STAREAST 2018 - Exploratory Testing
Sunday, April 29
Foundations of DevOps—ICAgile Certification (2-Day)
Agile Tester Certification (2-Day)
Monday, April 30
Critical Thinking for Software Testers
Critical thinking is the kind of thinking that specifically looks for problems and mistakes. Regular people don't do a lot of it. However, if you want to be a great tester, you need to be a great critical thinker. Critically-thinking testers save projects from dangerous assumptions and ultimately from disasters. The good news is that critical thinking is not just innate intelligence or a talent—it's a learnable and improvable skill you can master. Michael Bolton shares the specific techniques and heuristics of critical thinking and presents realistic testing puzzles that help you practice...
Agile Testing: Team Tactics that Deliver the Goods
PreviewLet’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 vs. 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 must bring to the table to successfully test in agile contexts. Mary and Bob examine risk-based testing, iterative test planning, exploratory testing, agile...
Exploratory Testing: New Skills for Learning and Discovery
NewThe skill to self-manage our testing work and our learning—making learning and discovery a habit—is what differentiates skilled exploratory testing from simply putting random testing activities together. Maaret Pyhäjärvi says that exploratory testing treats test design, test execution, and learning as parallel, mutually supportive activities—with the goal of discovering things that we don’t realize we don’t know. Exploratory testing frames our thinking about the system and engulfs the idea of creating artifacts to support testing. Join Maaret to experience exploratory testing hands-on and...
Unit Testing: What Every Developer and Tester Should Know
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 on the project timeline? Do you want to help your organization reap the full benefits of testing earlier? Then join Tariq King to explore the fundamentals of unit testing so you can find bugs as soon as they happen and do more thorough, targeted testing during software development. This introductory session is for everyone—of all programming skill levels. Learn how to apply program-based techniques such as testing by looking, automated unit...
Tuesday, May 1
A Rapid Introduction to Rapid Software Testing
You're under tight time pressure with barely enough information to proceed with testing. How do you test quickly and inexpensively—yet still produce informative, credible, and accountable results? Rapid Software Testing, adopted by context-driven testers worldwide, offers a field-proven answer to this all-too-common dilemma. In this one-day sampler of the approach, Michael Bolton introduces you to the skills and practice of Rapid Software Testing through stories, discussions, and “minds-on” exercises that simulate important aspects of real testing problems. The rapid approach isn't just...
Technical Test Automation Challenges: Patterns and Solutions
PreviewMany 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 with relative ease. Other solutions that have worked well are patterns, 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 the patterns that help solve them. These are not development or code patterns—this is a code-free tutorial. Using a set of patterns developed with Seretta Gamba, Dot looks...
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Skills for the Testing World
NewSoftware continues to revolutionize the world—impacting nearly every aspect of our work, family, and personal life. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are playing key roles in this revolution through improvements in search results, recommendations, forecasts, and other predictions. AI and ML technologies are being used in platforms for digital assistants, home entertainment and automation, medical diagnosis, customer support, and autonomous vehicles. Testing practitioners are recognizing the potential for advances in AI and ML to be leveraged for automated testing—an...
Data Analytics and Machine Learning
NewDo you have access to lots and lots of test, development, app, and service data—really big data—from client and cloud service log files, test execution results, and more? Then, you have a great opportunity to begin using data analytics and machine learning (ML) to gain new product quality insights. Bring your laptops and your sense of discovery as Ken Johnston and Eun Change introduce analysis techniques and ML tools to help you develop new and potentially groundbreaking insights. First, they present a fast-paced statistics primer for those with no prior data exploration experience and...
How to Break Software: Robustness Edition
Have you ever worked on a project where you felt testing was thorough and complete—all features were covered and all tests passed—yet in the first week in production the software had serious issues and problems? Join Dawn Haynes to learn how to inject robustness testing into your projects to uncover those issues before release. Robustness—an important and often overlooked area of testing—is the degree to which a system operates correctly in the presence of exceptional inputs or stressful environmental conditions. Dawn shows you how—by expanding basic tests and incorporating specific...
Better Test Design for Great Test Automation and DevOps
Test automation is an essential element in agile and DevOps processes. Your test designs can make or break automation efforts throughout the entire CI/CD pipeline. Automation must find problems in a build, run without a hitch, and be easily maintained. If tests are badly structured and unnecessarily detailed, an automation engineer will have a hard time automating them—even with great tools. Hans Buwalda explores how testers (both technical and non-technical) can design or restructure tests to make them suitable for automation. These tests will be able to run seamlessly with the CI/CD...
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...
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...
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;...
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...
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...
Thursday, May 3
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Testing Your Metal: Parallels between Testing and Heavy Metal Music
PreviewA self-proclaimed rock-a-holic, Paul Grizzaffi is greatly affected by music and quite the aficionado of heavy metal. Not only does he love music, he’s also an expert in testing and automation. The phrase “test your mettle” means to test one’s strength of spirit, what one is prepared to endure. In both testing and automation development, we often are tested by suboptimal situations and difficult challenges—unrealistic expectations, resistance to change, and the insistence that all existing test cases must be automated. In coping with challenges, many people find solace in listening...