STAREAST Virtual 2021 - Test Leadership
Monday, April 26
Critical Thinking for Software Testers
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 practice...
Differentiated Management: Building Stronger Teams
Hiring and team-building are two significant issues faced by every quality manager or director. However, what happens once you have hired your team? How do you keep valued members on board and help struggling members to become better, all while continuing to manage your organization and meet deliverables? During this highly interactive workshop, you will learn how to differentiate content, process, and products by learning more about employee readiness, interest, and lived experiences. You will participate in a role-playing game and will work as a team to practice each of these skills. The...
Tuesday, April 27
Automation Framework Essentials
Automation is critical in today’s software delivery lifecycle, and yet many organizations struggle to keep their automation running. How can we mitigate difficulties and get consistent automation runs and results we can trust? The secret is implementing a solid automation framework, but that isn’t as easy as it seems. Chris Loder has built several automation frameworks over his career and has learned what works—and, more importantly, what doesn’t. This tutorial will cover what an automation framework is, the benefits of having one, and the keys to a successful framework, including...
Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics
To be most effective, leaders—including development and testing managers, ScrumMasters, product owners, and IT managers—need metrics to help direct their efforts and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important evaluation activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, the progress and results of both development and testing must be measured. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because developers and testers often are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he...
Testing Transformation: The Art and Science for Success
Technologies, testing processes, and the role of the tester have evolved significantly in the past few years with the advent of agile, DevOps, and other new technologies. It is critical that we testing professionals evaluate ourselves and continue to add tangible value to our organizations. In your work, are you focused on the trivial or on real game changers? Jennifer Bonine describes critical elements that help you artfully blend people, process, and technology to create a synergistic relationship that adds value. Jennifer shares ideas on mastering politics, maneuvering core vs. context...
Holistic Performance Testing for Modern Applications
With the advent of frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue, the landscape of application performance has changed significantly in terms of testing and measurement. Gone are the days of measuring response time as a single value based on back-end performance. In modern web and mobile applications, additional layers need to be peeled apart at the front end to truly understand its performance characteristics. Traditional approaches to performance testing are no longer sufficient to provide a delightfully responsive user experience. Join Kaushal Dalvi as he details new developments in the...
Wednesday, April 28
The F Word: Great Feedback in Dev Teams
After presenting my session “Eight Ways to Ruin Your 1-on-1s” at Stareast and SQuADCon in 2019, attendees told me one particular area of discussion needed more attention: feedback. This session will be the session everyone knows they should attend but would like to avoid! Providing feedback is a necessary skill for individuals, teams, and organizations to grow, yet studies suggest 69% of managers are uncomfortable communicating with their employees and 37% of business leaders are afraid to give performance feedback. Although these numbers only address managers, we all need to show...
Psychological Safety: Bad News Does Not Smell Good with Time!
We have lived through the traditional Command and Control culture where leaders used to “shoot the messenger”. Leaders would say, “Don’t Bring Me Problems, Bring Me Solutions!”. If leaders cannot handle the truth nobody will tell them the truth. High-Performance Teams build complex business solutions with high quality. Most often they are successful on their first try but sometimes they need to learn from experimentation. In these cases, it is better to deliver bad news than bad product. For team members to share bad news they must feel safe to share reality. If Organizational Culture does...
Moving Quality to the Cloud
In today's world, organizations are either born in the cloud or moving to the cloud. How they succeed will depend on their strategy and approach to operating in the cloud. One of the key elements for the success of such organizations, is testing and more so, Quality Engineering. We will discuss different Quality Engineering approaches or methodologies required by organizations that are adopting the cloud, whether migrating applications from on-premise to the cloud or maintaining a hybrid model or building it all in the cloud. This will cover various cloud deployment models, with inherent...
Thursday, April 29
Shift from Manual to Automation
PreviewIn today's market, good QA employees are hard to find. What if you need to do more but still have manual testers on the payroll. There are two options: Lay them off or train them up. Laying them off then means you have to find someone to fill their position who can do the automation but at the same time, all of that valuable product knowledge walks out your door. We had the same problem. We decided to train them up. We didn't have a budget for bringing in training or sending our QA's out to coding classes. Instead we took the few of us who had software development degrees/experience...
Simplicity - The Path to Agile Testing Efficiency
The pace of an Agile project creates demands efficiency in all testing techniques and processes. Traditional approaches run counter to this efficiency and must be changed during the Agile transition. Join Paul as he applies the Agile Manifesto Principle #10: “Simplicity – the art of maximizing the amount of work not done - is essential” to distinguish what past testing practices work and don’t work to clean out the clutter of the non-working. He will identify common process traps when adopting Agile methodologies, suggest priorities that are most important to Agile testing, and present...
Controlled Mobile Rollout with React Native
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...
Test Management in Agile—What Happened to All My Testers?
Substantial confusion exists about the roles and responsibilities of test management when using an agile software development process. Agile seeks to streamline project management and leadership under the role of a ScrumMaster. But what does this mean for test managers? How do they stay involved in the process? What role do they fill? Is it possible that test managers are no longer needed? Join Jeffery Payne for a collaborative dialog to discuss the pros and cons of a variety of test management models he has seen used by companies who have adopted agile. Learn how to best position yourself...
