STAREAST 2018 - Test Management

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...

Let’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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Although 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...

For most of his career in test/QA, Jason Wick found the prevailing sentiment to be us vs. them—testers vs. developers or the project team vs. the business. And this mindset does not work on a cross-functional product team where everyone must share goals and be willing to put the team goals ahead of all other agendas. During his past year of leading a product delivery team, Jason Wick has discovered that establishing this team goals mindset is no easy task. However, with hard work—and, yes, some setbacks—his team members have indeed transformed from a group of people doing work into...

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...

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...

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...

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....