STAREAST 2019 - Project Manager
Customize your STAREAST 2019 experience with sessions covering project management.
Monday, April 29
Agile Testing: Team Tactics that Deliver the Goods
Sold Out!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...
Blockchain Quality: Securing Trust in a Digital Age
NewBlockchain technology introduces decentralized, distributed, cryptographically linked digital structures that record information across many computers. Due to its highly secure structure, blockchain is growing at a rapid pace in the financial and automotive industries, and adoption is starting in other industries. We are also witnessing the rise of the smart contract, a set of immutable programmatic auto-enforcing rules that live on the blockchain. However, although there are many benefits, blockchain introduces a unique set of testing and quality concerns. For example, race conditions and...
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
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...
Wednesday, May 1
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...
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...
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....
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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...