STAREAST 2019 - Concurrent Sessions
Concurrent sessions offer attendees the flexibility to follow a specific track or to explore various topics throughout the conference in order to customize their learning experience. Learn both enterprise foundations and new methodologies to grow your skills, supercharge your knowledge, and re-energize your career growth.
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Wednesday, May 1
How Do I Work with These Millennials? Attracting and Retaining the Next Generation
PreviewLeaders and managers are facing many struggles attracting, retaining, and working effectively with the millennial workforce. Millenials have shorter tenures in positions, expectations of work-life balance, and a need for purpose-driven work. No longer are the days of employees who just come in and get the work done because of a deeply ingrained work ethic. Join Nikki Henry as she breaks down the values of this generation. You'll leave with tools and templates to better engage and retain your millennial workforce for the long term. This includes a shift in leadership practices, but...
Testing through the Ages
How long have you been in software testing? What was testing like when you first started? How did the discipline of software testing get to where it is today, and where is it headed in the future? Dot Graham takes a look back at software testing, from a personal perspective as well as a general view. She shares what she has learned from her experiences over the years and gives lessons for today. Dot started her working life by being put into a test group, where she wrote test execution and comparison programs (they weren’t called “tools” back then). In her more than forty years as a...
Data Curation: Refine and Shine
PreviewWe now live in a world where data is generated with every action taken. From buying groceries to walking the dog, we're generating data all the time, everywhere. Companies are starting to undertake harnessing that data efficiently for business cases, and that requires developing a process around data curation. This process must determine which data to curate, how to maintain curated data, and when to delete stale data. A robust data curation process agreed upon by stakeholders is essential to mining data effectively if you want to strike gold. Michael Hobbs will walk through the...
Postmodern Testing
PreviewThe modern world of testing gets noisier, more fragmented, and more confusing every day. Postmodern Testing is an admission of the imperfect world we live in—a new test strategy framework for today’s agile, continuous, and multiplatform teams. Jason Arbon will outline strategies for identifying any given product’s testing needs, as well as prescribe how to efficiently combine different testing techniques and test automation tools to deliver a coherent, well-reasoned, and cost-effective method to the madness. Jason draws on his learnings from how Google tested the Chrome browser,...
Agile Testing in a Waterfall World
What can a tester do when they join an organization that isn’t really agile—or maybe is (gasp) still waterfall? In these situations, it is important to focus on the values and principles that make up agile. Even in a development environment that does not strictly follow an agile-related methodology like Scrum or kanban, the tester can still bring agile principles to their testing. Kat Rocha will share real-world experiences relating to how test engineering can act agile within a waterfall development team, as well as what is important for testing in a team that is undergoing an agile...
Automated Security Scanning for Your Delivery Pipeline
Agile development and DevOps depend on an automated pipeline to build, test, and deploy code quickly. Security is all too often viewed as a manual task that is too difficult to automate and is left for later—not a good decision! Matt Grasberger says that by leveraging automated security scans with open source scanners, you can reduce the risk of security vulnerabilities, get the most out of your pipeline, and increase software quality. Matt will thoroughly explain and demonstrate several ways to implement automated security scans. Discover how to quickly test endpoints against SQL...
The Who, What, Where, When, and How of Test Strategies
What is a test strategy, and how do you develop one? Join Adam Satterfield and Janna Loeffler as they talk through developing a test strategy. They’ll discuss how different software development methodologies influence your test strategy, as well as how techniques like common and coordinated test planning and risk-based testing can be applied to the creation of your test strategy to improve its quality. Adam and Janna also will detail how to develop a test strategy when working with different team dynamics; for example, does your test strategy look different for internal teams versus...
Timeless Testing Skills for Modern Testers
PreviewAs testers in today’s world of agile and DevOps, we are challenged to champion quality in new ways and to develop innovative test approaches that focus on customer value. It's important to bring creativity as well as technical expertise to our test techniques so that we can make our most valuable contributions. We determine both what to test and how to test, and we test jointly with developers. We assess risk and communicate it to our teams and stakeholders through our stories. Our ability to innovate comes from not only our technical skills, but also from our skills in...
