STAREAST Virtual 2021 - Concurrent Sessions

AI is here to stay and we know it’s going to change our world. There is so much information about AI that, it’s hard to know where to start, what to learn , what to ignore and what to believe. How do we tester’s cope up with this new technology and will this technology bring an end to our field of work? Join Aprajita Mathur as she shares basics of AI and where this technology stands today, what problems are being solved by it and why AI is not just about “ Test Bots” or “Robotics”. She will discuss how testers add/can add value in AI, what testing skills are transferable when working with...

There is often no time to load testing or make changes to the code when the load testing is pushed to the end of the development cycle. It results in catastrophic effects where the business delays the release or spends more funds to fix the problem after the software delivery. Also, the traditional and legacy load testing approaches are either outdated or too slow to give instant results in the era of agile software development. Therefore, to provide speedy delivery, accuracy, and confidence in your software, this presentation will explore and fit load testing as a part of...

The goal in most test automation is for it to run fast, fail fast, and get answers fast. But not all testing can, or should, be instant. Systems that use long running processes or workflows by design require polling-style testing that could take minutes, hours, or even days. In this session, Douglas will demonstrate using AWS Lambda functions with DynamoDB to create a serverless test monitor for polling long-running systems. He will also explain the benefits of using a serverless approach to create an “always available” testing tool to free up resources for other critical tasks....

Did you know that 20% of federal ADA & 508 lawsuits now mention violations in mobile apps? There’s legal precedence now on maintaining compliance across all digital properties. As an example, the DOJ ruled against H&R Block, citing non compliance of both their web and mobile apps. Same fate for Dominos Pizza. Does your organization have an ADA compliance strategy for your mobile applications? Attend this session if you want to learn about the ABCs of accessibility testing. We will cover the WCAG 2.0 and 2.1 standards. Discuss whether you should target Level A, Level AA, or Level...

DevOps was born of a simple problem - a lack of culture / sharing in a company, especially between the world of developers and the operations teams. Now that everything is becoming programmable and the world of technology is moving very fast, this gap exists between all functions within a company. In this session, I will talk about the last 4 years at Cisco, where I started and ran a company initiative to move our DevOps culture forward through community management, organizing unconferences and sharing best practices. I will also provide an update about where we are in our DevOps journey...

Speed is the name of the game now as we strive to deliver new features faster to end-users. When it comes to building and delivering the software faster - speed, quality, security, business growth, end-user satisfaction, and cost control also play an important role in driving success.Testing is important!

Software development teams are constantly challenged by increasing demands for new features, shorter times to market, and quicker turnarounds for testing fixes. To cope with these pressures, teams are leveraging methods for continuous deployment and shifting testing to the right -- towards production. Daily pushes are gated by pre-production unit and integration tests while the rest of the testing now happens in production. However, traditional test automation strategies do not effectively adapt to quickly evolving, highly dynamic systems and environments. Thankfully, AI-driven testing...

Performance testing isn’t the first thing organizations think about when moving to DevOps – in fact, it’s often ignored as traditional approaches don’t jive well with the fast and nimble world of DevOps. However, performance is still a critical part of the user experience, and poor performance and outages will quickly negate the value of the features you’re delivering. Lee believes that organizations don’t have to gamble with application performance. He will discuss techniques for implementing continuous performance testing in your pipeline, so you don’t have to roll the dice on your user...

We all know that Artificial Intelligence is here and here to stay. Most teams are wondering how to leverage AI for their automation. In this session, Lisette will cover a case study on how to successfully leverage Artificial Intelligence in your automation strategies.  Attendees in this session will take away:

DevOps is the hot cake in every sector and organizations are rethinking their tools, processes and culture in tune with DevOps. But DevOps is just as much about quality as it is about speed. While companies have adopted automation well and show figures like 75% automated regression tests, there is one catch. They are still unable to catch defects early enough. For companies that practice Agile and DevOps, testing has now become a part of the dev team’s role. But since testing has many dependencies like SIT, realistic data for UAT and interface responses, testing is not completed as...

