STAREAST 2023 - 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.
Wednesday, May 3
RIP UI Test Automation. You Failed. CX Observability Will Lead Us to Software Quality
Despite the massive efforts around testing phases, pyramids, vegetables, periodic table, etc., users keep finding bugs, which leads to poor CX. Testing is an activity; quality is the goal. We’ve been focused on making the activity better, but that didn’t improve quality. In this session, Alex Martins will discuss his best efforts and experiences around testing and never being able to achieve the dream of software quality. Alex has been on projects that spent more money on testing than on development, and still didn’t catch all bugs. He's thrown AI/ML into my testing lifecycle and still...
Leveraging Machine Learning & AI for Quality Assurance
Machine learning, artificial intelligence… It’s everywhere. Everyone is talking about it. It’s the next “BIG” thing that is expected to bring in over 10 trillion into the economy by 2030. But what is it? And what can it do for you? Join David for an explanation on machine learning and AI and the many benefits each provides. Furthermore, you will dive deeper into three areas in which machine learning and AI can be utilized to improve the quality of your software and users’ experience, such as: 1. Utilizing machine learning to identify patterns in analytics to essentially provide enhanced...
Debunking the QA KPI Myths and Make KPI Great Again
Everyone is focused on data and metrics to make major decisions. When it comes to software quality, KPI metrics can become a myth. Sometimes it works, sometimes you miss it. KPI metrics help determine the health of the product, as well as provide guidance for continuous improvement. In this session, Lisette will share what KPI have worked based on her experiences, and discuss how you can determine what KPI will work for your organization. Key takeaways from this session include:
Determining the purpose of QA KPI for your needsAdapting the KPI Metrics to your organizational...The 10 Steps for Effective Mainframe Testing
It is without a doubt that DevOps has come to the mainframe. Any company that currently runs a mainframe platform is either in the process of transforming mainframe development or has already transformed their mainframe development to using DevOps. While DevOps has come to the mainframe, automated testing is still lagging. Application teams have shiny new DevOps pipelines and automation, are using tools like Git to super charge their development but are still using manual testing procedures, bad test data, and antiquated testing processes. To get to that next level of DevOps maturity,...
Why Your Digital Engineering Effort Will Not Produce the Results You Think
You have read the books, purchased your tools, containerized your apps, moved to the cloud, and automated your development pipelines. Awesome! Surely you are going to knock this transformation out of the park! But that's not enough. There are several principles you need to consider. It is the combination of tools and technologies, people, and principles combined that make a digital engineering successful. Let’s discuss the principles for technical agility and how to apply a test-first mindset. These principles will help attendees build the foundation for successful digital engineering...
Automation Face-Off
What do you think about when you hear the words "test automation"? Are you considering developing your own tools to help you probe the product deeply, or will you apply a commercial tool for automated checking? Are you excited by new, powerful, enabling technologies, or do you worry that a robot will replace you? One thing is for sure: when we apply tools, we fundamentally change the context and the nature of the work we do.Our panelists are software testing experts who will discuss all this and more with you! Together, we'll probe what people mean by automation, the power that tools can...
Introduction to Test Orchestration
PreviewThis session will be an introduction to test orchestration: the process, execution, and monitoring of automated tests to drive the quality of your product. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that will save us, but being successful at test automation often requires making changes to more than just how the tests are executed. We also need to consider our process/workflow around software testing. What's our branching strategy? When and where do we deploy? Who reviews the failed tests? And in addition to evaluating our process/workflow around testing, we also need to consider...
Data Science and System Testing: Lessons Learned from a Four-Part Workshop Series
During fall 2022, Big Data Florida ran a series of four workshops on the intersection of data science and system testing. The first was on “Testing Big Data Systems,” which provided the basis for subsequent meetings. The second event was on “Testing Machine Learning (ML) Models,” the third was on “Testing Artificial Intelligence (AI) Applications,” and the fourth was on “Leveraging AI and ML in Testing.” Participants were an interdisciplinary group drawn from data science, testing (hardware, software, and integrated systems), and interested researchers and professionals. This session...
Implementing a Whole Team Quality Approach to Software Development in a Startup Environment
PreviewMost startups are working within tight budgets and timelines. Getting the product working and out the door is the main goal, while quality tends to fall by the wayside. This can cause a backlog in needed testing, automation, and even added tech debt. Even when QA exists, there is often a “throw it over the wall” mentality. In order to tackle this issue early on at Highlight, we focused on a Whole Team Quality approach of software development. By looking at everything through a lens of quality, including business requirements, it has helped to ensure that we are releasing high...