Big Data Migration to the Cloud: Testing Challenges and Strategies
PreviewMoving to the cloud is no longer a question of if, but when. Most corporations are either underway in their cloud adoption or have it on their radar. Typically the move from on-premise to cloud is a few hops and different types of data, such as SQL or some version of a file. Couple this with data transformations and it poses a challenge to testing and QA. How do you validate at each hop? Is it required to validate contents between source and destination? Can this testing be automated? Do we build a tool to automate these steps or purchase one? In this session, Sanjay Srinivas will...
The Dell EMC Journey in the Age of Smart Assistants
Dell EMC is driving to optimize and reimagine their testing practices with the application of data-driven smart assistants, powered by analytics and machine learning. At a macro level, Geoff Meyer will highlight the opportunities across the product engineering and testing landscapes that are ripe for the application of analytics and AI. Key ingredients in moving toward solutions that matter are the identification of organization-specific pain points, their prioritization, and the availability and cleanliness of essential data. Geoff will share the process of experimentation, staffing, and...
Dig In: Get Familiar with the Code to Be a Better Tester
PreviewMaybe you’ve been testing the same application for a while and your rate of finding new bugs has slowed. Or you’re trying to find more ways to figure out what your devs are doing day to day. You have the tools at your disposal—you just need to dig in! Hilary Weaver-Robb will share tools and techniques you can use to take your testing to the next level. See everything the developers are changing, and learn how you can find the most vulnerable parts of the code. These strategies can help you focus your testing and track down those pesky bugs! Take away a better understanding of tools...
Excuse-Free Testing: An Open Source Tool for Simpler CI Integration
PreviewThe goal of continuous testing is to find defects earlier in the development lifecycle and release software faster to the market. This can be achieved by integrating open source functional and performance testing tools in the early stages of your software delivery lifecycle. Klaus Neuhold will explain how to integrate the open source test automation framework Taurus, and other tools such as JMeter and Selenium, as a CI step in Jenkins pipelines, so that these tools can be triggered as part of everyday code commits or builds. Taurus can run a large variety of tests and has reporting...
By the Reader, for the Reader: The Wall Street Journal’s Secrets to Customer-Centric Experiences
Readers of The Wall Street Journal have seen many stories about companies shutting their doors after years of success. These companies failed to adapt to rising customer expectations and new technologies—they lost touch with what their customers wanted. The Wall Street Journal didn’t want to become one of these cautionary tales. Sumeet Mandloi explores how The Wall Street Journal aligned its engineering, design, and product teams to shift to a quality engineering organization focused on customer-centric experiences. As part of this transition to quality engineering, the company started...
Game Theory: The Test Engineering Path to Success
Every customer has different expectations for their software, requiring different testing strategies. Game designers can help us understand how to plan our strategy for managing various QA tools so teams can successfully navigate each different customer strategy in a risk-reward environment. A customer who makes their money from understanding and teaching software to others, rather than selling it, requires continuous integration and delivery, because they need new material on a regular basis. A customer who uses the software to defend life and limb requires it to be right the first time...
Future-Proofing Test Engineers in the Era of ML and AI
PreviewWe're all hearing the buzzwords of AI, machine learning, chatbots, and next-generation testing. Does this mean that the days of traditional testing as we know and practice it are over? Eran Kinsbruner doesn't think so. Join Eran to learn about the clear transformation happening toward smarter testing techniques and tools. These approaches drive better pipeline efficiency and release velocity with high quality, and Eran thinks this means good things for the testing practice and practitioners. Discover the key trends that are happening around AI, machine learning, and bots in the web...
No One Really Cares about Testing: A Perspective from a Billion-Dollar App Team
PreviewWhen is the last time you read a five-star review in the App Store or Play Store that raved, “This app is so well-tested! Their quality assurance team really knows what they’re doing. Their test automation must fit so well into their CI pipeline that they can find all sorts of issues in a snap”? The fact is most end-users don’t care about all the things we do in testing on a day-to-day basis. Instead, they care that our applications solve their problems in the way that they expect them to or in a new way that delights them. Andrew Bardallis will challenge you to first think about...
