STAREAST - Conference List Schedule | TechWell

Conference archive

Conference Schedule

Sunday, April 28

Registration—7:30am–5:00pm
7:30 am to 5:00 pm
Continental Breakfast—7:30am–8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Multi-day Training Classes Begin—8:30am–5:00pm
8:30 am to 5:00 pm
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Fundamentals of Selenium
Max Saperstone
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

Gain the the foundational skills required to leverage Selenium in order to write meaningful automated tests and increase the speed and quality of testing in this two-day, hands-on course.

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Software Tester Certification—Foundation Level
Claire Lohr
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

Accredited training for the ISTQB® Certified Tester—Foundation Level (CTFL) certification, aligned to the new 2018 syllabus. ISTQB is the only internationally accepted certification for software testing and has granted more than 500,000 certifications in more than 110 countries around the world. In this three-day course, learn what it takes to be a successful software tester and learn about the relationship of testing to development, test levels, black-box methods, white-box testing, experienced-based testing, and more. This course is appropriate for those new to the testing profession and those seeking certification in software testing. 

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Performance, Load, and Stress Testing
Tauhida Parveen
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

Designed for system testers, system designers, system tuners, software engineers, QA professionals, and project leaders, this course provides an introduction to the complexities of software performance testing and delivers testing skills that participants can immediately apply back on the job.

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Mobile Application Testing
Brian Hicks
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

Many testers attempt to apply what they know to mobile testing, and while that may work for some functional testing, it often leaves many critical features untested. Critical errors that go untested can mean a swift end to a mobile application. Learning how to identify common issues in mobile applications and how to test the unique aspects of a mobile application is the only way to be truly successful. This two-day course will cover usability across multiple platforms and resolutions, network and security testing, creating application unit tests, mobile UI automation, and performance testing for various devices over various networks and carriers.

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Foundations of DevOps—ICAgile Certification
Gene Gotimer
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

DevOps combines development, testing, and operations and includes continuous integration, automated testing, continuous delivery, and rapid deployment practices. Because DevOps practices require confidence in nearly all changes, automated testing is an essential ingredient that is integrated into the process and relied upon for enforcement of quality gates and to ensure overall delivery quality. This two-day course will teach you how to avoid the common mistakes of DevOps implementations and to leverage DevOps best practices. Test professionals, operations engineers, developers, project managers, and business owners will all benefit from this curriculum.

 

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Security Testing for Test Professionals
Jeffery Payne
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

Explore security testing in an interactive workshop setting. This course is appropriate for software development and testing professionals who want to begin doing security testing as part of their assurance activities. 

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Agile Tester Certification
Mike Sowers
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

Agile software practices are being employed within many development organizations worldwide, and as a result, many testers struggle to understand the agile development process and their place in it. In Agile Tester Certification, both novice and experienced testers learn the fundamentals of agile development, the role of the tester in the agile team, and the agile testing processes. Learn technical and team skills testers need for success in the world of agile development, as well as the techniques of Test-Driven Development (TDD), Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) during this two-day course. All participants are expected to have experience in or knowledge of agile development fundamentals.  

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Python® for Testers
Kristoffer Nordström
8:30 am to 5:00 pm
This is a course for testers who are frustrated by the laborious and manual work that makes up day-to-day test work, anyone who has tried or wants to try scripting and programming in order to help them focus more on the sapient test activities and let the computer do the repetitive work. During the course we will work with a strong focus on practical knowledge and learning by doing with much hands-on coding. This so that attendees can work independently with Python after the course. A large amount of exercises are built to give the opportunity to build simple but powerful tools using Python, which gives a deeper understanding of the opportunities that the language offers.
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Requirements-Based Testing Workshop
Richard Bender
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

If your testing efforts are not achieving the payback you and your organization expect, this course is for you. Requirements-Based Testing (RBT) delivers a proven, rigorous approach for designing a consistent and repeatable set of highly optimized test cases. Companies employing RBT practices have achieved twice the requirements coverage with only half the tests they previously maintained.

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Agile Test Automation—ICAgile (SOLD OUT)
Robert Sabourin
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

Explore the many ways automation supports agile testing in this two-day course with real-world, vendor-neutral examples of agile test automation approaches and tools. In addition, successful attendees are awarded the ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Test Automation (ICP-ATA).

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Load Testing With JMeter™
Glenn Buckholz
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

Learn to use the open source framework, Apache JMeter™, to manage, record, and execute your tests. The two-day, hands-on class will have students run tests against a sample application to help solve issues that include basic test recording, dealing with SSL, parameterizeing tests, and more.