Delivering Quality with the Correct Strategy
PreviewUsually we find that clients don't include quality inside their delivery process. But what happens when the release to production is ready and suddenly things are not working as expected? Quality calls! This process should start earlier and be included within the delivery process from the very beginning; even, during the initial call with the client to understand what they expect from us. This is where quality strategy lives: from the evaluation of client's requirements/expectation, going through the team that you will work with, planning the stages where the quality shall be...
High Octane DevOps: Supercharged CI/CD Pipelines
PreviewTo reinvent the wheel is to attempt to duplicate, most likely with inferior results and technical debts. Within a large-scale organization the true cost of CI/CD is the toil involved when effort is repeated to create the same or similar pipeline functionality. What we discovered during a CI/CD journey is that the key to creating powerful and efficient CI/CD or automation testing pipelines is in not writing pipeline logic at all. The formula that was unlocked is in focusing on the atomic level of the reusable code within pipeline stages. By harnessing the power of creating small...
Performance Assurance and SRE - Panel
Delivering performance applications is a multi-layered challenge these days. Teams must assure that the application performs on multiple fronts. Each new function must have quick responses and be as slim as possible from the coding moment. It must be quick and light for a single request, handle concurrency, and coexist with multiple other processes even in micro-serviced applications spread all over the place. Not to mention, it must handle lots of loads once in production. It must stay performant and available within the agreed thresholds. The impressive amount of tasks to tackle and co-...
A Journey to Better Automation with the Screenplay Pattern
Anyone who has spent time automating tests quickly learns that writing interactions is a challenge. People often struggle to write automation that remains reliable and avoids code duplication. The Page Object Model is a popular way to handle interactions, yet it still falls into some of these problems. In this session, we’ll take a journey with a simple C# search engine test to refactor its interactions from inadequate traditional ways to improved ones offered by the Screenplay Pattern. By the end, you’ll be able to use Screenplay calls with Boa Constrictor to make reliable interactions...
Testing Machine Learning Functionality: The Need for a New Way of Thinking
When testing functionality based on machine learning or trained functionality, the focus of your testing changes. The code itself stops being interesting to some degree, and instead the focus needs to be elsewhere. Based on personal experience and research projects, this session will highlight the importance of testing your data, why independent testing is vital, and how some "old school" tools can help when thinking & planning test activities. This session will also demonstrate trained functionality intended for autonomous driving, and will touch more general problems faced when...
Integration of A11y Audits into Test Automation
A11y audits have been one of the essential disciplines of software quality assurance for years. For some time now, these accessibility audits can be performed easily by any end user in the browser (e.g., Google Lighthouse, axe add-on for Firefox, etc.). These checks can be integrated easily into an existing selenium test automation. This session will speak to the pitfalls when doing automatic audits and why they happen. This session will also showcase how these audits can be integrated into an existing test framework using Selenium. Attendees will discover a concrete solution with code...
Testing & Release Strategy for Native Android & iOS Apps
Experimentation and quick feedback are the keys to success of any product, while also ensuring a good quality product with new and better features is being shipped out at a decent/regular frequency to the users. In this session, we will discuss how to enable experimentation, get quick feedback, and reduce risk. We will also discuss testing strategy and the release process on Android & iOS Native apps that will help enable CI/CD. Finally, this session will focus on the below techniques/practices related to testing & releases: * Functional automation approach - identify and automate...
Tactics for Testing DevOps Infrastructure Code
With the cloud, infrastructure such as networking, security, virtual machines, and much more is entirely software code. 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 this...
Modern Test Automation Strategies - A Panel
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 and help you address the challenges that we all face when scaling our test automation to match modern continuous delivery needs. You don't have to...
Thursday, May 4
Feature Flags - The Good, The Bad, and How to Prevent The Ugly
PreviewMore and more companies are using feature flags to get all types of changes – new features, configuration changes, bug fixes, and experiments – into production in a safer, faster, and most importantly, a sustainable way. Software companies that shift to deploying with feature flags benefit from low risk releases, faster time to market, higher quality, and in general happier teams. Sounds great, right? But what happens when your system isn’t implemented correctly, or worse, tested properly? This session will take attendees on a journey of why teams use Progressive Delivery, and the...
Automatic Canary Analysis: Critical Success Factor for Release Pipeline
Netflix began streaming services with a small-scale microservice ecosystem. As our global reach grew, so did the complexity of the underlying ecosystem. Membership Lifecycle Ecosystem is a cluster of services that handles all the backend business logic related to membership, signup, billing, and payments. This ecosystem consists of 100+ internal microservices and a similar number of external partners and payment processors - spanning across multiple teams. Each team has an asynchronous release cadence and the quality of each release has a direct impact on the quality of the ecosystem and...
