STAREAST 2022 - Concurrent Session | TechWell

STAREAST 2022 - Concurrent Sessions

Concurrent sessions offer attendees the flexibility to explore a variety of topics throughout the conference on Wednesday and Thursday in order to customize their learning experience. Learn both enterprise foundations and new methodologies to grow your skills, supercharge your knowledge, and re-energize your career growth.

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Wednesday, April 27

Eran-Kinsbruner
Perforce
W1

Cypress Advanced Capabilities Declassified for Efficient Cross-Browser Test Automation

Preview
Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Cypress is the fastest growing test automation framework for cross browser testing and it's open source. It has a ton of benefits for developers and test engineers, but also some very advanced and cool capabilities that by knowing them - practitioners could enhance their productivity and test coverage volume. To name a few - interception and network control, visual testing, cloud executions, plugins are a subset of such abilities that organizations need to be familiar with. In this session, Eran Kinsbruner, DevOps Chief Evangelist and best selling author will walk through the top...

Leandro Melendez
K6-Grafana
W2

ALL the Ways AI Can Be Leveraged in QA

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

In these days of Machine learning initiatives where organizations are focusing on leveraging AI to ease the automation process, many others forget all of the other areas it can impact. Leandro will give you many other perspectives on how AI and Machine Learning can aid in test automation and the holistic approach to all the practices that make it possible to Assure Quality in our environments. He will show you how to leverage multiple areas from tracing, observability, test cases, defect logging, defect resolution, etc. Best of all, as usual, Leandro will turn the presentation into a light...

Steampunk
W3

Test Your Unit Tests: Mutation Testing

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Even if your code coverage is 80%, how much confidence do you have in your unit tests? Are they catching the edge cases? Can you fearlessly refactor? Add new features? Perhaps you are writing code that another team will rely on (or worse, you have to rely on!) Or maybe you have to untangle some ugly spaghetti code and want some idea of what it does before you start chopping it up. A mutation testing framework like PIT from pitest.org tests your JUnit tests and shows you what you are and aren’t testing. If your unit tests all pass, mutation tests make changes to a copy of your source code...

W4

What's New in Chromium and Other Tools in 2022

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

It is 2022 and the number of open source frameworks, tools and libraries available is mildly reminiscent of the shovel sellers during the gold rush. With a new tool or framework cropping up almost every other week, it is near impossible to keep up and do meaningful evaluations for your use-cases without losing your sanity. And eventually, FOMO starts to creep in. If this feeling sounds familiar to you, join Kaushal Dalvi in this session as he goes over what is new in 2022 from a web performance perspective and goes over scenarios and situations where some of the shiny new toys can...

Janna_Loeffler
mParticle
W5

Congratulations! You're a leader! Now what?!

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

You’ve done it! You’ve finally gotten into that leadership position, whether it be a test lead, test manager, or even test director. Now what? You’ve gotten to this point because of your technical skills. Always one to jump in and fix things or get things done. However, now your job is people. You’ve gone from doing the testing to leading people who do the testing. What does this mean for you? In this talk Janna will talk about the transition from individual contributor to leader. What do you do when the skills that got you here aren’t the same as the skills that you need to be a good...

Ebenezer Ikonne
Cox Automotive
W6

Testing Thoroughly Requires Safety

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Repeated software incidents led to system downtime, lost revenue, and a decrease in customer service. Team debriefs revealed that many of these incidents were preventable failures that occurred because (a) a lack of psychological safety on the team, (b) testing was considered the sole responsibility of testers, and (c) the team did not anticipate and prepared for what could go wrong. We first had to foster a psychologically safe environment where team members felt free to discuss obstacles to testing, such as a lack of environmental parity. A safe environment enabled the team to identify...

Iryna Suprun
Xandr
W7

Not Your Testing Tool

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

When we talk about testing and tools we usually mean test automation tools but what if there is more? What if there is a much wider spectrum of tools that can help us to improve quality (and find bugs)? Have you ever thought about secrets your monitoring tool can share? How google screen reader can improve the quality of your app? What is hidden behind those warnings in logs? If not - let’s talk about tools. About not testing tools. I often feel that testers miss a bunch of useful tools that can help to spot issues when not actively testing. These tools can be used by anybody in the team...