Testing without a strategy or plan will always lead to missed opportunities to infuse quality earlier and often. As software leaders, you may be surprised to find that even today testing can still be an afterthought. From poor requirements or documentation, lengthy test cycles, flaky or bloated test automation suites, this issue can surface in many ways. In this talk, Erika Chestnut, Head of Quality Assurance at Calendly, will share how she is leading her organization to think more broadly about quality. In addition, she will...

Due to many historical reasons, most testing and even development organizations, approach their manual and automated testing efforts independently. What’s more, when you look closer at these teams, you notice that even within their automation efforts they are using a number of different testing frameworks, running independently and without much thought around coordination, coverage overlaps or functional dependencies. This approach needs to change. Teams are releasing products faster than ever, and this means that we need to make every testing effort count, including everything from...

Controlled rollouts, or canary releases, allow you to release your features to a small subset of your user base at a time to ensure functionality before releasing it to your entire user base. Its a fundamental piece of having an effective CI/CD pipeline, and essential to chaos engineering because you can roll out features to production, test them in production, and ensure functionality and reliability. However, this process on mobile comes with some challenges. How do you propagate feature flagging configuration to mobile devices that don't always have a strong network? As a mobile...

Ask a handful of testers to define exploratory testing. Some will respond that it’s simply poking around - try something, see what breaks, and then try something else. Many will identify it as an iterative process of learning and experimentation. But ask about what makes exploratory testing hard, and you find that practitioners are challenged in knowing where to start, what to test, when to stop, and how to know if they’ve found a bug. What makes for good exploratory testing? Join Philip as he examines the techniques of the actors of the Commedia dell'Arte, the 16th century approach...

A testing team (approximately 150 testers) was significantly downsized (60%) due to unforeseen external conditions (COVID 19) and initially production releases and project scope were reduced. However, scope of work for the reduced team unexpectedly increased due to business “reopening” with many new and modified requirements to facilitate rapid business resumption. The new requirements were more dynamic and brought many significant changes to the business functionalities. The reduced testing team responded to the challenge by successfully managing multiple releases / projects while having...

Software testing challenges us to find faster and more effective ways to assess risk to our users and the systems that support those users. Those faster and more effective risk assessments require compromises between available time, equipment capacity, market viability, and our desire to provide great results to our users. This talk uses experiences from 6 years of maintaining, testing, and delivering the Jenkins git plugin as a way to highlight the complications and the compromises involved in software testing in production environments and in widely varied environments. This is an...

UX Design takes place prior to the development phase. UX Testing, using data, takes place after the product is already built (e.g. using tools like Google Analytics). Kimberly Snoyl will give us her take on UX Testing and the possibilities it has. As a tester, her work is to make sure the designed product is built correctly according to the requirements in the development phase. "In my opinion, testing focuses too much on functionality instead of ensuring the end user is happy with the product and can use it effectively and efficiently." In this interactive talk I will give my take...

We all know that test automation can work wonders. It can help organizations reduce cost, save time and effort, get quicker feedback, etc. thereby directly contributing to increased productivity and maximization of profits. However, not many organizations succeed in their automation quests. Often automation starts with a big promise and ends in frustration, budget overrun, or both. Join Amit Sikka as he investigates why many Software Test Automation journeys don’t go far enough or don’t deliver the value they promise. During this interactive session, Amit will also dive into the steps and...

In this session I will review the techniques and complexities of testing spatial computing and mixed reality applications and devices. This new frontier of computing will introduce participants to a new way of testing applications in an endless world of reality. Spatial computing brings 3D reality into our homes, office, and environments to bring enriching experiences. The variation of light, location, and room size can bring challenges that we didn't have to face when presenting the information on a screen. Lean how these new technologies are creating a new paradigm in testing and...