applications are hosted on servers, they produce immense quantities of logging data. Quality engineers should verify that apps are producing log data that is existent, correct, consumable, and complete. Otherwise, apps in production are not easily monitored, have issues that are difficult to detect, and cannot be corrected quickly. Tom Chavez presents the four steps that quality engineers should include in every test plan for apps that produce log output or other machine data. First, test that the data is being created. Second, ensure that the entries are correctly formatted and...
DevOps Tools for Winning Agility
With a myriad of tools to choose from—open source, free, paid, and enterprise level—teams and organizations have seemingly endless options. Making the right tool decisions can impact the level of quality and success within DevOps projects. Kellyn Pot'Vin-Gorman discusses different tools, what tools work best together, and how—even in teams that are in silos—the right choices can make the difference between success and failure in DevOps implementations. Explore tools—such as Ansible, Jenkins, Maven, Delphix, Github, Liquibase, and Terraform—for automating builds and virtualization. Review...
Balancing Tech Know-How with Social Skills
PreviewEven today, communication breakdowns are a primary cause of software project failures. Marcia Buzzella’s research shows that increasing the success rate of projects across agile, DevOps, and waterfall methods requires a balance of social and technical capabilities. Social interactions enable us to assess situations and course correct in ways machines cannot. By strengthening your individual social capabilities (i.e., improving communication techniques and building supportive relationships), you can help transform how testing activities are perceived and help stakeholders understand...
Automated Testing for New-Gen Digital Interactions: Chatbots, Alexa, and Siri
PreviewToday’s IT systems communicate with customers through multiple points of engagement and various interfaces, ranging from web, mobile, and voice to BOTs and apps like Alexa and Siri. Sanil Pillai says these systems need to provide seamless handoffs between different points of interaction—while at the same time providing relevant and contextual information quickly. To accomplish this, a team must be able to successfully pair device hardware capabilities and intelligent software technologies such as location intelligence, biometric sensing, and Bluetooth. Testing these systems and...
Exploratory Testing: Learn to Do It like a Bloodhound
PreviewLet’s face it—dogs are born to sniff everything. Using their noses, they gather information from other dogs, people, and most everything. We teach dogs to use their noses to find bombs, predict seizures, locate cancer cells, detect drugs, and so much more. When dogs smell, they are not just recording an odor; they get an entire story. Although testers have fewer scent receptors than dogs, Susan Zampino says that we can learn how to gather information like a dog to drive our exploratory testing. Using active audience participation, Susan will stimulate participants to rely on their...
Testing in a Microservices and Continuous Delivery Environment
PreviewThe combination of microservice architectures and continuous delivery (CD) create a difficult scenario for integration and release testing. Even though microservices often introduce a huge number of integrations and transitive dependencies, testing still must be completed quickly to keep the pipeline flowing smoothly. Robert Williams surveys the techniques and tools available today for testing one or more microservices against a mix of real and virtualized dependencies in various stages of the CD pipeline. He explores structured testing around multiple versions of those services...
Use Path Analysis in Test Design for Better, Faster Testing
No question about it … software is highly complex maze, and it could take many lifetimes to manually test all the paths in a typical business app. Automation doesn’t help much because it’s not smart enough (yet) to design tests. Rob Sabourin shares his experiences testing complex application—some with more possible paths than particles of matter in the visible universe. Although programmers have applied path analysis to structural unit tests for years, path analysis has been mostly neglected in areas of end-to-end testing, workflow, process flow, usage scenarios, data flow, and system...
Not Your Parents’ Test Automation: Application of Non-Traditional Automation
Most software organizations have a test automation initiative—some just beginning and others humming right along. Typically, these initiatives focus on traditional automation—using a software package to automate test cases or user stories. However, if you use only the traditional approaches to automation, you will miss opportunities to exploit the complete powers of automation. Paul Grizzaffi shares real-world examples where non-traditional automation or “automation assist” approaches, including high volume automated testing, have provided high business value testing in his company. He...
Devices and Desires: How Do Humans Experience Software?
We consume and still we desire more—more devices, more apps, more data, more bandwidth, more connectivity. The more we have, the more we want. We assume that to be true—those of us who work in the software industry. But is that true? To understand what is really required of our products, we need to design and test a pyramid of interlocking quality attributes that, together, make for an optimum experience. Isabel Evans discusses why and how we can evaluate UX and what is takes to deliver better UX to our customers. Isabel looks at the needs of the individual software user in conjunction...
Integration and Functional Testing Using Dockerized Dependencies
PreviewTo emulate production-like conditions that cannot be tested on the unit level, many integration and functional tests need a realistic environment. However, performing these tests in a production-like environment is fraught with problems—test data management issues, tests that are difficult to execute repeatedly, and network traffic that causes long-running test execution times. Instead of having to deal with these problems and others, Irene Dhong employs Docker to simulate dependencies. Learn how you can take advantage of Dockerized dependencies for quick test writing, reusability...
Five Things We’ve Learned from 100,000 Bug Fixes
PreviewSince co-founding Testlio four years ago, Kristel Kruustük and her team of testers worldwide have worked with QA leaders and engineers at some of the world’s most innovative companies, including Lyft, Salesforce, Hotels.com, and Microsoft. During that time testers working with her testing-as-a-service company have identified 100,000 bugs and counting. Along the way, Kristel has learned there are five key traits and skills that make testers and test leaders great. In this eye-opening session, she talks about the tester’s mindset—curious, open, tenacious, and more—and how you can...