Deloitte Consulting India Pvt Ltd
Mradul-Kappor
Deloitte Consulting LLP
W8

Quality Assurance Evolution and Analysis with AI / ML

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

In this age of explosive technological acceleration, cognitive technologies are converging to redefine how knowledge is synthesized, disseminated, and analyzed.New Technology platforms and tools, new methodologies with shorter development time and a constant demand to remain competitive and innovative has put the focus back on how testing is being carried out. We have seen usage of cognitive technologies in automation and performance test which helps achieve a level of auto-healing capability. It has been observed that testing teams have evolved to cope with demand and are using AI based...

Megan-Hutchinson
QualityWorks Consulting Group
W9

Let’s Get Basic: Manual Testing is the Beginning

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm
VIRTUAL ONLY

Manual Testing has been looked down upon since the emergence of automation testing, although it is it’s building block. However, this presentation will return to the basics and remind individuals why Manual Testing is important and the tools that can be used to record these types of tests. Manual testing is not rigid, meaning there is more flexibility when it comes on to executing the test cases, individuals don’t need extensive coding experience or any coding experience at all. Furthermore, manual testing involves an analytical mindset and can assist in developing an individual's...

Yoosuf-Maktoum
Sysco Corporation
W10

Automate and Measure the Performance of Customer Journeys

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

In today's modern digital world, where Customer Experience is the key - Application performance – is in demand and a crucial success factor like never before. Traditional transaction-based performance measures are not sufficient to ensure a swift digital customer experience. Performance measuring of customer journeys has become vital as it builds confidence and reliability in the application/system under test. There are multiple challenges in measuring customer journeys' performance - diverse operating systems, devices, and geolocations etc., will account for hundreds of scenarios to be...

Mark Minson
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
W11

Creative Brain Breaks for the Office

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

A notion of eras past is that while at work, people should be focused on work only. But times have changed and bringing games into the workplace can provide the X-factor your team has been missing. This isn't gamification of work. This isn't video games but board, card and role-playing. The goal is to get employees away from their desks and monitors but keep their minds engaged. Most games involve strategic thinking, adjusting to changes on the fly and often collaboration with the added benefit of fun. I will talk about virtues of specific games (Ticket To Ride, Flux, D&D and others...

Western Digital
W12

How SDETs & QEs Can Step Up and Empower Their Dev Teams

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Test automation and ensuring quality are traditionally the responsibilities that fall under QEs and SDETs – the PO defines & scopes the capability and business value, the developers create the feature, and then SDETs create the test automation and perform comprehensive testing to ensure high quality. Nowadays, this approach has become agile and iterative, but it mostly stayed the same - the SDET or QE usually carries most of the weight when it comes to testing and ensuring quality. It is now time to evolve the role that SDETs and QEs play to become that who empowers the team from...

PatientPoint®
W13

Let's Get Serious About Test Automation | Architectural Approach

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

There are many layers and aspects of software that can and should be tested automatically. Apart from testing software functionality, we can automate testing for performance, accessibility, API layer, visual layer, cross-browser and cross-platform, data, links validation, security, etc. To do all of it and to ensure that the appropriate pieces are tested with the suitable tools, on the proper infrastructure, and at the right time we need an architectural approach.

Automated testing solution is a complex system in itself, so planning, design and development of it should follow the...

BrightInsight Inc
W15

Component and Contract Testing: A True Shift Left in Microservices Architectures

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Are you struggling to see the true benefit of shift left in your microservices architecture ? Do you ever wish you had some checks in place before developers would check-in their code ? Block having a build until issues/defects are fixed? If so, then the answer is to have component tests followed by contract tests. Join Yesh Veera as he teaches you how to implement and perform component testing. You'll traverse up the classic testing pyramid until you reach above component tests to discover a contract testing framework. If that hearing this excites you then come see for yourself how to...

Leandro Melendez
K6-Grafana
W16

Modern Performance Assurance - Panel

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Performance testing has been under-appreciated for a long time, even nowadays. The organizations that notice its importance often do not know how to embrace it or are stuck in ancient practices from the past. On top of that, the wide variety of actions relevant to performance has expanded. We don't look anymore only at testing and doing load automation. We need to assure excellent performance in our applications! Ensuring performing applications includes more than just load-testing. We must instrument, monitor, improve automation creation times, pipeline performance, enable continuous,...