Lunch—12:00pm–1:00pm
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Training Classes Continue—1:00pm–5:00pm
1:00 pm to 5:00 pm

Monday, April 29

Registration—7:00am–5:00pm
7:00 am to 5:00 pm
Continental Breakfast—7:30am–8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Full & Half-Day Tutorials—8:30am–12:00pm
8:30 am to 12:00 pm
Multi-day Training Classes Continue—8:30am–5:00pm
8:30 am to 5:00 pm
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Tutorial MA Critical Thinking for Software Testers Preview
Michael Bolton
8:30 am to 4:30 pm

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

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Tutorial MB Driving Lessons for Test Automation Managers Preview
Seretta Gamba
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

In 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...Read more

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Tutorial MC Fundamentals of Testing Requirements Preview
Isabel Evans
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

Testing 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...Read more

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Tutorial MD Unit Testing: What Every Developer and Tester Should Know Preview
Tariq King
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

Do you want to take your testing skills to the next level? Are you trying to stay relevant on an agile team where testing is shifting to the left on the project timeline? Do you want to help your organization reap the full benefits of testing earlier? Then join Tariq King to explore the fundamentals of unit testing so you can find bugs as soon as they happen and do more thorough, targeted testing during software development. This introductory session is for everyone—of all programming skill levels. Learn how to apply program-based techniques such as testing by looking, automated unit...Read more

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Tutorial ME System-Level Test Automation: Ensuring a Good Start Preview
Chris Loder
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

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...Read more

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Tutorial MF Agile Testing: Team Tactics that Deliver the Goods Preview SOLD OUT
Bob Galen, Mary Thorn
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

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...Read more

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Tutorial MG Test Design for Fully Automated Build Architecture Preview
Melissa Benua
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

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...Read more

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Tutorial MH Pairwise Testing Explained Preview NEW
Lloyd Roden
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

As testers we are faced with many challenges especially when designing and executing tests. Most problems reside in the fact that we usually do not know which test case design technique to use and more importantly we usually do not have time to run all of our tests. This workshop will uncover what the challenges are with test design and explains the real problems associated with combinatorial testing. During this tutorial Lloyd Roden looks deeply into the two methods for designing tests using the pairwise design technique; Orthogonal Arrays and pairwise algorithms. Pairwise testing helps...Read more

Lunch—12:00pm–1:00pm
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Full-Day Tutorials Continue—1:00pm–4:30pm
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm
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Tutorial MI Blockchain Quality: Securing Trust in a Digital Age Preview NEW
Dionny Santiago
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

Blockchain 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...Read more

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Tutorial MJ Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization Preview
Adam Auerbach
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

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Tutorial MK Getting a Grip on Cognitive Adaptive Testing Preview
Julie Gardiner
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

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Tutorial ML Influence Diagrams: A New Way to Understand Testing Preview
Isabel Evans
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

As 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...Read more

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Tutorial MM Test Automation Strategies for the Agile World Preview
Bob Galen, Mary Thorn
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

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Tutorial MN Testing Strategies for Microservices Preview
Tariq King
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

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Tutorial MO Testing Leadership IQ Preview
Jennifer Bonine
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

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Tutorial MP From User Story to Test Case Preview NEW SOLD OUT
Lloyd Roden
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

Agile Software Methods are becoming the preferred way of working in most organisations. However testers are often finding it difficult to know how to adapt to the new way of working. It is often difficult to know how to test user stories and more importantly, how to use the systematic testing techniques in an agile context. Join Lloyd Roden as he discusses a variety of test case design techniques for user stories. Bring your own user stories to this tutorial and Lloyd will explain how these testing techniques can be applied to your own user stories. Lloyd will demonstrate how exploratory...Read more

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Tutorial MQ Clean Coding Practices for Test Automation Preview NEW
Angie Jones
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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. However, many people who write test code may not have experience writing production code, so it’s not exactly clear what is meant by this statement. And even those who write production code find that there are unique design patterns and code smells that are specific to test code in which they are not aware. Join Angie Jones for this workshop, at which, you will be given a...Read more

Registration Desk Hours—Closes at 5:00pm
4:30 pm to 5:00 pm
Speed Networking—5:15pm-6:00pm
5:15 pm to 6:00 pm

Tuesday, April 30

Registration—7:30am–5:00pm
7:30 am to 5:00 pm
Continental Breakfast—7:30am–8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Full- and Half-Day Tutorials—8:30am–12:00pm
8:30 am to 12:00 pm
Multi-day Training Classes Continue—8:30am–5:00pm
8:30 am to 5:00 pm
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Tutorial TA Being Technical Enough: Learn Technical, Testing and Leadership Skills that Let You Soar Preview NEW
Graeme Harvey, Hilary Weaver-Robb
8:30 am to 4:30 pm

It’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...Read more

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Tutorial TB X-Ray Vision For Testers: How to Analyze Things Preview NEW
Michael Bolton
8:30 am to 4:30 pm

