STAREAST Virtual 2021 - Quality Assurance
Customize your STAREAST 2021 experience with sessions covering quality assurance for software developers or testers.
Tuesday, April 27
Web Security Testing: The Basics and More
Web applications are often security critical or serve as front-ends for security critical applications, making web testing for vulnerabilities an essential part of software testing. Unfortunately, most software testers have not been taught how to identify web security issues while testing applications. Join Jeffery Payne as he shares what you need to know to security test web-based applications as part of your overall testing process. Learn about the most common web security vulnerabilities and how they are introduced into web code and exploited by hackers. Explore test techniques for...
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,...
Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps
In many organizations, agile development processes are driving the pursuit of faster software releases, which has spawned a set of new practices—DevOps. DevOps stresses communications and integration between development and operations, including rapid deployment, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Because DevOps practices require confidence that changes made to the code base will function as expected, automated testing is essential. Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the unique challenges associated with integrating automated testing into continuous integration/continuous...
Wednesday, April 28
The Human Factor of Testing
What does a crash in your app mean if it just happens to one person? Not a lot, usually! But what does it mean if that app is their only way to communicate with the outside world? Or--what does even a minor defect in your app mean when it’s supposed to be safeguarding the health of your community? It can degrade your user's trust and make them less likely to use your app. There are many defects that are easy to categorize as low priority but how does the context of the app change your reaction to defects? This is the human factor of testing—the way that our users and their use cases...
10 Ways You Can Thrive in Your Testing Career
PreviewFor many testers, their careers are directed by others. Without proper thought and consideration about where we want to go, we could end up somewhere we don’t want to be. Rob Lambert will explore some of the ways you can instead learn to thrive in your testing, tech and management career—learning, improving, helping others, accepting help, and building a diverse set of in-demand skills. He will share ten ways he’s uncovered to enjoy your journey as you progress through your career: paint a picture for the future, build a simple knowledge management system, seek out diverse ideas,...
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...
The Power of Mocking APIs
Serverless Testing: Executing Long Running Test Automation
PreviewThe 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....
Automation Using Geb/Spock/Groovy and a Geb Page Object Generator
PreviewSuze will go over the general introduction to the Geb/Spock/Groovy Automation solution as a layer of abstraction over Selenium/JUnit4/Java. She will also teach the technique and advantages of Page Object Modeling where she will demonstrate a simple Geb Page Object and the associated test that runs against the google.com web search pages. Suze will then introduce a tool that she created that reads web pages and creates the application page's Geb Page Object and a test class that contains some basic tests. She will discuss the advantage this gives that allow you to accelerate your...
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...
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...
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? ...Testing a Data Science Model
Laveena has heard from other senior testers that they know of data science teams but no testers testing the models. How do we have enough confidence what is produced is good enough? A model is a statistical black box, how to test it so we understand its behaviors to test is properly. Main aim would be to help inspire testers to explore data science models. Laveena invites you to her talk where she will share her journey of discovering data science model testing and find the following takeaways useful not just for testing a data science model but day to day testing too. Key takeaways:
...Continuous Performance Testing in DevOps
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...
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
Things I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a Test Engineer
Being a test engineer comes with unique challenges. It is unlike other engineering positions because of its holistic approach. As the subject matter expert in your field, you are expected to know your product's details from end to end, but there are process changes and culture changes that would have made my life a lot easier. There are processes that each company I have worked at does differently, and in this talk, I will share them with you so that you understand what to do and what not to do. Through my testing experience, I have learned foundational concepts that I wish I had known...
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:...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Using Testing to Learn Design Techniques
There are many similarities in a design and testing workflow. Designers and testers work towards a user goal and towards delivering quality apps. Find out some techniques used by designers to gather a complete research, turn it into actionable items, and measure its success. Some of these approaches are similar in concept to a tester’s approach. At the end of this talk you can use some of these methods to make your product features more user-centric with research to back it up.
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.