Modern Woodmen of America
W17

Maturing Your QA Practice in a Rapidly Evolving Development Landscape

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

You are in charge of Quality Assurance at an Organization. Maybe it is new to you, to the organization, or what was previously there just wasn’t working and needed a revamp. Many of us are challenged to build or mature QA in a rapidly and ever-changing software development landscape. Join me for a case study in building QA from *almost* the ground up including challenges and maturity along the way. We will cover how to define capabilities and offerings for your team that are agonistic to the software development methodology and is tool agnostic. We will discuss how to chart your QA team...

LitheSpeed
Raj Indugula
LitheSpeed
W18

Overcoming Gherkin Anti-patterns for Manageable, Durable, and Valuable Test Code

Wednesday, April 27, 2022 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Gherkin holds the promise of being an easy to implement and easy to understand tool for getting teams to be Test Driven. And it should be. But in our experience working with and coaching many teams, we have found significant differences between theory and practice. Too often, Gherkin scenarios result in test code that is difficult to understand, difficult to maintain, and not valuable. We will go over the following anti-patterns and discuss strategies to overcome them:

Scenarios that focus on UI implementation rather than expected behaviorScenarios that are too long and too...

Thursday, April 28

Mala-Punyani
Splunk
T1

Why Salesforce Test Automation Shouldn’t Be Painful

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 9:45am to 10:45am

In this talk, Mala will share a holistic view of the challenges of traditional software testing in the complex Salesforce testing ecosystem and provide a roadmap for leaders to overcome implementation roadblocks in partnership with R&D teams. Mala will demonstrate how an investment of a DevOps solution with a Sauce Labs integration helped her agile team achieve time reduction of up to 50% for overall flow, while doubling release velocity without additional headcount. If you are a manager looking to scale end-to-end testing coverage and/or wondering how to make your Salesforce test...

Adam_Auerbach
EPAM Systems
T2

AI in Testing and Testing AI: A Moderated Panel

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 9:45am to 10:45am

Synergies among AI and software testing include both leveraging AI for test automation, and devising methods for testing AI systems. Researchers, software vendors, and practitioners are already using AI to develop a new wave of test automation tools. These tools automatically explore, model, reason, learn, and test software applications. However, as with most AI and ML-based technologies, these tools raise concerns around whether or not we really trust and depend on them. ML-based systems tend to be highly dynamic and adaptable at runtime, thereby requiring extensive testing both offline,...

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
T3

Best Practices for Testing Your Serverless Applications

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 9:45am to 10:45am
VIRTUAL ONLY

This talk is about applying best practices of testing to your serverless applications. Serverless technologies allow you to focus on building your application by reducing the work you do managing infrastructure. You'll learn how to overcome the challenges of testing in a serverless architecture, and how to efficiently test your Lambda functions efficiently. This includes unit testing, integration testing, and end-to-end testing. After this talk, you will gain an understanding of the benefits of using the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) CLI to test code manually, and verifying...

Chris_Loder
Upland InGenius
Melissa Benua
mParticle
T4

Breadmaking and the Art of Data-Driven Model-Based Testing

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 9:45am to 10:45am

Are you short on testing resources but not short on things to test? Is your current test case creation effort exclusively like baking artisanal hand-crafted sourdough? Do your tests rely on data? Does your test team understand what that your product’s data looks like and how to use it? Melissa and Chris will show you how solid data models can drive solid data driven testing in your automation. They draw on their years of experience and share how you can generate test cases from your actual data models, run those test cases at scale, and validate - using the power of oracles - to ensure...

CP Rail
T5

Testing in the Context of DevOps

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 9:45am to 10:45am
VIRTUAL ONLY

DevOps aims to reduce the distance between development (software developers and quality assurance specialists) and operation (experts responsible for rolling out software to production and managing the infrastructure). The goals of DevOps are to increase the speed of software delivery process, to resolve critical issues quickly, and to enable organization to serve their customers better. These goals indicate that in DevOps, quality assurance, in general, and testing, in particular, should be looked at differently as compared to traditional testing and even agile testing. Specifically, the...

Lisette-Zounon
Zsquare Solutions Inc
T7

What are your Automation Strategies?

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

Everyone in your organization has probably discussed automation at least once. But who is responsible for automation? and what are the automation strategies for your organization? Several factors should be considered before jumping into automation. In this session, I will cover what to consider for your automation strategies because it always depends on your organization and what you are trying to achieve.