How do we go about understanding something complex? How do we move from confusion to clarity? What strategies and approaches can we use to identify and reason about things that matter? When we’re dropped into a testing situation, how do we make sense of it all? How can we rapidly achieve a deeper understanding of things that we know little or nothing about? How can we develop skills to make us more powerful testers? The answer to these questions is analysis - the study of things and ideas by examining their elements and structure. In this one-day tutorial, Michael Bolton will lead...Read more

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Tutorial TC Introduction to Selenium Preview
Max Saperstone
8:30 am to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

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Tutorial TD Web Security Testing: The Basics and More Preview
Jeffery Payne
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

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...Read more

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Tutorial TE Technical Test Automation Challenges: Patterns and Solutions Preview SOLD OUT
Dorothy Graham, Seretta Gamba
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

Many organizations find that test automation does not work as well as they thought it would. In many cases, these failures are due to generic technical reasons, which can be fixed with relative ease. Other solutions that have worked well are patterns, common to automation efforts at any level with whatever tools you are using. Dot Graham and Seretta Gamba focus on often-neglected technical issues—i.e., non-management issues—and the patterns that help solve them. These are not development or code patterns—this is a code-free tutorial. Using a set of patterns developed together, Dot and...Read more

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Tutorial TF Taking Test Design Techniques Beyond Planning Preview
Isabel Evans
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

Understanding 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...Read more

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Tutorial TG Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Skills for the Testing World Preview
Tariq King, Jason Arbon
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

Software 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...Read more

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Tutorial TH Agile Test Team Leadership: From Concept to Product Preview SOLD OUT
Bob Galen, Mary Thorn
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

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...Read more

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Tutorial TI Test Estimation in the Face of Uncertainty Preview
Robert Sabourin
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

Anyone 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...Read more

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Tutorial TJ Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics Preview
Mike Sowers
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

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...Read more

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Tutorial TK Test Data: Mining, Morphing, Managing and Maintaining It! Preview NEW
Julie Gardiner
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

According 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...Read more

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Tutorial TT Bash Scripting with Git and GitHub for Open Source Contribution Preview
Wilson Mar
8:30 am to 4:30 pm

Skill 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...Read more

Lunch—12:00pm–1:00pm
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Full- and Half-Day Tutorials Continue—1:00pm–4:30pm
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm
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Tutorial TL Visual Validation for Test Automation Preview NEW
Angie Jones
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

Functional test automation is a wonderful way to frequently and expeditiously execute regression testing. However, the test scripts that we write are limited to the few assertions we’ve considered. Many times, these assertions only cover the tip of the iceberg and account for a small fraction of what a human being would have subconsciously verified. For example, a test automation script can verify that when adding 2 and 2 via a calculator app, the sum that is returned on screen is 4. But does the 4 appear correctly? Is it upside down? Or sideways? Is it the right color? Are there errors...Read more

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Tutorial TM Testing Transformation: The Art and Science for Success Preview
Jennifer Bonine
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

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Tutorial TN Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps Preview
Jeffery Payne
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

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Tutorial TO Continuous Testing Using Containers Preview NEW
Melissa Benua
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

Containers. 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...Read more

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Tutorial TP Virtualization and Containers for Automating Web Testing Preview
Gene Gotimer
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

Docker 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...Read more

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Tutorial TQ How to Break Software: Robustness Edition Preview
Dawn Haynes
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

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Tutorial TR Shift Left to Test User Experience Preview
Isabel Evans
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

In today’s environment, the user experience (UX) is overwhelmingly important—and is not just about the product. UX describes all facets of a person’s interactions with and reactions to the product, the organization that supplies it, and the environment in which it is experienced. Isabel Evans says that in order to focus our tests appropriately, it is vital that we testers understand our users’ experiences. We need to explore and measure human, business, and societal impacts of products we develop, and how those are underpinned by technical qualities. Unless we “shift left” as...Read more

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Tutorial TS Better Test Design for Great Test Automation Preview
Hans Buwalda
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

Welcome Reception—4:30pm–5:30pm
4:30 pm to 5:30 pm
Test Lab Kick-Off—5:30pm-7:30pm
5:30 pm to 7:30 pm

Wednesday, May 1

Morning Yoga/Morning Run—6:45am-7:30am
6:45 am to 7:30 am
Registration—7:00am–5:30pm
7:00 am to 5:30 pm
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Bonus Session B3 Software Testing—Reinvented for DevOps Preview
James Senecal, Tricentis
7:15 am to 8:15 am
Continental Breakfast—7:30am–8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Networking Events— Lean Coffee (7:30am-8:30am) | Test Lab (All Day) | Couch Sessions (All Day) | Genius Testing Bar (All Day)
7:30 am to 8:30 am
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STAREAST 2019 Virtual Conference
8:30 am to 6:00 pm

Wednesday, May 1 | 8:30am–5:30pm ET and Thursday, May 2 | 8:30am–5:30pm ET

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The annual STAR EAST Virtual conference will be streamed live from Orlando, May 1–2, 2019. The live content includes all five keynote presentations, select industry technical presentations, and interviews with...Read more

