STAREAST Virtual 2021 - Developer
Customize your STAREAST 2021 experience with sessions for software developers.
Monday, April 26
Unit Testing: What Every Developer and Tester Should Know
Do you want to take your testing skills to the next level? Are you trying to stay relevant on an agile team where testing is shifting to the left on the project timeline? Do you want to help your organization reap the full benefits of testing earlier? Then join Tariq King to explore the fundamentals of unit testing so you can find bugs as soon as they happen and do more thorough, targeted testing during software development. This introductory session is for everyone—of all programming skill levels. Learn how to apply program-based techniques such as testing by looking, automated unit...
Test Automation: Start and Succeed
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,...
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...
Test Design for Fully Automated Build Architecture
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...
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...
Testing Strategies for Microservices
Software development is trending toward building systems using small, autonomous, independently deployable services called microservices. Leveraging microservices makes it easier to add and modify system behavior with minimal or no service interruption. Because they facilitate releasing software early, frequently, and continuously, microservices are especially popular in DevOps. But how do microservices affect software testing and testability? Are there new testing challenges that arise from this paradigm? Or are these simply old challenges disguised as new ones? Join Tariq King as he...
Wednesday, April 28
The Power of Mocking APIs
Thursday, April 29
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...
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 and Mixed Reality
As per Gartner, by 2023, the number of differently abled people employed will triple due to AI and emerging technologies, reducing barriers to access. Artificial intelligence (AI),Augmented Reality(AR),Virtual Reality(VR) and other emerging technologies have made work more accessible for differently-abled people. Many of us are quite aware of such immersive technologies and how these technologies are changing businesses and human lives. In addition to this, there is one special area where AR/VR could be quite useful, and this area is Accessibility. We will discuss few use cases on how this...
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...
Friday, April 30
Tool Builders for Life
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,...
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...
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...
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.