STAREAST 2019 - Agile Testing

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 automation...

Cognitive Adaptive Testing means harnessing the power of analytics and autonomics in support of continuous delivery. The emergence of cognitive, adaptive testing is driven by trends towards omnichannel content delivery, utilization of big data and improved customer experience. Our software/systems need to be extremely responsive to customer sentiment, work across a variety of devices, be resilient in the face of unpredictable failure modes, and process vast amounts of unstructured data. Such scenarios put extreme pressure on IT systems and processes to be not only more responsive but...

How do we go about understanding something complex? How do we move from confusion to clarity? What strategies and approaches can we use to identify and reason about things that matter? When we’re dropped into a testing situation, how do we make sense of it all? How can we rapidly achieve a deeper understanding of things that we know little or nothing about? How can we develop skills to make us more powerful testers? The answer to these questions is analysis - the study of things and ideas by examining their elements and structure. In this one-day tutorial, Michael Bolton will lead...

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...

Functional test automation is a wonderful way to frequently and expeditiously execute regression testing. However, the test scripts that we write are limited to the few assertions we’ve considered. Many times, these assertions only cover the tip of the iceberg and account for a small fraction of what a human being would have subconsciously verified. For example, a test automation script can verify that when adding 2 and 2 via a calculator app, the sum that is returned on screen is 4. But does the 4 appear correctly? Is it upside down? Or sideways? Is it the right color? Are there errors...

The 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 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...

As 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...

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...

The 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...

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...

When 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...

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...

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....

Roughly 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...

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...

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...

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 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...

How 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,...

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...

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.

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...

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...