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Keynote K1 Creative Trespassing: Sneak More Imagination into Your Work and Get More Done Preview
Tania Katan, Creative Trespassing
8:30 am to 9:45 am

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...Read more

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Keynote K2 Cutting through the Hype around Continuous Testing Preview
Jeffery Payne, Coveros
10:00 am to 11:00 am

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...Read more

Visit the Expo—10:30am–2:00pm
10:30 am to 2:00 pm
Networking Break in the Expo—11:00am-11:30am
11:00 am to 11:30 am
Concurrent Sessions—11:30am–12:30pm
11:30 am to 12:30 pm
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Industry Technical Presentation ITP1 Camelot - How can you achieve usage based Feature/regression testing? Preview
Aseem Bakshi
11:30 am to 12:30 pm
What is usage based testing and how can it seamlessly integrate with your current testing process & your Organization? What is Exploratory testing and how it can measurably increase quality when used with other execution channels like classical automation or AI automation or manual? Choice between Crowdsource or Automation or AI automation or manual testing - which one makes sense? When? Speed of regression execution and the value that can add to the organization. How you can scale up and down with usage based testing as neededRead more
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Industry Technical Presentation ITP1 APIs Are Coming: Defending Westeros from an Invading Army of Defects Preview
Chris Colosimo, Parasoft
11:30 am to 12:15 pm

• Generate a massive army of data with a radical new approach to test data management • Prepare for the attack by using service virtualization and stateful simulation • Get a high-level view of the battlefield by aggregating quality data across your test automation practicesRead more

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Industry Technical Presentation ITP2 A Strategic Approach to Digital Commerce Testing Preview
Alan Ip
11:30 am to 12:30 pm
Discussions of an effective test approach for multinational eCommerce Projects Mitigation strategies for technical and project management challenges Successful roll-out of global eCommerce PlatformRead more
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Concurrent Session W1 How Do I Work with These Millennials? Attracting and Retaining the Next Generation Preview
Nikki Henry, Ladies Leading Ladies
11:30 am to 12:30 pm

Leaders 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...Read more

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Concurrent Session W2 Testing through the Ages Preview
Dorothy Graham, Software Test Consultant
11:30 am to 12:30 pm

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session W3 Data Curation: Refine and Shine Preview
Michael Hobbs, Dell EMC
11:30 am to 12:30 pm

We now live in a world where data is generated with every action taken. From buying groceries to walking the dog, we're generating data all the time, everywhere. Companies are starting to undertake harnessing that data efficiently for business cases, and that requires developing a process around data curation. This process must determine which data to curate, how to maintain curated data, and when to delete stale data. A robust data curation process agreed upon by stakeholders is essential to mining data effectively if you want to strike gold. Michael Hobbs will walk through the...Read more

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Concurrent Session W4 Postmodern Testing Preview
Jason Arbon, test.ai
11:30 am to 12:30 pm

The modern world of testing gets noisier, more fragmented, and more confusing every day. Postmodern Testing is an admission of the imperfect world we live in— a new test strategy framework for today’s agile, continuous, and multiplatform teams . Jason Arbon will outline strategies for identifying any given product’s testing needs, as well as prescribe how to efficiently combine different testing techniques and test automation tools to deliver a coherent, well-reasoned, and cost-effective method to the madness. Jason draws on his learnings from how Google tested the Chrome browser...Read more

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Concurrent Session W5 Agile Testing in a Waterfall World Preview
Kat Rocha, ACT/NRCCUA
11:30 am to 12:30 pm

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session W6 Automated Security Scanning for Your Delivery Pipeline Preview
Matthew Grasberger, Coveros
11:30 am to 12:30 pm

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...Read more

Lunch in the Expo—12:30pm–1:30pm
12:30 pm to 1:30 pm
Concurrent Sessions—1:30pm–2:30pm
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm
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Industry Technical Presentation ITP5 Continuous Testing Made Awesome with Sauce Labs Preview
Bill Meyer
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm
Overview of how to run your automated Selenium tests in the Sauce Labs cloud Decrease the amount of time it takes your suite to run by executing tests in parallel Ensure your apps work all of the time with functional testing on real devicesRead more
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Industry Technical Presentation ITP6 Testers Touring Tomorrowland Preview
H.Taz Daughtrey
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm
ASTQB's ongoing "Observatory" function tracking technical and professional trends Shorter-term challenges and opportunities: IoT, machine learning, autonomous systems Longer-term possibilities in cryptography, quantum computing, other disruptive technical and professional changesRead more
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Concurrent Session W7 The Who, What, Where, When, and How of Test Strategies Preview
Janna Loeffler, Carnival Corp & plc, Adam Satterfield, Anthem
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session W8 Timeless Testing Skills for Modern Testers Preview
Gerie Owen, Technology Strategy Research, Peter Varhol, Technology Strategy Research
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