Attendees in this session will take away : - identify your automation framework - Determine what automation testing infrastructure - Deciding which tests to automate among...

HCL
T8

Raiders of the Lost AppSec

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

Remember the Indiana Jones movies? For those in infosec and security trying to navigate these days seems a lot like those movies. For instance, right from the very start of the series, we are shown how defense-in-depth is not enough - or have you forgotten that Indy escaped with the idol? Or how about how many of us, trying to keep up with threats, can relate to Indy, when going after a truck, said “I don’t know, I’m making this up as I go!”? And can't we ALL relate to trying to find the Security Holy Grail to help manage and mitigate risk – and felt the pain and scars from someone...

Derek Ashmore
Asperitas Consulting
T9

Testing Infrastructure Code: Best Practices and Common Mistakes

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

With the cloud, infrastructure such as networking, security, virtual machines, and much more is entirely software code now. Instead of manually creating cloud environments for applications and making changes, administrators write code to do that work. When changes are needed, that code is enhanced and re-run. Just like application code, infrastructure code needs to be tested. After all, code that introduces defects into existing environments can put developers, testers, and even end-users out of service. That said, most organizations do not adequately test infrastructure code. Anybody in...

QualityWorks Consulting Group
T10

Improve Test Maintenance and Coverage with Data-Driven Testing

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

Imagine this... You are an automation engineer and you are tasked to automate a workflow in an application that has multiple entry points for different inputs. What is the most efficient way you could ensure that you have all the test coverage that is needed per permutation and that you will be able to easily manage the test data? We know that maintaining test data for automation can be tedious and creating different test cases using different types of test data can be time-consuming. These issues can be solved by separating test data from test scripts. Whether you're a beginner or senior...

Lucid Software
T11

A Manual Testers Performance Review Process

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

Manual testing is a role that is often misunderstood which leads to difficulty in providing fair, unbiased, meaningful, and informative performance reviews. This talk will share a system for manual tester performance reviews that has been created by manual testers, for manual testers. It is a system that is designed to empower, support, and encourage manual testers to grow, learn, and feel like they have a meaningful career. Our team worked together to build a framework that allowed for a granular assessment of a variety of testing related skills, but one that could still be easily fit...

T12

Modern Test Automation Strategies - A Panel

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

Love it or hate it, test automation drives a large part of our day-to-day lives as testers. But writing and maintaining software automation doesn't HAVE to be painful! Learn from a panel of automation experts - including Janna Loeffler,  Adam Auerbach, and more - about how their teams have built reliable automation tooling and infrastructure that can stand the test of time. Moderated by Melissa Benua, the panel will answer YOUR questions about and help you address the challenges that we all face when scaling our test automation to match modern continuous delivery needs. You...

Péter Földházi
EPAM Systems
T13

Tri-Layer Testing Architecture

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Designing a proper architecture for building your test automation solution is one of the most important knowledge and experience a Test Automation Engineer may possess. The Tri-Layer Testing Architecture gives a good overview on how to design test solutions easily and quickly. About a decade ago people with advanced knowledge were building test automation frameworks with essentially two separate layers: Test Scripts and Test Libraries. The problem with this Bi-Layer architecture is reusability in other applications, specifically the size and complexity of test libraries along with the...

Abraham Marin-Perez
Equal Experts
T14

How to Manage Multiple Test Environments in a Hyperconnected Cloud World

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

The advent of the cloud came to give us testing superpowers: one properly configured Kubernetes file and one can easily spin up a bunch of Docker containers that faithfully represent the production environment. However, with ease of use comes abuse, and the proliferation of test environments is beginning to be a real headache to many organizations, both in terms of management and cost. Abraham has suffered this first hand, and from his experience at the trenches a number of strategies have materialized: universal feature flags, meta-automation, and test environment rationalization. These...

Equal Experts
T15

Embracing Collaborative Chaos: Running Chaos Days on Large Platforms

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm
VIRTUAL ONLY

Chaos Engineering reduces the impact of component failure. Chaos Days (aka Game Days) are one practice within this field, whereby controlled failures are used to learn and improve system and team response. We will describe how to run a Chaos Day on a large microservices platform, using our experience of doing this across 60 teams, 1000 microservices. The session will explore why you’d run a Chaos Day, and how to know when you and your platform are ready to do so. We’ll share our learnings of the actual mechanics of running one: how do you plan, execute and retrospect a Chaos Day. We’ll...