Fishbowl Discussion: Continuous Testing
The Next-Generation Skills Needed for the Future of Testing
That AI is the future of testing seems to be a well-established fact. But assuming that AI will simply replace current manual testers is merely naive. Just like a tractor is no replacement for a farmer, there are many tasks in testing that by their very nature cannot be automated by current AI. As AI improves, many boring testing tasks will be automated, including creating test automation. But at some point, AI is much better suited to replace developers than testers. Think about a behavior-driven development test: It’s easier to generate code that makes the tests pass than it is to...
Thursday, May 2
Are You the Best Leader You Can Be?
We are all leaders. At a minimum, we must lead ourselves every single day, but many of us also have teams that we lead and serve. Have you ever stopped to analyze yourself to determine if you are the best leader you can be? Amy Jo Esser has had the joy of learning from many great leaders outside the testing arena, including John C. Maxwell, Tony Robbins, Mel Robbins, Brendon Burchard, Michael and Megan Hyatt, and Rachel Hollis. Amy Jo continues to learn from leaders in our testing community, including the inspiring leaders and speakers who have been a part of the Women Who Test community....
Where Does Data Come From?
With all the tools available on the market, it can be overwhelming to determine which ones might meet your needs and which ones will work best in your environment to create a high-performing team. Join Jennifer Bonine as she explains the relationship of the DevOps cycle, your environment, and how a hub-and-spoke model can link all your different data sets and tools together. Jennifer will identify 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...
Well, That’s Random: Automated Fuzzy Browser Clicking
PreviewRoughly speaking, "fuzzing" is testing without an oracle—essentially, testing without knowing what the outcome should be. We don’t know what should happen, but we have a good idea of things that shouldn’t happen, such as 404 errors and server or application crashes. We generally apply fuzzing to produce these kinds of errors when we’re testing text boxes, but why should text boxes have all the fun? Websites today are interconnected, multiserver applications that include connections to out-of-network servers, making it difficult to enumerate and control all the possible combinations...
Disrupt Your Career and Discover True Quality Engineering
PreviewOne of the best things Melissa Tondi did for her career was disrupt it. She'll talk about what disruption means, how it can take form, and how it can help build out a team model that is more adaptable to change than ever while still focusing on the traits quality engineering brings to the table within project teams. Even if physically disrupting your career is not an option, in this session you will discuss how you can develop the mindset of a quality engineer and how a career disruption—whether planned or unplanned—can enhance your quality engineering career development. Melissa...
Leveraging Kubernetes as a Tester
Kubernetes is one of the fastest growing open source projects in history, and it's taking the DevOps world by storm. With so many resources being poured into this technology, it would be nice if there were some benefits for testing. It may seem that the Kubernetes framework revolves around operations and microservices, but with a little know-how, we can leverage the internet excitement around the project to enhance our own automated testing frameworks. Glenn Buckholz will demonstrate how, with just a little bit of knowledge about Docker and Git, an automated testing team can leverage...
Example Mapping: The New Three Amigos
Example mapping is a collaboration technique used by teams to help refine requirements. Every team should have a set of “ready” criteria that includes some kind of workshop for development team members to establish a shared understanding. In a time-boxed example mapping session, rules will summarize examples or constraints about a user story, and the team will document questions about outcomes or dependencies for future refinement. The end result is requirements written as user behavior, with a shared understanding among all roles on the agile team. Join Thomas Haver to participate in a...
The Reality Distortion Field of Testing
The reality distortion field (RDF) is a term coined by Bud Tribble at Apple Computers in 1981 to describe Steve Job's charisma and its effect on the developers working on the Macintosh project. The RDF was said to be Steve Job's ability to convince himself and others to believe almost anything with a mix of charm, bravado, marketing, appeasement, and persistence. The RDF warps an audience's sense of proportion for difficulties and makes them believe that any task is possible. When it comes to testing, we have this RDF all around us, with managers saying things like, "We can and should...