As 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...Read more

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Concurrent Session W9 Big Data Migration to the Cloud: Testing Challenges and Strategies Preview
Sanjay Srinivas, Texas Capital Bank
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

Moving 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...Read more

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Concurrent Session W10 The Dell EMC Journey in the Age of Smart Assistants Preview
Geoff Meyer, DellEMC
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session W11 Dig In: Get Familiar with the Code to Be a Better Tester Preview
Hilary Weaver-Robb, Quicken Loans
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

Maybe 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...Read more

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Concurrent Session W12 Excuse-Free Testing: An Open Source Tool for Simpler CI Integration Preview
Klaus Neuhold, CA BlazeMeter
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

The 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...Read more

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Industry Technical Presentation ITP2 AI in Software Testing: Will a Bot Steal Your Spot? Preview
Wayne Ariola, Tricentis
1:45 pm to 2:30 pm

Join this session to learn: • Where AI can deliver the greatest impact to software testing • Whether AI will soon take over software testing • The next steps testers need to takeRead more

Concurrent Sessions—2:45pm–3:45pm
2:45 pm to 3:45 pm
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Industry Technical Presentation ITP8 Future Proof your QA Strategy: Tomorrow's Open Test Architecture Preview
Prashant Mohan
2:45 pm to 3:45 pm
How to build a seamless continuous testing experience vs integrations Key benefits of an architecture that is personalized to your organization End-to-end testing strategies that brings together people and processesRead more
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Industry Technical Presentation ITP9 Continuous Testing with Continuous Change Preview
John Boebinger, Alex Page
2:45 pm to 3:45 pm
Today's development teams are asked to build better code, faster This means that code must be tested more quickly causing teams to look at shift-left testing New tools are needed for shift-left testing to occurRead more
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Concurrent Session W13 By the Reader, for the Reader: The Wall Street Journal’s Secrets to Customer-Centric Experiences Preview
Sumeet Mandloi, Dow Jones
2:45 pm to 3:45 pm

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session W14 Game Theory: The Test Engineering Path to Success Preview
William Bell, Vocera Communication
2:45 pm to 3:45 pm

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session W15 Future-Proofing Test Engineers in the Era of ML and AI Preview
Eran Kinsbruner, perfecto
2:45 pm to 3:45 pm

We'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...Read more

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Concurrent Session W16 No One Really Cares about Testing: A Perspective from a Billion-Dollar App Team Preview
Andrew Bardallis, Target
2:45 pm to 3:45 pm

When is the last time you read a five-star review in the App Store or Play Store that raved, “This app is so well-tested! Their quality assurance team really knows what they’re doing. Their test automation must fit so well into their CI pipeline that they can find all sorts of issues in a snap”? The fact is most end-users don’t care about all the things we do in testing on a day-to-day basis. Instead, they care that our applications solve their problems in the way that they expect them to or in a new way that delights them. Andrew Bardallis will challenge you to first think about...Read more

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Concurrent Session W17 Fishbowl Discussion: Continuous Testing Preview
Adam Auerbach, EPAM Systems
2:45 pm to 3:45 pm
Many people confuse continuous testing with test automation. That makes sense, because you cannot do continuous testing without automated tests. But it is much more. It requires that all of the tests to certify a feature are automated, part of the continuous integration pipeline and the results of those tests determine automatically when the next step should be run. In this fishbowl session we will discuss how participants have enabled this process at their companies. We will discuss common pitfalls and how to avoid them. We will discuss how to move from automation to continuous testing and...Read more
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Concurrent Session W18 The Next-Generation Skills Needed for the Future of Testing Preview
Jeremias Rößler, retest, Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA
2:45 pm to 3:45 pm

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...Read more

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Industry Technical Presentation ITP10 The "Do Nots" of Testing Preview
Melissa Tondi, Rainforest QA
3:00 pm to 3:45 pm
Melissa will present the top five “do nots” that testers have introduced in to the industry. We will discuss these items in detail – why they were introduced and some of the mis-perceptions they have propagated. We will then discuss what to replace those “do nots” with and how those suggestions allow for a more innovative approach to the industry.Read more
Visit the Expo—3:30pm–6:30pm
3:30 pm to 6:30 pm
Networking Break in the Expo—3:45pm-4:15pm
3:45 pm to 4:15 pm
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Keynote K3 Lightning Strikes the Keynotes Preview
Nine Incredible Speakers, Lightning Keynotes
4:15 pm to 5:15 pm

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...Read more

Expo Reception & Passport Game Prize Drawings—5:30pm–6:30pm
5:30 pm to 6:30 pm
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Bonus Session B4 Powering Agile and DevOps testing with AI Preview
Rick Pandolfi, Siva Prasanna Vanapalli
6:45 pm to 7:45 pm

Agile and DevOps are driving precipitous compression of the software development life cycle: Release cycles are down to as little as a few hours. Concurrently, while accelerating many aspects of Software Engineering Deliverables, Agile and DevOps have also introduced increased and non-trivial points of failure. AutonomIQ and Marlabs have solved these issues for Customers and will show how AI driven testing coupled with leading Best Practices are driving more pervasive and reliable results across the software testing lifecycle in this rapidly changing era.

