STAREAST 2018 - Test Strategy, Planning, Metrics
Sunday, April 29
Requirements-Based Testing Workshop (3-Day)
Software Tester Certification - Foundation Level (3-Day)
Foundations of DevOps—ICAgile Certification (2-Day)
Security Testing for Test Professionals (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...
Implement BDD with Cucumber and SpecFlow
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. Mary Thorn says help is at hand. Enter behavior-driven development (BDD), and Cucumber and SpecFlow, tools for running automated acceptance tests and facilitating BDD. Mary explores the nuances of Cucumber and SpecFlow, and shows you how to...
Build Your Mobile App Quality and Test Strategy
PreviewLet’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 the awesomeness of your mobile app quality and testing strategy. Leave this interactive session with a strategy for your very own app—or one you pretend to own. The...
System-Level Test Automation: Ensuring a Good Start
Many organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems later on. As a leader, 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? This tutorial covers both “theory” and “practice”. Dot Graham explains the critical issues for getting a good start, and Chris Loder describes his experiences in getting good automation started at a number of companies. The tutorial covers the most important management issues you must address for...
Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization
NewThe DevOps movement is here. Companies across many industries are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, IT organizations have been staffed with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. 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 even embrace coding to stay relevant and add greater value to the business. DevOps really...
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...
Selenium Test Automation: From the Ground Up
Knowledge of Selenium, the industry-standard tool for testing web applications, is a much sought after skill in today’s world of test automation. If you want to learn Selenium, then this full-day tutorial provides a great start. Titus Fortner 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. Titus introduces other tools that work with Selenium to help manage the data used to drive your tests, evaluate JavaScript-heavy applications, manage your test...
Test Automation Strategies for the Agile World
Sold Out!With many organizations adopting agile practices, the test automation landscape has changed. Bob Galen explores current disruptors to traditional automation strategies, and discusses relevant and current adjustments that must be made when developing an automation business case. Open source tools are becoming incredibly viable and often best their commercial equivalents―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 up with incremental...
The Impact of IoT on Testing: What’s in Store
No longer just a futuristic concept, the Internet of Things (IoT) has a strong presence in today’s world. If your business is not prepared for it, you’re already behind. With the proliferation of connected “things”—devices, appliances, cars, and even clothing—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 demand...
Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics
To be most effective, leaders—including development and testing managers, ScrumMasters, product owners, and IT managers—need metrics to help direct their efforts and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important evaluation activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, the progress and results of both development and testing must be measured. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because developers and testers often are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he...
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...
Test Estimation in the Face of Uncertainty
NewAnyone who has ever attempted to estimate software testing effort realizes just how difficult the task can be. The number of factors that can affect the estimate is virtually unlimited. The keys to good estimates are understanding the primary variables, comparing them to known standards, and normalizing the estimates based on their differences. This is easy to say but difficult to accomplish because estimates are frequently required even when we know very little about the project—and what we do know is constantly changing. Throw in a healthy dose of politics and a bit of wishful thinking,...
Wednesday, May 2
What’s Our Job When the Machines Do Testing?
After its highly hyped introduction decades ago and followed by a long, quiet “winter,” artificial intelligence (AI) has slowly crept back into our consciousness. While our Siri and Alexa assistants entertain us, machine learning (ML) has brought new conveniences into our lives with solutions including Nest and Netflix. Today, AI brings us to the tantalizing brink of the autonomous vehicle. The sea change of this 4th Industrial Revolution has begun to disrupt industry after industry. The emerging capabilities of these fascinating machines demand our attention as AI starts to be applied in...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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
The Next Big Thing: Testing AI and Machine Learning Applications
Our world is changing. Artificial intelligence is being employed in many walks of life—from virtual assistants and robots to self-driving cars. How does this new way of life impact software testing? What is our role … and will we have one in the future? Of course! And it’s a very exciting time to be in testing because there’s not enough known about how to systematically test these AI- and ML-driven applications. Angie Jones gives an overview of why it’s extremely important that we comprehensively test these applications and how today’s tester can prepare and build the skillset for this new...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...