What's That Smell? Tidying Up Our Test Code
We are often reminded by those experienced in writing test automation that code is code. The sentiment being conveyed is that test code should be written with the same care and rigor that production code is written with. However, many people who write test code may not have experience writing production code, so it’s not exactly clear what is meant. And even those who write production code find that there are unique design patterns and code smells that are specific to test code. Join Angie Jones as she presents a smelly test automation code base littered with several bad coding practices...
Visual Regression Testing: A Critical Part of a Mobile Testing Strategy
There are many types of testing that companies need to perform in order to have confidence in their product: security testing, integration testing, system testing, performance testing, and more. Often, mobile developers focus on ensuring that main end-to-end flows of their applications work by relying on frameworks like Appium or Robotium. However, in the mobile domain, visual testing is essential because mobile devices differ drastically in capabilities, display dimensions, and even operating systems. Visual regression testing targets specific areas of visual concepts like layouts,...
The Era of Intelligent Testing
Existing QA solutions were built for a world where software changed infrequently. Highly adopted tools such as Selenium, Appium, and JUnit require a specialized skill set and too much maintenance, once you start factoring in the brittle nature of tests and the infrastructure required to run tests at scale. But there is still hope for QA in machine intelligence. Next-generation AI tools are here to help QA keep up with the agility of modern software delivery practices in two ways: by enabling manual testers who don't know how to code to automate, and by easily automating repetitive tasks so...
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...
Security Partners or Security Police?
It’s often said that with great power comes great responsibility. As technology becomes more powerful, security becomes a great responsibility. You’ve read all the books, followed the latest updates on all the blogs and forums, or maybe you just have a gut feeling that there’s a potential for disaster. As software testers, is it our job to be the security police? If you don’t protect the public, who will? Then there is the business—who is going to protect them from themselves? You go into meetings ready to save the day only to be shot down or, even worse, ignored. What went wrong? Why were...
8 Ways to Ruin Your One-on-Ones
PreviewAs managers, it's easy to fall into the trap of focusing on what we need out of our employees' one-on-one meetings, all the while forgetting that one-on-ones are for them! This talk is a list of eight behaviors that are guaranteed to make one-on-ones with employees less effective. For each of the eight unproductive behaviors, Jason Wick will provide examples of where he personally has failed, and share how this experience has become his guiding light of best practices for managing a dozen employees. The juxtaposition of the humorous tips to ruin your one-on-ones with a positive...
Testing in Production
PreviewHow do you know your feature is working perfectly in production? And if something breaks in production, how will you know? Will you wait for a user to report it to you? What do you do when your staging test results do not reflect current production behavior? In order to test proactively as opposed to reactively, test in production! By testing in production, you will have increased accuracy of test results, your tests will run faster due to elimination of mock and bad data, and you will have higher confidence before releases. You can accomplish this through feature flagging,...
API Testing: Going from Manual to Automated
API testing can be challenging—especially for the uninitiated. Ever wonder what makes an API test great? Patrick Poulin will arm you with an understanding of the benefits of automating API testing over doing it manually. Patrick will review the tools landscape and show common errors people make while creating API tests. He'll discuss the steps required to completely automate the entire testing framework for APIs, and show how it is simpler than most people assume. Leave this session with an understanding of how to automate API testing and overcome the fear of the unknown.
JMeter and the Cloud: Scalability that is Affordable, OpenSource, and Fits in CI
Load and performance testing can be messy, last minute and expensive in most organizations. It is possible to change the status quo with a mixture of technology and process. Incorporating performance testing into your CI pipeline can help mitigate the last minute part. Jmeter has been around since 1998 and offers a low-cost alternative for getting the job done, alleviating the expense. Incremental Test Driven Development of performance test cases can help alleviate the mess. Join Glenn as he uses the Cloud, Jmeter, and TDD to help to demonstrate how performance testing can be brought from...