Mapping Test...Read more

Thursday, May 2

Morning Yoga/Morning Run—6:45am-7:30am
6:45 am to 7:30 am
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Bonus Session BT5 How to Choose the Best API Testing Solution for Your Organization Preview
Chris Colosimo, Parasoft
7:15 am to 8:15 am
Continental Breakfast—7:30am–8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Networking Events—Lean Coffee (7:30am-8:30am) | Test Lab (All Day) | Couch Sessions (All Day) | Genius Testing Bar (All Day)
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Registration—8:00am–5:00pm
8:00 am to 5:00 pm
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Keynote K4 The AI Testing Singularity Preview
Jason Arbon, test.ai
8:30 am to 9:45 am

Most 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...Read more

Concurrent Sessions—9:45am–10:45am
9:45 am to 10:45 am
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Industry Technical Presentation ITP11 Accessibility Automation for the Agile Tester Preview
Joshua McClure
9:45 am to 10:45 am
In a lot of ways, accessibility is talked about and practiced as if it is a hydra dragon. Every time you think you’ve made an improvement, you cut off one head of the accessibility dragon and two heads grow back. In particular, there are a lot of myths out there that you can’t do accessibility in an agile development environment. A lot of that stems from accessibility being thought of something you do manually, and also often only as user acceptance testing or usability testing. And while that’s an important part of accessibility, there is much more you can do to integrate accessibility into...Read more
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Industry Technical Presentation ITP12 2018's Fastest Growing Testing Tool Launch Announcement Preview
Rick Pandolfi
9:45 am to 10:45 am
How SDET's can leverage ChroPath 5.0 for Free. How AI is transforming Maintenance of Existing Test Assets How AI is transforming testing into a truly Autonomous Territory.Read more
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Concurrent Session T1 Are You the Best Leader You Can Be? Preview
Amy Jo Esser, ProAssurance
9:45 am to 10:45 am

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....Read more

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Concurrent Session T2 Where Does Data Come From? Preview
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA
9:45 am to 10:45 am

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session T3 Well, That’s Random: Automated Fuzzy Browser Clicking Preview
Paul Grizzaffi, Magenic
9:45 am to 10:45 am

Roughly speaking, "fuzzing" is testing without an oracle—essentially, testing without knowing what the outcome should be. We don’t know what should happen, but we have a good idea of things that shouldn’t happen, such as 404 errors and server or application crashes. We generally apply fuzzing to produce these kinds of errors when we’re testing text boxes, but why should text boxes have all the fun? Websites today are interconnected, multiserver applications that include connections to out-of-network servers, making it difficult to enumerate and control all the possible...Read more

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Concurrent Session T4 Disrupt Your Career and Discover True Quality Engineering Preview
Melissa Tondi, Rainforest QA
9:45 am to 10:45 am

One 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...Read more

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Concurrent Session T5 Leveraging Kubernetes as a Tester Preview
Glenn Buckholz, Coveros
9:45 am to 10:45 am

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session T6 Example Mapping: The New Three Amigos Preview
Thomas Haver, Huntington National Bank
9:45 am to 10:45 am

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...Read more

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Industry Technical Presentation ITP3 Agile vs. DevOps For Continuous Testing: How to Optimize Your Pipeline Preview
Eran Kinsbruner, perfecto
10:00 am to 10:45 am

Interest in continuous testing has been growing for five years now — yet the more we talk about it, the more polarized the discussion becomes. Complicating the conversation is the fact that Agile and DevOps both drive the need for continuous testing, but both require distinctly different things from a quality perspective.

Join me for a lively discussion on what’s really required for continuous testing in the context of Agile and DevOps. See live examples of how to maximize testing pipeline efficiencies and walk away with tactics you can implement today.

Eran Kinsbruner,...Read more

Visit the Expo—10:15am–3:00pm
10:15 am to 3:00 pm
Networking Break in the Expo • 10:45am-11:15am
10:45 am to 11:15 am
Concurrent Sessions—11:15am–12:15pm
11:15 am to 12:15 pm
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Industry Technical Presentation ITP4 Eliminate Waiting Times Within Continuous Testing Preview
Renato Quedas, Micro Focus
11:15 am to 12:00 pm

Wait time is the silent killer of faster application delivery and nowhere is this more true than in testing. You need to be “testing early and often” while simultaneously creating practices that standardize and automate processes so they’re easier to monitor and enforce. Join this session to see how to:

· Increase your DevTesters' efficiency in building and maintaining automation assets using multiple SDKs