Release Automation: Yes, Testers Should Care
PreviewAgile DevOps focuses on moving changes through the pipeline as quickly as possible, which means that more operational tasks—like software deployment—will occur earlier. As a result, testing teams will begin assuming more responsibility in managing those deployments in order to perfect reputability. Tracy Ragan provides an overview of release automation as it relates to testing and explains how automation is key to achieving faster and leaner testing cycles. She discusses why deploying new code across diverse environments can be really tricky and slow, and how properly implemented...
Testing Digital Interfaces: Chatbots, Home Assistants, Touch ID, Facial Recognition, and More
PreviewIt seems almost everyday we see a product announced with a clever, new digital interface—and the rush has only just begun. From chatbots and motion sensors to facial recognition and voice integrations, these digital interfaces have a complex software side. Amir Rozenberg discusses the challenges we face now and explores a more challenging future to come for testers and testing. With concrete examples from the market, he offers new approaches for you to embed quality and test activities into the development cycle to tame the digital interface beast. With Amir, you’ll look at ways to...
Manual Testers Can Thrive in a Test Automation World
PreviewAs technology organizations seek to automate more testing, manual software testers may feel that they have little or no role in test automation. And QA managers struggle with how to engage their manual testers on automation projects. Jeanne Schmidt provides tips on how manual testers can become the testing guides for the whole team. They can assess tests are appropriate to automate, create comprehensive and safe test data, report automated test results, and lead the automation test process strategy. Jeanne offers practical guidelines on how testers can learn test automation...
Embedding Performance Engineering into the CI/CD Pipeline
PreviewA difficult challenge organizations face when adopting continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) is ensuring that every build has been evaluated for performance. Although most organizations do performance testing, how they do it and when they do it define their readiness for deploying in fast-paced environments. Anjeneya Dubey’s team faced similar challenges and found ways to embed performance engineering as part of their CD pipeline. To achieve this objective, they made changes to processes, technologies, and culture. They added non-functional requirements to “normal”...
AR and VR for Mobile Apps: Are You Ready to Test?
PreviewAugmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) mobile apps are going to dominate the technical landscape for the next few years. Compared to current mobile apps, testing this new AR and VR technology will require more preparation, more effort, and new tools. BJ Aberle breaks down the methods and tools he uses to test AR and VR applications. Explore test environment requirements and discover the types of test data you’ll need to prepare for AR and VR testing. Learn about Google’s Tango AR platform and BJ’s experiences testing AR apps, including the Tango-based Cydalion app for the...
What's an API and How Do I Test It?
API-based applications have become ubiquitous in the past few years. Yet many of us still really don't know what an API is from the inside out. Moreover, many of us don't know much about how to comprehensively test them! Join Paul Merrill to learn what everyone is doing and talking about related to APIs: microservices, REST, endpoints, requests, request methods, and responses. Paul demonstrates four free tools you can use to directly interact with a simple API: curl, the browser, Postman, and Java (with Rest Assured). Learn techniques for testing APIs at the service level and how to test...
Make the Shift to Quality Engineering
In the shift toward “continuous everything” in software development and delivery, we know that testing and testers must foster and support innovation within technology. Many of us just don’t know how to gauge that shift or, more importantly, know what needs to happen within our role to make it happen. Melissa Tondi explores the future of testing, what skills we should have/develop to ensure we are prepared for that future, and the traits of a quality engineer (QE)—where she believes many tester roles are shifting. Melissa walks you through what an innovation-oriented QE organization looks...
Influencing Stakeholders Using Fact-based Information
With all the open source tools available on the market it can be overwhelming as to which ones might meet your needs and which ones will work best in your environment to create a high performing team and metrics dashboard. Join Jennifer as she explains the relationship of data, your environment, and how a hub and spoke model can link all your different data sets and tools together. She identifies opportunities for applying test data analytics across the engineering and test landscape, ranging from high-value test cases to dynamically generated regression test suites. She will review ways...
Behavior-Driven Development: Real-World Mind Reading
Imagine this scenario: Business users are excited to finally get their hands on an implementation delivery that is on schedule, (mostly) on budget, and passed rigorous testing with flying colors. Unfortunately, when working with the new app or feature, the users realize that the way they described their needs didn’t translate into what they actually needed. Sound familiar? While she may not be able to offer telekinetic mind-reading tools, Kim Tatum is convinced that leveraging a behavior-driven development (BDD) approach helps bridge the gap between domain experts and technical teams. Join...
Open Source Tools for Performance Testing and Monitoring
Are you finding it hard to make time for performance testing? Does your code end up shipping to production with little or no performance validation due to the lack of tools or expertise? Do you often wonder what system performance looks like in production to end users? Whether you are a test engineer, developer, or seasoned performance tester who has used traditional tools like LoadRunner, there are times when you need to get a quick read on the performance characteristics of your system and determine if there are any regressions. Join Kaushal Dalvi as he shares tips, tricks, and...
The Appium Framework: Create and Implement Your Mobile Testing Strategy
The trend in mobile apps today is who can deliver the best and the most new apps as quickly as possible to keep up with the competition. With this, the need for more and better testing seems to grow exponentially. Open source Appium is a unique mobile app testing framework that allows you to write a single test which executes for native or hybrid apps on different operating systems running simulators/emulators and real devices in parallel. Harry Roberts describes how to create and implement a successful mobile testing strategy using Appium across Android and iOS devices. After discussing...
API Testing: How to Write Tests, Integrate into CI, and Track What You're Testing
PreviewSome developers and testers think that APIs, whether internally developed or not, should just work. Unfortunately, without a significant amount of focus on testing API services, one little flaw can spell disaster for your application—especially security vulnerabilities where hackers will target your application. Elise Carmichael discusses the risks of not fully testing APIs, how to be sure that all services are tested fully, and the types of negative testing you need to do on APIs. She shows you a method to organize your tests using Postman, a tool for REST web services testing....