STAREAST Virtual+ 2020 - Concurrent Sessions

How many times did you hear - legacy systems are not a good fit for Agile transformation? Have you ever said it yourself? I want to tell you a story of a digital transformation in Premier to prove you wrong. Agile is not only a great fit for the legacy applications, it an absolute business necessity, because how else can you provide incremental value for hundreds or thousands of users through a flexible adjustable roadmap? My story is not going to be about an immediate success. We've had our fair share of problems, challenges, and small failures. "Legacy" means "old". It means - outdated...

Transactional testers are experts in exposing weakness in multi-tier solutions, but they sometimes run into trouble applying their web-based experience to new microservice API solutions. New risks are present, and old risks have shifted around. REST APIs are naturally scalable, robust cloud-based technologies, but converting multi-tier applications to a microservice design exposes new risks in operation order, payload dependency, and stateless system. Rob Sabourin will share his experience in applying test planning, design, and implementation strategies to ferret out critical microservice...

Too often, technology teams are still operating with a barrier between the development and testing personnel. These teams should have the same mission: high-quality software that meets business objectives and is delivered on time, within budget. These barriers frequently seem insurmountable, but the reality may be that bringing developers and testers together is as simple as starting a conversation, sharing both the challenges they are striving to overcome and the victories they seek. Stephan Marceau will share the data and outcomes he has consolidated by observing more than 50 projects in...

How do you inspire developers, testers, and teams to improve their testing practices and code quality? Have you ever wanted to provide greater visibility into your quality practices? Join Janna as she talks about one way you can help inspire teams to not only improve testing and quality practices, but drive and own that change. She’ll talk about how gamifying your quality practices and modding your role as a tester can build a community and a culture of quality. In today’s age of agile development and DevOps, software development has truly become a social activity. So we need to stop...

The startup world is fast, demanding, and challenging. In order to be on top of the market in the software industry, most of the time a startup needs to move fast and ship even faster, while also fighting with budget and ROI issues. As a QA leader, how do you survive in this hostile environment and keep up with this crazy speed? How do you set realistic goals for yourself, your department, and your organization? Priyanka Halder will walk you through her tried and tested formula to succeed in a startup environment. Learn how to avoid feeling burned out, leverage and motivate your whole team...

The agile landscape is always evolving. One of the newest trends is the "shift left" approach, where testing is performed as early and as often as possible in the project lifecycle. If done correctly, shifting left enables teams to highlight poor design, provide quicker feedback to development, review progress sooner, and provide quicker turnaround on customer feedback. Unfortunately, many teams lack the discipline, time, or strategy to actually get out of their current rhythm and shift left. As testers, we yearn for the ability to test early with confidence, so we have time at the end of...

Testing is the final step prior to launch, and as a result, testing timelines are often compromised to meet overall project timelines. Under these circumstances, a risk-based testing strategy becomes the status quo to roll out the product with minimal priority issues. To leverage risk-based tests, teams have traditionally relied on a tester-centric approach by focusing on the testers' subject matter expertise, the application's defect-prone areas, and frequently executed test cases. However, we now have an opportunity to enhance and transform our risk-based testing approach to be more user...

It's a fact of life that we often have to write automated UI tests for features that have defects, or that interact with 3rd party APIs that aren't returning the right responses, or for items that we know aren't working right. When the team has decided that the behavior isn't going to be fixed, what's an automation engineer to do? Let the tests fail? Not write them? Champion harder for the defects? Jenny suggests writing your tests to pass. By creating tests that pass on the current expected behavior (the defect), we are in a perfect position to tell when the defect is resolved, or the api...

Solving scaling issues with an application that has high traffic can be hard if load testing was not done (or was done without adequate planning). To ensure proper load testing of an application, it needs to be broken down into stages: 1) Analysis: Document how your system is currently behaving in production, including its system metrics such as average load, CPU, latency, and traffic, in order to pre-define the application's service-level agreement. 2) Test strategy: Test scripts to match production use case patterns, and choose a load testing framework. 3) Testing and...

How do you know your feature is working perfectly in production? 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? If you want to test proactively as opposed to reactively, try testing in production! By testing in production, you have increased accuracy of test results, your tests will run faster due to elimination of mocks and bad data, and you will have higher confidence before releases. You can accomplish this through feature flagging, continuous...

A software test is no better than the data that drives it. Fuzz testing is a great way to find buggy, exploitable, or otherwise bad code—and if you’re working with a native application that operates on file input, it’s a solved problem. Grab an all-in-one suite, hit go, and profit! But what about web services? What about managed applications? For a service-based developer, fuzz testing your HTTP serving layer isn’t all that interesting if you’re running on the latest version of Apache. Fuzz testing your application along its interface boundaries, though? Very interesting—and not a problem...

There's been a lot of discussion around leveraging AI and machine learning (ML) for testing software, but seemingly less on how to test and provide QA for an AI- or ML-driven application. But Lauren Pehnke was faced with doing just that for a product that would combine natural language processing, computer vision, and image classification to drive ranked search results. She will outline the research on AI and ML she did before taking on this role, including basic vocabulary for the variants of AI involved and interesting AI "failures" to better inform what areas of the process would...

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 will moderate this panel discussion—which will include Jason Arbon, Jennifer Bonine, and Tariq King—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.

Build pipelines are expected to be green all the time. So how do you test your automation in your build systems without impacting the build itself? Where does automation fit into a build pipeline? At what stages of the build pipeline should I be running my automation? Join Janna as she walks through configuring your own build pipeline using YAML and Docker to test your automation and application before committing it to the main build. Using GitLab.com, she’ll walk you through some of the basics of Git, Docker, and YAML so you can configure your own build pipeline. These tools and...

Docker is the most popular containerized solution being used in the software industry for development. Like any other test automation tool, however, implementation can get complicated, tricky, and unmaintainable if all you understand is the record-and-playback features or think it is the same as using a virtual machine. Whether you are already using Docker for your automation needs or plan to start using it soon, join Aprajita Mathur as she shares her journey of using Docker for testing complex and constantly evolving data analysis pipelines. She will discuss basic concepts of...

This summer, a Young Women in Tech code camp was held in Columbus, Ohio, for members of the Bhutanese–Nepali refugee community. More than a dozen experts in technology volunteered to teach girls ages 13 to 17 about career options within technology, including computer programming, accessibility, user-centered design processes, cyber security, photo editing, software development, and desktop management. The training was supplemented by college admissions officers providing education guidance and a course on resume building, and the entire camp was sponsored by a local community college and...

Even sophisticated businesses struggle with software testing. End-to-end (E2E) testing, though vital, has remained a costly and inconsistent method of catching bugs. But there’s a light at the end of this tunnel. Advances in machine learning (ML) have increased test execution speed and stability. Now, technologies are emerging that allow machines to analyze live user traffic to produce test cases—using data to focus E2E testing on what users care about. In time, these technologies will be stitched together to allow machines to own the entire E2E testing process. This seismic shift...

If you ask a business leader which features in a given software release are most critical (and which potential failures keep them up at night), chances are they'll be related to the UI. But with many testing teams spending up to 80% of their time on regression testing, how can you make time for the resource-intensive tests that verify these high business value features? Many testers struggle to understand what questions to ask the business and business leaders related to this topic. Additionally, testers struggle with understanding how to identify risk areas and partner with their...