STAREAST 2021 - Software Tester | TechWell

Conference archive

STAREAST Virtual 2021 - Software Tester

Customize your STAREAST 2021 experience with sessions for software testers.

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...

Tariq_King
test.ai
MC

Unit Testing: What Every Developer and Tester Should Know

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

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...

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

Michael_Bolton
DevelopSense
TA

X-Ray Vision For Testers: How to Analyze Things

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - 10:00am to 5:30pm

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...

Byron_Katz
Coveros
TB

Introduction to Selenium

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - 10:00am to 5:30pm

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...

Tariq_King
test.ai
TC

Testing Strategies for Microservices

Tuesday, April 27, 2021 - 10:00am to 5:30pm

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...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
TD

Web Security Testing: The Basics and More

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

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...

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...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.Com, Inc.
TJ

Test Estimation in the Face of Uncertainty

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

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,...

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...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
TL

Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps

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

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...

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

Rob Lambert
Cultivated Management
K2

10 Ways You Can Thrive in Your Testing Career

Preview
Wednesday, April 28, 2021 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

For 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,...

Adam Sandman
Inflectra
W9

APIs – Security & Performance – How to Avoid Getting in the News!

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

From 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...

Jeremie-Garnier
Cisco Systems
W10

From Hardware to Software: Cisco's DevOps Journey

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

DevOps was born of a simple problem - a lack of culture / sharing in a company, especially between the world of developers and the operations teams. Now that everything is becoming programmable and the world of technology is moving very fast, this gap exists between all functions within a company. In this session, I will talk about the last 4 years at Cisco, where I started and ran a company initiative to move our DevOps culture forward through community management, organizing unconferences and sharing best practices. I will also provide an update about where we are in our DevOps journey...

Dionny Santiago
test.ai
W14

AI for Continuous Testing

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

Software development teams are constantly challenged by increasing demands for new features, shorter times to market, and quicker turnarounds for testing fixes. To cope with these pressures, teams are leveraging methods for continuous deployment and shifting testing to the right -- towards production. Daily pushes are gated by pre-production unit and integration tests while the rest of the testing now happens in production. However, traditional test automation strategies do not effectively adapt to quickly evolving, highly dynamic systems and environments. Thankfully, AI-driven testing...

W15

Testing a Data Science Model

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

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:

...

Thursday, April 29

talia-nassi
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
K4

Things I Wish I Knew Before Becoming a Test Engineer

Thursday, April 29, 2021 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

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:...

Valentin Guerlesquin
National Bank of Canada
T3

Dynamic Test Environments for Continuous Testing

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

Continuous Testing initiatives cope with several issues, some of them are highly linked to environments and test data. End-to-end environments do not allow on-demand deployments, since they are usually shared across other applications and used by manual testers. Using dynamic environments, which means on demand environment created from scratch for test execution, will help to resolve both these issues: to remove the collision with manual testing or other applications, and to control test data available for testing. During this presentation, I will do a live demonstration of a continuous...

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...

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...

kimberly snoyl
Capgemini/Idean
T18

UX Testing in Agile Development

Preview
Thursday, April 29, 2021 - 2:15pm to 3:15pm

UX 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...

Travis Davidson
Magic Leap
T22

The Reality of Testing in Spatial Computing

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

In this session I will review the techniques and complexities of testing spatial computing and mixed reality applications and devices. This new frontier of computing will introduce participants to a new way of testing applications in an endless world of reality. Spatial computing brings 3D reality into our homes, office, and environments to bring enriching experiences. The variation of light, location, and room size can bring challenges that we didn't have to face when presenting the information on a screen. Lean how these new technologies are creating a new paradigm in testing and...

Chris DeMars
Quicken Loans
K5

Accessibility in the Enterprise: The Relationship of A11y and ROI

Thursday, April 29, 2021 - 5:00pm to 6:00pm

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

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.