A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps
Where does testing fit in a DevOps world? DevOps encourages the development and operations teams to work together. This broadens the network of people who collaborate to deliver a product, which creates opportunities for the boundaries of testing to expand and for the nature of testing to evolve. Testing pushes right, toward production, once the development team understands the skills, practices, and tools available in operations. Examples include on-demand infrastructure that enables testing in a production-like environment, feedback from A/B test experiments provided by customer metrics...
AI in Testing: A Moderated Panel Discussion
Artificial intelligence is the newest trend in software testing. But what is it, and how will it impact the tester's role, both today and in the future? What do you need to do to embrace this emerging technology? Adam Auerbach and Jennifer Bonine will moderate this panel discussion—which will include Jason Arbon, Dan Belcher, Tariq King, Jeff Nyman, and Jeremias Rößler—to give you an opportunity to hear the opinions of industry leaders about AI in testing. You will have a chance to drive the debate, so come prepared with all your AI questions.
How to Lead Without Authority
Do you need to lead a project but have no level of authority? Is this the first time leading a project, but not sure where to start? Are you interested in potentially being a leader, but wondering what it takes? Leadership can come from many different roles within a company—regardless of title. Everyone wants to be the leader, but it’s not as easy as it appears. Parts of leading projects or teams can be challenging and at times requires tough conversations. Whether you are within IT or in another department, join Jolene for this session to learn tips to effectively lead a project through...
Using and Implementing BDD a Day in the Life
PreviewLearn how to discover, prioritize and plan the features that really matter: those that will deliver real business value and that will make a difference to your organization. You will discuss effective user stories that are pitched at the appropriate level, and writing actionable acceptance criteria that will guide developers and provide valuable feedback and documentation on application features and project progress. And you will experience how building a better synergy between BAs, developers and...
Testing as a Service: Forming a Service-Oriented Testing Team
Companies today must respond to the ever-increasing demand for delivering products in a fast-paced digital environment. As a result, many traditional testing departments are being dismantled, teams are being split up, and individual testers are being distributed across multiple projects or functional teams. This transition can lead to workflows that are awkward and siloed, with team members trying to figure out what exactly to do with the tester. Noha Gomaa thinks there must be a better way to handle the transition. Noha champions "testing as a service" to many project teams. She helps...
Testing Large Data Sets with Supervised Machine Learning
Price rate is used to calculate an insurance premium based on the different insurance coverage. Every year the price rate is based on updated regulations, so after each change, the new price rate has to be tested for a large amount of data to make sure that the premium is correct based on the coverage. Testing fifty thousand data entries and their variations is impossible for any testing team. Alireza Razavi will present an AI automation testing framework designed to solve this testing problem. Discover how to use a supervised machine learning algorithm to determine the type of training...
Lessons Learned Automating Cloud and Infrastructure Testing
As organizations embrace DevOps and IT value chain automation, we are seeing the explosive growth of infrastructure-as-code capabilities, fueled by cloud scripting technology. As infrastructure-as-code capabilities evolve, what role does testing play? Especially for continuous testing, when it comes to infrastructure provisioning and configuration? How does this approach integrate with other traditional forms of testing, such as unit, integration, and systems testing? Join Joseph Ours as he presents what he's learned about infrastructure-as-code and provides live demonstrations for...
Full-Coverage Testing in Small-Business Environments
PreviewIn small-business environments, testing is often completed in hindsight—or overlooked entirely. Chad Jung, Curtis Severance, and Kaleb Weddle will discuss the struggles and successes of ensuring a quality product from the perspectives of a developer, lead software test engineer, and software engineer in test working together on a DevOps team. They will show how to use an automated build pipeline, how to bring it all together for your team, and how to leverage developers who know the in and outs of the code better than anyone. They will discuss the pressures of releasing faster and...
ENCORE Session
BRAVO! It's back by popular demand! Did you have a hard time selecting which session to attend? Wished you had participated in a great session you heard about? Talked with someone at lunch or a happy hour about a great presentation and you wished you could have been there? Your wish has come true! We know it's a challenge to cover all the great sessions at our conferences, so on Thursday afternoon, we will feature a repeat of one of the most talked about sessions from Wednesday. We want to hear from YOU which session you would like to have presented again. Drop by the TechWell Experience...