· Remove bottlenecks that often slow down projects and damage quality

· Accelerate feedback and visibility over pipeline executionRead more

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Concurrent Session T7 The Reality Distortion Field of Testing Preview
Lloyd Roden, Lloyd Roden Consultancy
11:15 am to 12:15 pm

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session T8 What's That Smell? Tidying Up Our Test Code Preview
Angie Jones, Applitools
11:15 am to 12:15 pm

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session T9 Visual Regression Testing: A Critical Part of a Mobile Testing Strategy Preview
Dmitry Vinnik, Salesforce
11:15 am to 12:15 pm

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,...Read more

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Concurrent Session T10 The Era of Intelligent Testing Preview
Dan Belcher, mabl
11:15 am to 12:15 pm

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session T11 Building a Modern DevOps Enterprise Testing Organization Preview
Adam Auerbach, EPAM Systems
11:15 am to 12:15 pm

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session T12 Security Partners or Security Police? Preview
Janna Loeffler, Carnival Corp & plc, Yesenia Yser, Ultimate Software
11:15 am to 12:15 pm

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...Read more

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Industry Technical Presentation ITP15 Buy v. Build: 5 Things to Consider When Implementing a Mobile Device Cloud Preview
Steve Orlando, Mobile Labs
11:30 am to 12:30 pm
Learn about the benefits of a mobile device cloud for your testing lab Find out if it is better to buy or a build a mobile device cloud Discover the five questions you should ask when deciding whether to buy or buildRead more
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Industry Technical Presentation ITP15 Mindful Testing- Inhale discipline Exhale focus Preview
Meera Krishnan
11:30 am to 12:30 pm
Art and science of Yoga and its synergy with software testing Testing challenges in a digital world Convert your square wheels to round wheels with the third eyeRead more
Lunch in the Expo—12:30pm–1:30pm
12:30 pm to 1:30 pm
Concurrent Sessions—1:30pm–2:30pm
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm
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Industry Technical Presentation ITP20 How ALP transforms testing and reconnects QA with customers Preview
Elizabeth Choiniere
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm
What is ALP How ALP enables the entire team to be part of the SDLC process How ALP reconnects QA with customersRead more
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Concurrent Session T13 8 Ways to Ruin Your One-on-Ones Preview
Jason Wick, MakeMusic
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

As 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...Read more

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Concurrent Session T14 Testing in Production Preview
Talia Nassi, WeWork
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

How do you know your feature is working perfectly in production? And if something breaks in production, how will you know? Will you wait for a user to report it to you? What do you do when your staging test results do not reflect current production behavior? In order to test proactively as opposed to reactively, test in production! By testing in production, you will have increased accuracy of test results, your tests will run faster due to elimination of mock and bad data, and you will have higher confidence before releases. You can accomplish this through feature flagging,...Read more

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Concurrent Session T15 API Testing: Going from Manual to Automated Preview
Patrick Poulin, API Fortress
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

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.Read more

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Concurrent Session T16 JMeter and the Cloud: Scalability that is Affordable, OpenSource, and Fits in CI Preview
Glenn Buckholz, Coveros
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session T17 A Practical Guide to Testing in DevOps Preview
Katrina Clokie, Bank of New Zealand
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session T18 AI in Testing: A Moderated Panel Discussion Preview
Adam Auerbach, EPAM Systems, Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

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.Read more

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Industry Technical Presentation ITP19 Interactive Session: Creating Automated UI Tests Live & On The Fly Preview
Darrel Farris, mabl
1:45 pm to 2:30 pm

Start creating meaningful regression tests in minutes! Join our automation expert in a workshop where you will learn how to create robust automated functional UI tests with our all-inclusive mabl testing service. You'll create browser-agnostic, auto-healing tests, use them monitor your apps across your test and production environments, and run them at scale. Afterwards, we'll cover how machine learning pulls visual and performance regressions from your test results.Read more

Networking Break in the Expo—2:30pm-3:00pm • Closes at 3:00pm
2:30 pm to 3:00 pm
Concurrent Sessions—3:00pm–4:00pm
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm
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Industry Technical Presentation ITP12 DevOps for Leadership Preview
Gene Gotimer, Coveros
3:00 pm to 3:45 pm

Organizations and leaders are often supportive of DevOps, but they don't always understand what DevOps is and what it will change. It isn't a one-size-fits-all issue; different environments need different benefits from a DevOps transformation. Join Gene Gotimer as he shows how to determine what parts of DevOps your organization needs to concentrate on first and how you should define success. This isn’t all strategic, high-level thinking- there is plenty of tactical, “what is the next step?” planning on how to shape your delivery pipeline to work for your situation and organization.Read more

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Concurrent Session T19 How to Lead Without Authority Preview
Jolene Trzebiatowski, Delta Dental of Wisconsin
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm

