STAREAST 2018 - Developer

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 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...

Does your application have what it takes to handle the number of customers you expect—or hope for? Does it provide a quick, responsive experience for your users all the time? Amber Race explores the performance testing tools and techniques you need to help ensure that your application is ready for the load from real users. If you are just getting started as a performance tester and wondering how to begin, Amber takes you through the basics and reviews the different facets of load and performance testing. Learn how to analyze your application for potential issues, create tests using a...

Many initiatives to automate testing fail because teams focus too heavily on mastering the use of tools and frameworks, and not enough on understanding the foundational principles of a solid test automation strategy. Join Angie Jones and Paul Merrill for this interactive tutorial that requires no coding, no tools, and no laptops. Instead, let's knock down some dominoes! Learn the basic principles of good test automation by setting up dominoes in a way that solves puzzles. Angie and Paul share how to decide what to automate, how to organize test automation not only to reduce risk but also...

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...

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...

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...

If 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...

Software 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...

Vagrant 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...

You'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,...

For 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 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...

Selenium 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;...

It 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...

Managing 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...

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...

Even 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...

The 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...

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...

To 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...

Agile 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...

A 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”...

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...

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...

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...