STAREAST 2018 - Test Techniques
Sunday, April 29
Foundations of DevOps—ICAgile Certification (2-Day)
Agile Tester Certification (2-Day)
Requirements-Based Testing Workshop (3-Day)
Mobile Application Testing (2-Day)
Security Testing for Test Professionals (2-Day)
Software Tester Certification - Foundation Level (3-Day)
Monday, April 30
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...
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...
Fundamentals of Testing REST APIs
New Sold Out!Just getting started on your application programming interface (API) testing journey? Need to better understand APIs and how to effectively test them? Join Lianne Klaver for this introductory tutorial as he discusses API concepts, examples, test strategies, and techniques. Lianne describes the message architecture of REST APIs and discusses elements such as API resources, verbs, states, headers, and tokens. She shares examples and demonstrations of REST APIs in operation to give you a better understanding of how they work. Then learn by doing with exercises that enable you to recognize...
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...
Influence Diagrams: A New Way to Understand Testing
Influence diagrams provide a simple-to-create and easy-to-understand approach to address the complexities of real-life problems. As testers, we may want to find more bugs, but this may have an unintended consequence for developers. Developers now have more defects to debug, which affects their capacity to deliver new functionality. Isabel Evans has found that influence diagrams provide a way to understand and manage the complexities of key interactions among testers, developers, and business stakeholders. In the past few years, Isabel has used influence diagrams as a tool to analyze the...
Testing Today's Web Applications: Tools You Can Use
Preview NewIf you are a software tester in 2018, chances are you're testing a website or web application. Whether you are testing in a browser, within a web “wrapper” framework like Electron, or even a web app wrapped in a mobile application, your customers are using web apps and websites constantly—and they want them to work well. Our challenge in test, of course, is to test as thoroughly and efficiently as we can, given our time and resource constraints. Long time software testing veteran Alan Page demonstrates some of his favorite free or inexpensive tools for testing web apps and shares...
Web Security Testing: The Basics and More
Web applications are often security critical or serve as front-ends for security critical applications, making web testing for vulnerabilities an essential part of software testing. Unfortunately, most software testers have not been taught how to identify web security issues while testing applications. Join Jeffery Payne as he shares what you need to know to security test web-based applications as part of your overall testing process. Learn about the most common web security vulnerabilities and how they are introduced into web code and exploited by hackers. Explore test techniques for...
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...
Using Docker Containers for Automating Web Testing
Preview NewVagrant and Docker are automation tools that are popular in the DevOps world. Vagrant provides a simple, consistent interface to create virtual machines on your local system and in the cloud. Docker lets you control containers—similar to virtual machines but smaller and faster with less overhead. These tools provide on-demand, disposable test environments that are delivered quickly, in a known state, locally or in the cloud. Systems under test, test tools, infrastructure, and even pre-populated data are all candidates for virtualization and containerization. When required, the...
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
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...
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...
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...
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;...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...