STAREAST 2018 - Quality Assurance | TechWell

Conference archive

STAREAST 2018 - Quality Assurance

Sunday, April 29

Matthew Grasberger
Coveros, Inc.

Mobile Application Testing (2-Day)

Add to calendar
Sunday, April 29, 2018 - 8:30am to Monday, April 30, 2018 - 5:00pm

Learn to identify common issues in mobile applications and to test the unique aspects of a mobile app. This two-day course covers usability across multiple platforms and resolutions, network and security testing, mobile UI automation, performance testing, and more.

Claire Lohr
Lohr Systems

Software Tester Certification - Foundation Level (3-Day)

Add to calendar
Sunday, April 29, 2018 - 8:30am to Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - 5:00pm

Accredited training for the ISTQB® Certified Tester—Foundation Level (CTFL) certification. Find out what it takes to be a successful software tester and learn about the relationship of testing to development, test levels, black-box methods, white-box testing, exploratory testing, and more.

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.com

Agile Test Automation—ICAgile (2-Day)—SOLD OUT

Add to calendar
Sunday, April 29, 2018 - 8:30am to Monday, April 30, 2018 - 5:00pm

Explore the many ways automation supports agile testing in this two-day course with real-world, vendor-neutral examples of agile test automation approaches and tools. In addition, successful attendees are awarded the ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Test Automation (ICP-ATA).

Richard Bender
BenderRBT

Requirements-Based Testing Workshop (3-Day)

Add to calendar
Sunday, April 29, 2018 - 8:30am to Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - 5:00pm
Explore a proven approach for designing a consistent and repeatable set of optimized test cases. Learn and practice cause-effect graphing and alternative test design approaches, and take back a lifecycle testing process that incorporates testing as an integrated part of the development project.
Mike_Sowers
TechWell Corp.

Agile Tester Certification (2-Day)

Add to calendar
Sunday, April 29, 2018 - 8:30am to Monday, April 30, 2018 - 5:00pm
Learn the role of the tester in an agile team and explore agile testing processes in an interactive workshop. Successful attendees earn the ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Testing (ICP-TST) designation. This course is also accredited for the ISTQB® Foundation Level Agile Extension exam.

Monday, April 30

Jim_Holmes
Guidepost Systems
MB

Develop WebDriver Automated Tests—and Keep Your Sanity

Preview New
Add to calendar
Monday, April 30, 2018 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Many teams go crazy because of brittle, high-maintenance automated test suites. Jim Holmes helps you understand how to create a flexible, maintainable, high-value suite of functional tests using Selenium WebDriver. Learn the basics of what to test, what not to test, and how to avoid overlapping with other types of testing. Jim includes both philosophical concepts and hands-on coding. Testers who haven't written code should not be intimidated! We'll pair you up to make sure you're successful. Learn to create practical tests dealing with advanced situations such as input validation,...

Mary_Thorn
Mary Thorn Consulting
MC

Implement BDD with Cucumber and SpecFlow

Add to calendar
Monday, April 30, 2018 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Maaret Pyhäjärvi
F-Secure Oyj
MK

Exploratory Testing: New Skills for Learning and Discovery

New
Add to calendar
Monday, April 30, 2018 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

The 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...

Tuesday, May 1

TC

Fundamentals of Testing REST APIs

New Sold Out!
Add to calendar
Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

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...

Dorothy Graham
Software Test Consultant
TJ

Technical Test Automation Challenges: Patterns and Solutions

Preview
Add to calendar
Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Many 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...

Mike_Sowers
TechWell Corp.
TK

Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics

Add to calendar
Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Ken Johnston
Microsoft
Eun Chang
Microsoft
TO

Data Analytics and Machine Learning

New
Add to calendar
Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Do 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...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.com
TP

Test Estimation in the Face of Uncertainty

New
Add to calendar
Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Anyone 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,...

Dawn Haynes
PerfTestPlus, Inc.
TR

How to Break Software: Robustness Edition

Add to calendar
Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Wednesday, May 2

K1

Transformation from QA to Engineering: Testing in the Fast Lane

Preview
Add to calendar
Wednesday, May 2, 2018 - 8:30am to 9:45am

Are you being asked to shorten your testing timelines? Do you feel pressured to increase your test automation coverage but don’t have the time, staff, or budget? How do you as a leader upgrade your team’s skills and technical abilities and still meet your daily release deliverables—without bringing in external resources? Join Jennifer Scandariato as she shares her journey in transforming her company’s QA department into a test engineering center of excellence, where manual testers are now automation engineers who apply automation technologies to expedite and streamline the testing...

Melissa_Benua
mParticle
W12

Elegant Test Weapons for a More Civilized Age

Preview
Add to calendar
Wednesday, May 2, 2018 - 1:45pm to 2:45pm

Software 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...

Gopal_Brugalette
SAP Concur
W16

Machine Learning and Data Science for Quality and Performance Engineering

Preview
Add to calendar
Wednesday, May 2, 2018 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Jeff Payne
Coveros, Inc.
W17

Test Management in Agile—What Happened to All My Testers?

Add to calendar
Wednesday, May 2, 2018 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Glenn_Buckholz
Coveros, Inc.
W18

How to Test Serverless Cloud Applications

Add to calendar
Wednesday, May 2, 2018 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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

Tom Chavez
Splunk
T2

Machine Data Is Everywhere: Use It for Testing!

Add to calendar
Thursday, May 3, 2018 - 9:45am to 10:45am

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...

Sanil_Pillai
Infostretch
T5

Automated Testing for New-Gen Digital Interactions: Chatbots, Alexa, and Siri

Preview
Add to calendar
Thursday, May 3, 2018 - 9:45am to 10:45am

Today’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...

Susan Zampino
Progressive Casualty Insurance Company
T6

Exploratory Testing: Learn to Do It like a Bloodhound

Preview
Add to calendar
Thursday, May 3, 2018 - 9:45am to 10:45am

Let’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...

Robert Williams
CA Technologies
T7

Testing in a Microservices and Continuous Delivery Environment

Preview
Add to calendar
Thursday, May 3, 2018 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

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...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.com
T8

Use Path Analysis in Test Design for Better, Faster Testing

Add to calendar
Thursday, May 3, 2018 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

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...

Amir_Rozenberg
Perfecto
T14

Testing Digital Interfaces: Chatbots, Home Assistants, Touch ID, Facial Recognition, and More

Preview
Add to calendar
Thursday, May 3, 2018 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

It 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...

Jeanne Schmidt
Rural Sourcing Inc.
T15

Manual Testers Can Thrive in a Test Automation World

Preview
Add to calendar
Thursday, May 3, 2018 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

As 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...

BJ Aberle
Float
T17

AR and VR for Mobile Apps: Are You Ready to Test?

Preview
Add to calendar
Thursday, May 3, 2018 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Augmented 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...

Paul_Merrill
Beaufort Fairmont
T18

What's an API and How Do I Test It?

Add to calendar
Thursday, May 3, 2018 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

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...

Melissa Tondi
EMS Software
T19

Make the Shift to Quality Engineering

Add to calendar
Thursday, May 3, 2018 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Kim Tatum
Deloitte Consulting
T21

Behavior-Driven Development: Real-World Mind Reading

Add to calendar
Thursday, May 3, 2018 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Elise Carmichael
QASymphony
T24

API Testing: How to Write Tests, Integrate into CI, and Track What You're Testing

Preview
Add to calendar
Thursday, May 3, 2018 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Some 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....