Do you need to lead a project but have no level of authority? Is this the first time leading a project, but not sure where to start? Are you interested in potentially being a leader, but wondering what it takes? Leadership can come from many different roles within a company—regardless of title. Everyone wants to be the leader, but it’s not as easy as it appears. Parts of leading projects or teams can be challenging and at times requires tough conversations. Whether you are within IT or in another department, join Jolene for this session to learn tips to effectively lead a project through...Read more

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Concurrent Session T20 Using and Implementing BDD a Day in the Life Preview
Rick Faulise, tap|QA
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm

Learn 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...Read more

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Concurrent Session T21 Testing as a Service: Forming a Service-Oriented Testing Team Preview
Noha Gomaa, Aldo Group
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session T22 Testing Large Data Sets with Supervised Machine Learning Preview
Alireza Razavi, TD Bank
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session T23 Lessons Learned Automating Cloud and Infrastructure Testing Preview
Joseph Ours, Centric Consulting
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session T24 Full-Coverage Testing in Small-Business Environments Preview
Chad Jung, Renaissance Electronic Services, Curtis Severance, Renaissance Electronic Services, Kaleb Weddle, Renaissance Electronic Services
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm

In 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...Read more

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Keynote K5 Beyond Coding: Test Automation as Art Preview
Katrina Clokie, Bank of New Zealand
4:15 pm to 5:15 pm

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...Read more

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Concurrent Session T25 ENCORE Session Preview
5:30 pm to 6:30 pm

BRAVO! It's back by popular demand! Did you have a hard time selecting which session to attend? Wished you had participated in a great session you heard about? Talked with someone at lunch or a happy hour about a great presentation and you wished you could have been there? Your wish has come true! We know it's a challenge to cover all the great sessions at our conferences, so on Thursday afternoon, we will feature a repeat of one of the most talked about sessions from Wednesday. We want to hear from YOU which session you would like to have presented again. Drop by the TechWell Experience...Read more

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Leadership Summit Session SMT1 Reception: Summit Kickoff: As a Leader, What Is Keeping You Up at Night? (Summit Registration Required) Preview
Jeffery Payne, Coveros
5:30 pm to 6:30 pm

Kickoff the Testing & Quality Leadership Summit with a reception and some networking.Read more

Friday, May 3

Continental Breakfast—7:30am–8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Registration—7:30am–3:00pm
7:30 am to 3:00 pm
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Women Who Test
8:30 am to 3:30 pm

Women Who Test is a full-day event on Friday, May 3 for women to network with other women who work in software testing. It is also a day to learn from and be inspired by each other. The program will cover testing topics and will support women’s personal and career journeys and include content like: reengineering your life, growing your personal brand, setting goals, discovering your career superpowers, and how to problem-solve when you are a female in the tech industry where your gender is outnumbered 7:3. Join women test engineers, managers, CEOs, and consultants for some truly inspiring talks and fascinating group work. Registration is free for conference attendees, but you must reserve your seat in advance.Read more

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Testing & Quality Leadership Summit
8:30 am to 4:30 pm

At the 2019 Testing & Quality Leadership Summit, program chair Jeffery Payne brings together senior industry leaders for an interactive exchange of ideas and experiences. Each of these leaders brings a unique perspective to the table and will provide Summit participants with lessons learned and practical techniques for leading teams, addressing management challenges, and gaining senior management buy-in.Read more

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Bonus Session B1 The Workshop on Regulated Software Testing (WREST) Preview
John McConda, Moser Consulting, Jim LeBaron, MasterControl
8:30 am to 4:30 pm

Join us at The Workshop on Regulated Software Testing (WREST)—a free, full-day bonus session held on Friday after the conference concludes. A unique peer workshop, WREST is dedicated to improving the practice of testing regulated systems. We define regulated software as any system that is subject to an internal or external review. WREST relies on its attendees to make the workshop a success. There are no formal presentations, only experience reports with plenty of time designated for facilitated discussion. We hope to learn from each other by hearing the success and (especially!) failure stories of real practitioners who test regulated software. Have a problem you want input on solving? You can bring that to the workshop as well—just be prepared to participate! WREST is hosted by John McConda and Jim LeBaron.

NOTE: Limited seats are available. Reserve your seat when you register online for the conference or by contacting the Client Support Group at 888.268.8770 or [email protected] .Read more

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Bonus Session B2 The Mega-Actionable Continuous Testing Workshop Preview
Shamim Ahmed, CA Technologies, A Broadcom Company
8:30 am to 12:30 pm

If you’re struggling to understand how to implement Continuous Testing in your company, then this workshop is for you! In just four hours you’ll come away with a solid understanding of the three pillars to implementing Continuous Testing and the tools needed to be successful. Most importantly you’ll come away with your own action plan customized to your environment and current needs. Yes, that’s right! You will leave with a Continuous Testing strategy tailored to meet your team’s specific needs. During the course, you will respond to various questions as the instructor guides you and a...Read more