STAREAST Virtual 2021 - Test Strategy, Planning, Metrics
Monday, April 26
A Hands-on Intro to Docker for Testers
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...
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Skills for the Testing World
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 that still...
Tuesday, April 27
X-Ray Vision For Testers: How to Analyze Things
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...
Introduction to Selenium
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. Byron Katz 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. You will be introduced to practices and principles that apply to the whole team. You will write Selenium scripts in two languages, Python and Java, and will...
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...
Test Estimation in the Face of Uncertainty
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 thinking,...
Develop and Refine Your Company Testing Strategy
Every quality director wants to implement a modern, forward-looking testing strategy, and many test managers look to other companies to figure out the "magic bullet" for achieving excellent quality quickly and reliably. But the truth is that everything you need to know about your best test strategy is already in your company. In this workshop you will use your quality priorities, strategies, and code base as the foundation for defining and improving your testing strategy. You’ll work individually and in small groups to examine your current testing structure and methodologies, perform risk...
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
Stacking The Automation Deck
Arranging the playing cards in a deck to be in one’s favor is called stacking the deck. Outside of card playing, we use the term more generally to mean arranging a situation to increase our chances of a favorable outcome. When it comes to automation endeavors, the meaning is no different. Specifically, we want to arrange our architecture, implementation, and usage patterns to be appropriate for our endeavor’s desired life-span. One approach to future-proofing is to focus less on the automation framework and more on the automation stack. An automation stack is a layered automation...
APIs – Security & Performance – How to Avoid Getting in the News!
PreviewFrom large scale data-breaches, major system-wide outages and executives being hauled in front of Congress, failure to adequately plan and carry out API performance and security testing will definitely make the front-page news.... not in a good way. This session will discuss the present a comprehensive strategy for performance and security testing of your APIs, it will include best practices for security testing and vulnerability assessment, as well as approaches for adequately testing the performance and scaleability of your APIs. It will include some real-world case studies of...
Visualizing the Futuristic View - Testing Serverless Applications
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!
How do we test the serverless applications?How is this different from the native app?What are the differences between the traditional & serverless apps?How do we test the code which is running in some server which we do not manage?How are we going to test the lambda functions? ...
Flow Model vs Page Object Pattern
PreviewThe Page Object Pattern is widely known and used amongst Test Automation Engineers. It allows engineers to model the application for their tests, reusing certain elements, making the test solution more structured and hence decreasing maintenance cost and the learning curve of test automation. Working at large fintech and other companies, Peter got to realize: for some, Page Object is not intuitive. From a tester's point of view it could be improved. Moreover, it breaks the Single Responsibility principle, which has been one of its most criticized flaw. That's why the Flow Model...
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
Audit Your Automation: Key to a Successful Test Strategy
Auditing the test automation suite reduces the cost of maintenance and ensures that the key areas are prioritized which in turns improves the quality of the product. “Automating a user story is part of Definition of Done”. “Automate the complete backlog”. “Regression tests should be automated”. How many times have we heard these lines? And during the process of working through the backlog, there comes a point when maintaining the automated tests and looking through the daily failures become more overpowering than working on new tests itself. This is because of the one fundamental myth:...
Valuing the Customer: Wagile Product Development
PreviewDo your new products launch with mediocre market reception? If so, your innovation process might be to blame. Traditional waterfall processes become bureaucratic while Agile systems have not delivered on their promises, either. New product development fails due to poor product designs and misunderstanding of the markets. Enter “Wagile” New Product Development. Wagile is a hybrid product development process that engages customers throughout the product design cycle while ensuring project execution meets internal requirements for scope, schedule, and budget. Implementing wagile leads...
4 Strategies to Champion Quality
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...
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...
Orchestrating Your Testing Process - Coordinating Your Manual and Automated Testing Efforts
PreviewDue 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...
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...
Tales of Testing in Production
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...
Accessibility in the Enterprise: The Relationship of A11y and ROI
As we build more and more things on the web, accessibility is gaining much more visibility. But what does it actually mean to you and your company? It means we HAVE to be cognizant of everyone, all the time, with no exceptions as we do our part in building awesome, accessible user experiences to people of all levels of ability while being mindful of our users' diversity of disability. Accessibility on the web is not a nice-to-have, but a requirement: leaving out at least 20% of your audience can be detrimental to your organization's return on investment and bottom line. Not sure what to do...