Conference Schedule

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...Read more

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:...Read more

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...Read more

Do 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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more