STAREAST 2019 - Exploratory Testing | TechWell

Conference archive

STAREAST 2019 - Exploratory Testing

Monday, April 29

Michael_Bolton
DevelopSense
MA

Critical Thinking for Software Testers

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Critical thinking is the kind of thinking that specifically looks for problems and mistakes. Regular people don't do a lot of it. However, if you want to be a great tester, you need to be a great critical thinker. Critically-thinking testers save projects from dangerous assumptions and ultimately from disasters. The good news is that critical thinking is not just innate intelligence or a talent—it's a learnable and improvable skill you can master. Michael Bolton shares the specific techniques and heuristics of critical thinking and presents realistic testing puzzles that help you...

Tuesday, April 30

Michael_Bolton
DevelopSense
TB

X-Ray Vision For Testers: How to Analyze Things

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

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...

Angie Jones
Applitools
TL

Visual Validation for Test Automation

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Wednesday, May 1

Jeff Payne
Coveros
K2

Cutting through the Hype around Continuous Testing

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Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

There is a lot of hype around continuous testing these days. It seems like every product vendor has a continuous testing product and every consulting company has a continuous testing practice. But what exactly is continuous testing? And how is it different from what we've been doing in testing for the past several decades? Join Jeffrey Payne as he discusses what continuous testing is all about and how today's organizations are leveraging it to improve their quality. Learn what tools and techniques enable continuous testing, and examine the pros and cons of moving toward a more continuous...

Michael_Hobbs
Dell EMC
W3

Data Curation: Refine and Shine

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Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

We 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...

Jason_Arbon
test.ai
W4

Postmodern Testing

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Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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,...

Kat_Rocha
ACT/NRCCUA
W5

Agile Testing in a Waterfall World

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Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Janna_Loeffler
Carnival Corp & plc
W7

The Who, What, Where, When, and How of Test Strategies

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Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

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...

Sumeet_Mandloi
Dow Jones
W13

By the Reader, for the Reader: The Wall Street Journal’s Secrets to Customer-Centric Experiences

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Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

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...

W16

No One Really Cares about Testing: A Perspective from a Billion-Dollar App Team

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Wednesday, May 1, 2019 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

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...

Thursday, May 2

Paul_Grizzaffi
Magenic
T3

Well, That’s Random: Automated Fuzzy Browser Clicking

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Thursday, May 2, 2019 - 9:45am to 10:45am

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...

Dmitry Vinnik
Salesforce
T9

Visual Regression Testing: A Critical Part of a Mobile Testing Strategy

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Thursday, May 2, 2019 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

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,...

Talia_Nassi
WeWork
T14

Testing in Production

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Thursday, May 2, 2019 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

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,...

Katrina_Clokie
Bank of New Zealand
K5

Beyond Coding: Test Automation as Art

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Thursday, May 2, 2019 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

The rise of test automation is changing the testing landscape as organizations urgently accelerate their automation goals. As demand for automation increases, those accountable for testing roles are learning to write code, but few are learning the skills that support the creation of truly useful automated assets. Just as using a paintbrush does not make an artist, writing code does not make an engineer. Without a wider perspective, we can end up with test automation frameworks and tests that are inefficient and difficult to maintain. As a test practice manager at a major financial...