STAREAST 2019 - Test Management
Customize your STAREAST 2019 experience with sessions covering test management.
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...
Fundamentals of Testing Requirements
PreviewTesting and requirements are bound together: You use requirements to understand what to test and what your customer expects from the product under test. Requirements appear in many forms—verbal, diagrams, user stories, or formal specifications. But sometimes once we start testing, we find that requirements are missing, inadequate, wrong, or changing. This is normal, and as testers, part of our role is to help the team and the customer clarify what is required. (Sometimes we even build the requirements to clarify our tests!) Join Isabel Evans to understand how to identify, capture,...
System-Level Test Automation: Ensuring a Good Start
Many organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems later on. As a leader, how can you ensure that your new automation efforts will get off to a good start? What can you do to ensure that your automation work provides continuing value? This tutorial covers both “theory” and “practice”. Chris Loder explains the critical issues for getting a good start and his experiences in getting good automation started at a number of companies. The tutorial covers the most important management issues you must address for test automation success...
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...
Test Design for Fully Automated Build Architecture
Imagine this … As soon as any developed functionality is submitted into the code repository, it is automatically subjected to the appropriate battery of tests and then released straight into production. Setting up the pipeline capable of doing just that is becoming more and more common and something you need to know about. But most organizations hit the same stumbling block—just what IS the appropriate battery of tests? Automated build architectures don't always lend themselves well to the traditional stages of testing. In this hands-on tutorial, Melissa Benua introduces you to key test...
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...
Influence Diagrams: A New Way to Understand Testing
PreviewAs testers, we may want to find more bugs, but this may have an unintended consequence for developers: Developers now have more defects to debug, which affects their capacity to deliver new functionality. Isabel Evans has found that influence diagrams provide a simple way to understand and manage the complexities of key interactions among testers, developers, and business stakeholders. In this practical workshop with hands-on activities, Isabel will help you construct and interpret influence diagrams to illustrate typical team and project problems and solutions in testing. With...
Test Automation Strategies for the Agile World
With the adoption of agile practices in many organizations, the test automation landscape has changed. Join Bob Galen & Mary Thorn as they explore current disruptors to traditional automation strategies, and discusses relevant and current adjustments you need to make when developing your automation business case. Open source tools are becoming incredibly viable and beat their commercial equivalents in many ways―not only in cost, but also in functionality, creativity, evolutionary speed, and developer acceptance. Agile and DevOps methods have fundamentally challenged our traditional...
Testing Strategies for Microservices
Software development is trending toward building systems using small, autonomous, independently deployable services called microservices. Leveraging microservices makes it easier to add and modify system behavior with minimal or no service interruption. Because they facilitate releasing software early, frequently, and continuously, microservices are especially popular in DevOps. But how do microservices affect software testing and testability? Are there new testing challenges that arise from this paradigm? Or are these simply old challenges disguised as new ones? Join Tariq King as he...
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...
Introduction to Selenium
Knowledge of Selenium, the industry-standard tool for testing web applications, is a much sought after skill in today’s world of test automation. If you want to learn Selenium, then this full-day tutorial provides a great start. Max Saperstone shows you how to build test automation using Selenium. But he doesn’t stop there. He uses his years of experience to show you how to build automation that is clean, robust, and easy to maintain. Max introduces other tools that work with Selenium to help manage the data used to drive your tests, evaluate JavaScript-heavy applications, manage your test...
Web Security Testing: The Basics and More
Web applications are often security critical or serve as front-ends for security critical applications, making web testing for vulnerabilities an essential part of software testing. Unfortunately, most software testers have not been taught how to identify web security issues while testing applications. Join Jeffery Payne as he shares what you need to know to security test web-based applications as part of your overall testing process. Learn about the most common web security vulnerabilities and how they are introduced into web code and exploited by hackers. Explore test techniques for...
Taking Test Design Techniques Beyond Planning
PreviewUnderstanding when and how to apply test design techniques is fundamental to your testing. Join Isabel Evans to learn some basic techniques that she uses in her own work, and add these vital test design techniques to your personal toolbox of methods. Isabel will demonstrate how to use test design techniques not just to decide what tests to conduct, but also to find potential defects and missing requirements before coding starts, to derive a test basis when requirements are unwritten, to drive the direction for nonscripted approaches, and to provide input to automation. Different...
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Skills for the Testing World
PreviewSoftware continues to revolutionize the world, impacting nearly every aspect of our work, family, and personal life. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are playing key roles in this revolution through improvements in search results, recommendations, forecasts, and other predictions. AI and ML technologies are being used in platforms for digital assistants, home entertainment, medical diagnosis, customer support, and autonomous vehicles. Testing practitioners are recognizing the potential for advances in AI and ML to be leveraged for automated testing—an area...
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...
Test Estimation in the Face of Uncertainty
PreviewAnyone who has ever attempted to estimate software testing effort realizes just how difficult the task can be. The number of factors that can affect the estimate is virtually unlimited. The keys to good estimates are understanding the primary variables, comparing them to known standards, and normalizing the estimates based on their differences. This is easy to say but difficult to accomplish because estimates are frequently required even when we know very little about the project—and what we do know is constantly changing. Throw in a healthy dose of politics and a bit of wishful...
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...
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...
Visual Validation for Test Automation
NewFunctional 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...
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...
Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps
In many organizations, agile development processes are driving the pursuit of faster software releases, which has spawned a set of new practices—DevOps. DevOps stresses communications and integration between development and operations, including rapid deployment, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Because DevOps practices require confidence that changes made to the code base will function as expected, automated testing is essential. Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the unique challenges associated with integrating automated testing into continuous integration/continuous...
Virtualization and Containers for Automating Web Testing
PreviewDocker is one of the hottest technologies in our industry today. It lets you create and manage containers—like virtual machines but smaller and faster. They can provide on-demand, disposable test environments that start quickly, repeatably, locally or in the cloud. When you want, you can tear down the environment and recreate a pristine copy within seconds. And since the process is automated, anyone on the team can use the same commands to get their own systems. When you finish testing, those containers can be deployed directly into production. At each stage, the environments for...
How to Break Software: Robustness Edition
Have you ever worked on a project where you felt testing was thorough and complete—all features were covered and all tests passed—yet in the first week in production the software had serious issues and problems? Join Dawn Haynes to learn how to inject robustness testing into your projects to uncover those issues before release. Robustness—an important and often overlooked area of testing—is the degree to which a system operates correctly in the presence of exceptional inputs or stressful environmental conditions. Dawn shows you how—by expanding basic tests and incorporating specific...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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....
Where Does Data Come From?
With all the tools available on the market, it can be overwhelming to determine which ones might meet your needs and which ones will work best in your environment to create a high-performing team. Join Jennifer Bonine as she explains the relationship of the DevOps cycle, your environment, and how a hub-and-spoke model can link all your different data sets and tools together. Jennifer will identify opportunities for applying test data analytics across the engineering and test landscape, ranging from high-value test cases to dynamically generated regression test suites. She will review ways...
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...
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...
Example Mapping: The New Three Amigos
Example mapping is a collaboration technique used by teams to help refine requirements. Every team should have a set of “ready” criteria that includes some kind of workshop for development team members to establish a shared understanding. In a time-boxed example mapping session, rules will summarize examples or constraints about a user story, and the team will document questions about outcomes or dependencies for future refinement. The end result is requirements written as user behavior, with a shared understanding among all roles on the agile team. Join Thomas Haver to participate in a...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...