STAREAST 2019 - Tutorial | TechWell

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STAREAST 2019 - Tutorials

Full- and half-day tutorials are consistently the most popular and highly rated part of the conference. Tutorials allow you to take a deeper dive into a specific topic so that you can learn to make improvements to everyday processes in the areas that matter most to you.

Monday, April 29

Michael_Bolton
DevelopSense
MA

Critical Thinking for Software Testers

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

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...

Seretta Gamba
Freelancer
MB

Driving Lessons for Test Automation Managers

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Isabel Evans
Independent Consultant
MC

Fundamentals of Testing Requirements

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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,...

Tariq_King
Ultimate Software
MD

Unit Testing: What Every Developer and Tester Should Know

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Chris_Loder
InGenius Software
ME

System-Level Test Automation: Ensuring a Good Start

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Bob Galen
Vaco
Mary_Thorn
Vaco
MF

Agile Testing: Team Tactics that Deliver the Goods

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Melissa_Benua
mParticle
MG

Test Design for Fully Automated Build Architecture

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Lloyd_Roden
Lloyd Roden Consultancy
MH

Pairwise Testing Explained

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Dionny Santiago
Ultimate Software
MI

Blockchain Quality: Securing Trust in a Digital Age

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Adam_Auerbach
EPAM Systems
MJ

Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Julie_Gardiner
Independent Consultant
MK

Getting a Grip on Cognitive Adaptive Testing

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Isabel Evans
Independent Consultant
ML

Influence Diagrams: A New Way to Understand Testing

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Bob Galen
Vaco
Mary_Thorn
Vaco
MM

Test Automation Strategies for the Agile World

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Tariq_King
Ultimate Software
MN

Testing Strategies for Microservices

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

MO

Testing Leadership IQ

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Lloyd_Roden
Lloyd Roden Consultancy
MP

From User Story to Test Case

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Angie Jones
Applitools
MQ

Clean Coding Practices for Test Automation

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Monday, April 29, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Tuesday, April 30

Graeme_Harvey
PlanGrid
Hilary Weaver-Robb
Quicken Loans
TA

Being Technical Enough: Learn Technical, Testing and Leadership Skills that Let You Soar

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

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 keep...

Michael_Bolton
DevelopSense
TB

X-Ray Vision For Testers: How to Analyze Things

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

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...

Max_Saperstone
Coveros
TC

Introduction to Selenium

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

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...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
TD

Web Security Testing: The Basics and More

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Dorothy Graham
Software Test Consultant
Seretta Gamba
Freelancer
TE

Technical Test Automation Challenges: Patterns and Solutions

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Isabel Evans
Independent Consultant
TF

Taking Test Design Techniques Beyond Planning

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Tariq_King
Ultimate Software
Jason_Arbon
test.ai
TG

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Skills for the Testing World

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Bob Galen
Vaco
Mary_Thorn
Vaco
TH

Agile Test Team Leadership: From Concept to Product

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.Com, Inc.
TI

Test Estimation in the Face of Uncertainty

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Mike_Sowers
Coveros
TJ

Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Julie_Gardiner
Independent Consultant
TK

Test Data: Mining, Morphing, Managing and Maintaining It!

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Wilson Mar
JetBloom
TT

Bash Scripting with Git and GitHub for Open Source Contribution

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

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...

Angie Jones
Applitools
TL

Visual Validation for Test Automation

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

TM

Testing Transformation: The Art and Science for Success

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
TN

Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Melissa_Benua
mParticle
TO

Continuous Testing Using Containers

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Gene Gotimer
Coveros
TP

Virtualization and Containers for Automating Web Testing

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Dawn Haynes
PerfTestPlus, Inc.
TQ

How to Break Software: Robustness Edition

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Isabel Evans
Independent Consultant
TR

Shift Left to Test User Experience

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Hans_Buwalda
LogiGear
TS

Better Test Design for Great Test Automation

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Tuesday, April 30, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...