Chaos Journey of GitOps
We will share our journey on how me make progress on application resiliency. We will share how we transform from monolith base chaos to Micro service and later on the container-native platform, Kubernetes. We will share how we build solutions for specific resilience patterns, later converge in open source framework, and Later started using kubernetes native way of CRD. We will share how we use Chaostoolkit, and extend that framework to cater our needs. We will demonstrate how this work been to migrate from as service to container-native way using Litmuschaos. We will share how we use Argo...
Testing Leadership Adaptability and Resilence To Meet Unforeseen Conditions
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...
Want to Be a Manager? What No One Tells You About It
You have now successfully lead multiple projects for your team. You know you’re ready to be a manager but your organization disagrees or maybe you have already made the jump. You have seen good management in action. You also know of all the mistakes your previous managers have made and you are certain you won’t make them. Think again. Whether you’re looking to grow into a management role or you’re a new manager, what skills should you learn and grow so that you do not fail brilliantly at this new role? Join Aprajita Mathur as she shares her journey into management. What no one told her and...
UX Testing in Agile Development
PreviewUX 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...
Creating a QA Department Out of Nothing
We will discuss the following areas that need to be addressed as you take on the opportunity. You could write the test cases in word or excel but why when there are so many free tools or minimally expensive tools out there. We will discuss the different tools available and how to compare and write a proposal to deliver to management. After a certain amount of time you will need help. Should you hire contractors, full time employees, or a mix of both? We will discuss the pros and cons. As you are hiring and then have the people secured it’s important to put the right people on the right...
Friday, April 30
Tool Builders for Life
Opening Remarks
Welcoming remarks from Leadership Summit Moderator, Jeffery Payne to kick the Summit off and discuss the days agenda.
Do Not Assure Quality, Advocate for it!
As software testing professionals, we know there is never enough time for testing. There are always going to be those issues and bugs that slip through the cracks and out into production. Many times, this is because there was something that we could just not control in order to assure quality. Even if we could control everything, could we still really assure quality? Exhaustive testing is never possible for large-scale applications meaning we will always have to assume some amount of risk. As testing leaders, it's time to stop trying to assure quality and start advocating for it. Only...
Planting the Seeds of a Healthy Organization
Nurturing a strong, vibrant engineering culture takes work. There's no magic bean you can plant and then expect caring and collaboration to spring, fully-embodied, from the ground. What are the seeds that grow into a healthy organization? How do you plant them, care for them, and let them bloom into a self-sustaining culture that people love to work in - and that excels at getting things done? Melissa has been an engineering leader (and a gardener) for quite some time, and is excited to share her experiences in planting and tending to blossoming teams of software professionals that,...
Perceptive Leadership
When I was a new leader, I spent a considerable amount of time figuring out what I needed to learn to become the type of leader who created the best experiences possible for my team. Many books, articles, and speakers emphasized having empathy and high emotional intelligence. These were often described as fundamental traits you either had or didn’t have. It took years of practice and experience to fully understand not only why these skills matter for great leaders, but also how to develop them, apply them, and get better using them every day. I learned these skills (and more) were at the...
Think Tank Discussion Part I—Problem Definitions
Join with your peers in an engaging and highly interactive session to discuss the issues that affect you most. Using answers to the question “As a Leader, What is Keeping You Up at Night?”, participants will form small groups to work on finding solutions to pressing test management issues. Discussions will review identified issues, barriers to change, and focus on innovative strategies and practical next steps. At the end of the think tank, all feedback will be collected and posted online to encourage further collaboration.
The Year of Change!
We interrupt your regularly scheduled life to bring you 2020 AND 2021! Over a year of unprecedented unknowns and uncertainty. Many of us have faced countless challenges in our personal lives and in our careers and frankly, it is hard to not feel STUCK! In order to get unstuck, we must learn what to do to bring about personal change. How can we identify the changes we want to make and then find new ways to make those changes? Let’s talk about the steps we need to take to intentionally shift our mindset and habitual patterns that may be holding us back. Join Alison for this interactive...
Think Tank Discussion Part II—Leadership Solutions
Based upon the problem definitions developed during Part I of the Think Tank, small groups will brainstorm on how to best solve these challenges, leveraging the collective wisdom of peers and Summit speakers. Each group will designate a representative to present its results and practice delivery.
Creative Trespassing: How to Quiet Imposter Syndrome and Start Believing in Yourself!
Many of us have an inner voice telling us we lucked out and that’s the only reason we’re leading the team or running the meeting and, if people got a closer look, surely they would see: WE ARE A FRAUD. That’s normal; the problem is when we believe it. Tania Katan, bestselling author, creative disruptor, and champion of women will show you how to transform imposter syndrome into impossibly awesome! Sharing her personal experiences and offering a blend of inspiration and practical advice, Katan will offer a guide to help you move beyond self-doubt and use creativity as fuel for a freer and...
Think Tank Discussion Part III—Presentation of Results
Small group representatives will each be given five minutes to present their leadership solutions. Summit participants will vote on which group produced the best solutions.
Panel—Career Superpowers
Let’s discuss and define the most important career superpowers for women. Hear what industry professionals, leaders, and idea disruptors think the important career superpowers are for women in 2021 and going forward.