STAREAST 2022 - Test Leadership

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...