STAREAST 2022 - Test Management
Customize your STAREAST 2022 experience with sessions covering test management.
Monday, April 25
Test Automation: How to Start and Succeed
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 will explain 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,...
The Annotated Meeting
NewMeetings are expensive. The details and decisions are important. But no one reads the minutes! Are you tired of referring back to a decision in a meeting only to find that everyone remembers it differently? Or no one remembers it at all?! Friend, what you need is an annotated meeting!In an annotated meeting, you take notes—in a specific format—right in front of the attendees via room display and screen-share. By identifying and writing the key information, decisions, and action items in front of your participants, you'll ensure that everyone is on the same page, that everyone agrees to...
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Skills for the Testing World
PreviewSoftware 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...
Test Design for Fully Automated Build Architecture
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...
Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization
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 26
Testing Strategies for Microservices
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...
How to Get Started with Cypress.io
NewThe web has evolved. Finally, testing has also. Cypress is a modern testing tool that answers the testing needs of modern web applications. It has been gaining a lot of traction in the last couple of years, gaining worldwide popularity. If you have been waiting to learn Cypress, wait no more! Filip Hric will guide you through the first steps on how to start using Cypress and set up a project on your own. The good news is, learning Cypress is incredibly easy. You’ll write your first test in no time, and then you’ll discover how to write a full end-to-end test for a modern web application....
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...
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 Derek Evans 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...
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...
Holistic Performance Testing for Modern Applications
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...
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,...
Web UI Testing with Playwright in Python
NewEverybody gets frustrated when web apps are broken, but testing them thoroughly doesn't need to be a chore. Playwright, a new open-source browser automation tool from Microsoft, makes testing web apps fun! Playwright offers a slew of nifty features like automatic waiting, mobile emulation, and network interception. Plus, with isolated browser contexts, Playwright tests can set up *much* faster than traditional Web UI tests. In this tutorial, we will build a Python test automation project from the ground up. We will automate web search engine tests together step-by-step using Playwright for...
Wednesday, April 27
ALL the Ways AI Can Be Leveraged in QA
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...
Congratulations! You're a leader! Now what?!
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...
Not Your Testing Tool
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...
Automate and Measure the Performance of Customer Journeys
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...
Creative Brain Breaks for the Office
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...
How SDETs & QEs Can Step Up and Empower Their Dev Teams
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...
Modern Performance Assurance - Panel
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,...
Maturing Your QA Practice in a Rapidly Evolving Development Landscape
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...
Overcoming Gherkin Anti-patterns for Manageable, Durable, and Valuable Test Code
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
Why Salesforce Test Automation Shouldn’t Be Painful
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...
AI in Testing and Testing AI: A Moderated Panel
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,...
Breadmaking and the Art of Data-Driven Model-Based Testing
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...
Testing in the Context of DevOps
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...
The Rise and Benefits of Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
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...
Enhance AppSec Maturity and Outcomes Using DevSecOps Metrics
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...
How Do You Help Motivate Testers?
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...
Importance of When: How to Effect Change in Your Team
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...
Role of Testers in Agile / DevOps Environment
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...