STAREAST 2019 - DevOps
Customize your STAREAST 2019 experience with sessions covering DevOps.
Monday, April 29
Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization
The DevOps movement is here. Companies across many industries are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, IT organizations have been staffed with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. 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 even embrace coding to stay relevant and add greater value to the business. DevOps really...
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...
Tuesday, April 30
Test Data: Mining, Morphing, Managing and Maintaining It!
NewAccording to the 2018/2019 World Quality Report, the number one challenge in applying testing to agile development is overcoming the challenges of creating, managing, and maintaining test environments and test data. Over 48% of respondents had issues with test data. As our systems complexity and time to market demands have increased, the appetite for resolving the test data issue can be diminished or be viewed as test data doesn’t really matter. Join Julie Gardiner as she shares the good, bad and ugly of test environments and data, defines an approach to establish where you are in terms of...
Bash Scripting with Git and GitHub for Open Source Contribution
PreviewSkill with Git is a prerequisite for most software jobs today. This is because the vast majority of software developed is stored in Git-based repositories such as GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket. GitHub's domination of social coding makes it the new business card to demonstrate your creativity, popularity, capability, and tenacity. “Configuration as code” is a standard DevOps practice so testers must know how to set up and use Git to obtain and update versions of their infrastructures. In this hands-on tutorial, create your own website and learn the GitHub markdown used to format...
Continuous Testing Using Containers
NewContainers. Every manager thinks they want them, but few teams have experience in knowing what to DO with them. Used thoughtfully, containerization of your services can transform the way your organization thinks about testing. Gone can be the days of maintaining X different compute environments with Y different configurations. Imagine instead spinning up just the code you need, on the machine type it needs, and only for as long as you need it. In this technical training, Melissa will walk through what containerization means for a legacy code base attempting to practice continuous...
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
Cutting through the Hype around Continuous Testing
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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
The AI Testing Singularity
PreviewMost basic software testing will soon be done by a few individual, large systems. But today, software testing is a fragmented world of test creators, test automators, vendors, contractors, employees, and even “pizza Fridays” where developers roll up their sleeves and test the build themselves. When teams start testing their apps, they dream up the same positive, negative, and edge test cases as every other team before them. Most software testing is either manually tapping an application or manually creating and maintaining detailed automation scripts—from scratch! AI will soon...
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....
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...