STAREAST 2019 - Test Leadership
Monday, April 29
Critical Thinking for Software Testers
PreviewCritical 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...
Driving Lessons for Test Automation Managers
PreviewIn order to support their automation team effectively, test managers must be able to recognize when the team is taking a ‘bad’ turn and know how to steer it back, or, when starting, know how to do things right from the very beginning. They don’t need to know all the technicalities, but they must know the basics of good automation and be able to explain to higher management what automation can or cannot deliver in order to secure and sustain their support. In this tutorial Seretta Gamba introduces the Test Automation Patterns Wiki and explains in detail the patterns test managers...
Getting a Grip on Cognitive Adaptive Testing
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...
Testing Leadership IQ
Have you ever needed a way to measure your testing leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies and the evolution of testing and testing leadership. Join Jennifer as she explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can...
Tuesday, April 30
Being Technical Enough: Learn Technical, Testing and Leadership Skills that Let You Soar
Preview NewIt’s easy to feel overwhelmed as a tester today, no matter how experienced you are, especially on agile teams and teams embracing a DevOps culture. Perhaps you’ve heard about the Modern Testing principles and those have you on the defensive? Test automation is daunting enough, especially if you lack coding experience. Today we have test automation tools that use machine learning. Perhaps your company’s product is starting to incorporate AI. Or you have to figure out how testing can keep...
Agile Test Team Leadership: From Concept to Product
Sold Out!Today, many agile organizations are making a terrible error. They are assuming there is no place for test management and leadership in agile, self-directed team contexts. Mary Thorn and Bob Galen beg to differ with this view and believe a strong need exists for testing leadership in agile organizations—just different from the way we’ve typically approached it. Join Mary and Bob as they explore what excellent test team leadership looks like in agile contexts. Explore the aspects of self-directed teams and the implications to your previous leadership styles. Look under the covers of Scrum...
Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics
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...
Testing Transformation: The Art and Science for Success
Technologies, testing processes, and the role of the tester have evolved significantly in the past few years with the advent of agile, DevOps, and other new technologies. It is critical that we testing professionals evaluate ourselves and continue to add tangible value to our organizations. In your work, are you focused on the trivial or on real game changers? Jennifer Bonine describes critical elements that help you artfully blend people, process, and technology to create a synergistic relationship that adds value. Jennifer shares ideas on mastering politics, maneuvering core vs. context...
Better Test Design for Great Test Automation
Test automation is an essential element in modern system development. And test design can make or break automation efforts throughout the entire CI/CD pipeline. We want automated tests to find problems in a build quickly, run without a hitch, and be easily maintained. However, if tests are badly structured and unnecessarily detailed, you may have a hard time automating them—even with great tools and great technical expertise. Hans Buwalda explores how testers, both technical and non-technical, can design or restructure tests to make them suitable for automation. In this session, you’ll...
Wednesday, May 1
Creative Trespassing: Sneak More Imagination into Your Work and Get More Done
After years of smuggling creativity into the corporate sector without getting busted, Tania Katan has learned that we don’t need to be in a job that is distinctly creative in order to be distinctly creative in our job. In fact, no matter how tedious the task or how buttoned-up the office environment, we can all learn to conjure imagination anywhere, anytime, by choosing to stand out rather than fit in. Join Tania for some hilarious stories, wacky exercises for flexing your creative muscles, and engaging ideas like “Fire Hierarchy” and “Transform the Norm.” You will leave with tools and...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Lightning Strikes the Keynotes
Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR conferences. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consists of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. And now, lightning has struck the STAR keynotes. Some of the best-known experts in testing will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning. Get multiple keynote presentations for the price of one—and...
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....
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
Beyond Coding: Test Automation as Art
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...
Friday, May 3
Failing and Recovering
PreviewDo you ever feel you have lost confidence in your own abilities? Why does this happen? Isabel Evans spends a lot of time painting. Someone once commented, “Why are you doing this, when you are not very good at it?” And gradually she stopped drawing and painting, after being intimidated by a conventional vision of what good art should look like. At the same time, she experienced a parallel loss of confidence in her professional abilities. Attempting creative pursuits like drawing and painting is essential to cognitive, emotional, creative abilities and she began to understand the...