STAREAST 2021 - Test Transformation | TechWell

Conference archive

STAREAST Virtual 2021 - Test Transformation

Monday, April 26

Michael_Bolton
DevelopSense
MA

Critical Thinking for Software Testers

Monday, April 26, 2021 - 10:00am to 5:30pm

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 practice...

Chris_Loder
Upland InGenius
MD

Test Automation: Start and Succeed

Monday, April 26, 2021 - 10:00am to 1:30pm

Many organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems as their product matures and changes over time. 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 added value? Chris Loder explains the critical issues you need to know to get a good start, and he will share his extensive experience in building great automation. He covers the most important management issues you should address for test automation success,...

Richard Mills
Coveros
MH

A Hands-on Intro to Docker for Testers

Monday, April 26, 2021 - 10:00am to 1:30pm

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...

Tariq_King
test.ai
Jason_Arbon
test.ai
MI

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Skills for the Testing World

Monday, April 26, 2021 - 2:00pm to 5:30pm

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...

Melissa Benua
mParticle
MK

Test Design for Fully Automated Build Architecture

Monday, April 26, 2021 - 2:00pm to 5:30pm

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...

Adam_Auerbach
EPAM Systems
MM

Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization

Monday, April 26, 2021 - 2:00pm to 5:30pm

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...

Tuesday, April 27

Chris_Loder
Upland InGenius
TE

Automation Framework Essentials

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - 10:00am to 1:30pm

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...

Mike_Sowers
Coveros
TF

Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - 10:00am to 1:30pm

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...

Jennifer-Bonine
AI Appstore, Inc.
TH

Testing Transformation: The Art and Science for Success

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - 2:00pm to 5:30pm

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...

TM

Holistic Performance Testing for Modern Applications

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - 2:00pm to 5:30pm

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

Manisha Mittal
Nagarro
W12

Visualizing the Futuristic View - Testing Serverless Applications

Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - 2:15pm to 3:15pm

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? ...
Jagdish Karira
Ciber Global, LLC
W17

Psychological Safety: Bad News Does Not Smell Good with Time!

Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - 3:45pm to 4:45pm

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...

Saurayan-Chaki
Deloitte Consulting LLP
Mythili Venkat
Deloitte Consulting LLP
W18

Moving Quality to the Cloud

Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - 3:45pm to 4:45pm

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

Safiya Bano
Salesforce
T1

Audit Your Automation: Key to a Successful Test Strategy

Thursday, April 29, 2021 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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:...

Lisette Zounon
Zsquare Solutions Inc
T2

Are You Ready for AI to Take Over Your Automation Testing?

Preview
Thursday, April 29, 2021 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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:

Determine if your automation strategy can leverage AI tool Discuss the learning curve and mindset shift necessary for your QA team to embrace AI Tool Discuss success case study of using AI tool as part of automation testing Leverage AI tool in your CI/CD environment Discuss...
Harshal Vora
QMetry Inc.
T4

Implementing DevOps and Better Quality Releases with Continuous Testing

Preview
Thursday, April 29, 2021 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Mark Minson
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
T7

Shift from Manual to Automation

Preview
Thursday, April 29, 2021 - 1:00pm to 2:00pm

In 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...

Joel Montvelisky
PractiTest
T8

Orchestrating Your Testing Process - Coordinating Your Manual and Automated Testing Efforts

Preview
Thursday, April 29, 2021 - 1:00pm to 2:00pm

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...

Paul Herzog
Devbridge
T9

Simplicity - The Path to Agile Testing Efficiency

Thursday, April 29, 2021 - 1:00pm to 2:00pm

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...

T12

The Theatre of Exploratory Testing: Going Off Script

Preview
Thursday, April 29, 2021 - 1:00pm to 2:00pm

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...

John-Hill
Ansible by Red Hat
T19

Life After Selenium

Thursday, April 29, 2021 - 3:45pm to 4:45pm
Selenium has been the unchallenged leader in open source UI testing since 2004. As the web evolved, Selenium adapted and abstracted. This abstraction came with a cost and now UI testing is rightly understood to be “slow” and "flaky". Test automation architecture was shaped into “pyramids” to avoid this performance penalty. QA could not shift left because our results were too slow or unreliable. A lot has changed since 2004 and there are now open source alternatives that will make you change your framework as well as your test strategy.
In this presentation, we'll demonstrate the inherent...
AgreeYa BeatBlip
T20

A Winning Approach To Test Automation that Guarantees Both Speed and Quality

Thursday, April 29, 2021 - 3:45pm to 4:45pm

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...

Friday, April 30

Jaimee Newberry
Picture This Clothing
WWT1

Tool Builders for Life

Friday, April 30, 2021 - 9:30am to 10:45am
There is a secret power behind the tools we use every day to get our jobs done in the technical realm. Throughout our lives and careers, we can apply these tools to a host of problems that need solving, not only in our work but in our every day lives. In this talk, Jaimee will share how the practice of being a tool builder by trade equipped her with the skills needed to build a ladder to climb out of a very dark place and into a completely new career working with people she loves working with, doing the most fulfilling work of her life.

 

Melissa Benua
mParticle
WWT2

Planting the Seeds of a Healthy Organization

Friday, April 30, 2021 - 11:00am to 12:00pm

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,...

Alison Wade
TechWell Corp.
WWT3

The Year of Change!

Friday, April 30, 2021 - 1:00pm to 2:30pm

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...

Tania_Katan
Creative Trespassing
WWT4

Creative Trespassing: How to Quiet Imposter Syndrome and Start Believing in Yourself!

Friday, April 30, 2021 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

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...

Alison Wade
TechWell Corp.
WWT5

Panel—Career Superpowers

Friday, April 30, 2021 - 3:45pm to 4:30pm

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.