Thomas-Haver
Red Green Refactor
T16

The Rise and Benefits of Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a term given to technology that allows developers to programmatically emulate the actions of a human to execute a business process. RPA often operates on the user interface (UI) layer to capture data or interact with an application or across multiple applications to perform tasks that are considered repetitive or time-consuming. Originally focused on business processes, many RPA solutions now integrate with testing tools. While the promises of easy adoption and scaling are made by almost every vendor, the reality is long-term commitment to an RPA program...

Journal Technologies
T18

My Testing is a Reflection of My Developer's Unit Testing

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm
VIRTUAL ONLY

Having worked with many developers in my 25-year history in Quality Assurance, when I determine my test plan, I must consider the Unit Testing my Developer has completed. Given the request for speed and agility in testing, we must consider the level of testing and experience of our developer to best plan the depth of testing and the direction of the testing we must complete. Questions I must ask myself: Do I have prior knowledge of the developer's unit testing? Is a demo from development to QA part of our team's Agile Methodology? How clearly can the developer communicate her approach...

T19

Defining Test Automation Requirements Through Recordings

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Most organizations have gone away from the concept of record & playback as their preferred automation method. The early failures of this approach to automation years ago has left significant doubt that this can be used as a primary method of automation. Instead, automation engineers may rely on manual test cases that outline what needs to be done, review a business requirements document, or analyze a design document. Why can’t recordings help not only fill these requirements, but also provide the foundation for automation engineers to work from? The recorders of today are so much...

T20

Enhance AppSec Maturity and Outcomes Using DevSecOps Metrics

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Building a mature AppSec program is critical to the success of any product in managing the most vulnerable areas of the application. How can we ensure that the DevSecOps pipeline implemented is working effectively? The paper answers them by highlighting the key measures for every CISO to monitor and track the effectiveness of the AppSec maturity. The effective outcomes were measured by tracking 6 key metrics to validate if DevSecOps is successfully implemented. When done right, DevSecOps goes well beyond “shifting security left” to “shifting security everywhere” ensuring application is...

federico-toledo
Abstracta
T21

How Do You Help Motivate Testers?

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Anyone can do testing, but only good and motivated testers can do great testing. The mindset of a tester is different from that of anyone else in a software development team, and so are their motivating factors. There are special difficulties to confront in our undervalued field that we must be aware of if we want to keep the motivation of our testers high. In order to help testers grow, we must take proper care. I started out as a tester, led a team of testers, and now, I am leading test leaders. I want to share my experiences and the lessons my fellow team leaders and I have learned...

Julie_Gardiner
Independent Consultant
T22

Importance of When: How to Effect Change in Your Team

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Have you ever been in the situation of having lots of ideas to improve software quality, but your project team seems less responsive? Does your team struggle to work well together? Already got lots of actions to take from the conference and you don’t know how these changes will be received? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then this session is for you. Join Julie Gardiner as she shares ways of getting your message across and how to help play to people’s strengths to make your team work more efficiently and effectively. She shares a communication style model and how the...

T23

Role of Testers in Agile / DevOps Environment

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm
VIRTUAL ONLY

The role of a tester is bigger and expandable beyond time-boxed sprints. As much as the Test First mindset starts from sprint planning, it is important for testers to be tech-savvy to support the tested code successfully released into production. And behold, close out with Smoke testing. This session focuses on the role of a tester in and beyond sprint:

How to collaborate with other roles at the program level?How testers can contribute during DevOps automation?What's the definition of done for the team and for the product?

Two things that the audience can take away from this session:1...

Max Saperstone
Steampunk
T24

Page Object Model Pitfalls

Thursday, April 28, 2022 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Selenium has been around for over 15 years, and by now organizations have realized that Selenium tests need to be treated the same as any other functional code. This means not just keeping your tests in source control, but also designing them to be maintainable and robust. A common design pattern known as the Page Object Model (POM) has emerged, which greatly assists with organization and maintenance of tests. But there are scalability, speed, and robustness issues with this pattern. This has caused organizations to move away from Selenium for other tooling, however, most organizations are...