Eating the Elephant: Being the First QA
PreviewCongratulations, you have landed a position as the first QA Engineer at an exciting new company! Now what? Between trying to adjust to a new work environment and trying to establish quality driven rituals and habits, being the first QA for a new and/or small company can be a monumental and sometimes overwhelming task. In this session, we will discuss how communication, compartmentalization, and automation can make an immediate impact for your once QA-less team. First, we will examine how the simple act of being vocal and concise about risks and concerns can go a long way towards...
Testing Hard-to-Test Devices Using Docker Containers
Back in the day, live testing was the only way to test systems, especially software and hardware, and the advanced methodologies that we have today did not exist. Today, docker containers have made even the most difficult systems very easy to test. In this session, we will take a look at an example of testing a disk monitoring service using software techniques without actually using any disks. The service reports NVMe SSD drives’ state and classifies drives as “good” or “bad” based on the data. Key takeaways from this session include understanding the basics of NVMe and docker, creating a...
AI in Testing: A Moderated Panel Discussion
Artificial intelligence is the newest trend in software testing. But what is it, and how will it impact the tester's role, both today and in the future? What do you need to do to embrace this emerging technology? Tariq King will moderate this panel discussion to give you an opportunity to hear the opinions of industry leaders about AI in testing. You will have a chance to drive the debate, so come prepared with all your AI questions.
Comprehensive API Testing Ecosystem
Maintaining API test cases across multiple environments, for different load levels, and types of tests (eg. smoke, functional, regression) traditionally required separate tests be written and maintained. Test maintenance is expensive. If you have three lower environments that tests are run for, then you usually have at least three different tests you are trying to keep in sync. If you have a new API added for a microservice, then you have to modify and validate across all three tests at a minimum. If you are running different load levels for build tests verses load tests, for example, that...
Blurring the Line Between Developer and QA
Many QA testers are hesitant to poke their noses into the code they are testing, preferring to do black box testing instead. But what if getting a little nosey could help you save time and become a better tester? What if you could better assess risk by peeking under the covers and determine just how much testing is required for a feature? For over two decades (ouch!), Earline Deutsch has been a software developer, but in the past 18 months she switched to serving as a Software QA Engineer. In this session, she'll discuss her experiences in a whole new light from reviewing code changes to...
Building Something from Nothing: How Changes in the Healthcare Industry Kickstarted a Testing Revolution for Medicaid Agencies
Every person in the United States will, in every stage of their life, interact with the Healthcare industry. In 2005, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) initiated a modernization act which had a ripple effect for states. The State of Vermont, along with every other state and territory, needed to begin upgrading legacy systems - systems that are 30, 40, or even 50 years old - and bring Medicaid into the future. Given that Vermont’s legacy systems have no historical documentation of as-is process flows, no future-state, no requirements, no documentation of code or set up,...
Representation Matters for Women of Color in Tech
PreviewHow can you see yourself in a technical position; but there's no one who looks like you. This is one of many challenges Women of Color (WOC) experience in the tech field. The tech field is majority white men. As a Gen-X black woman, Lettie Ar-Rahmaan wasn’t encouraged to enter the tech field. Therefore, she struggled between service and technology. In the end, her passion for technology won and she's found success in technology from developer, QA tester, test manager, and now a product manager. The memories of being told she's not good enough came to her as she wrote her book,...
Successfully Converting Manual Test Teams into Test Automation Engineers
The need to convert manual test teams into test automation engineers is in large demand in many companies. This request is most prevalent in organizations using Agile Scrum that have short sprint cycles. In implementing solutions to this demand, Andy Sidney has found two effective strategies that have worked at two different companies in the past five years. In both situations the strategies were challenged by the Scrum teams and the QA teams because it would slightly modify the Scrum process, and initially increase the workload for the QA testers until the learning curve diminished. Once...
Building an API Automation Framework Using Cypress
In this session, Greg Patterson will share his experience starting on a new team that was directed to use Cypress for automation, and API automation was also a requirement. Cypress has the ability to support both of these needs, but it is something that takes a little work. After some short training sessions, Greg was able to help all of his team to contribute to the automation efforts by creating a simple framework that could be used for both UI and API automation. Greg will share his experience with integrating the frameworks into Azure DevOps to run tests in the cloud. Key features to...
Why Your Project Will Be Late (And What You Can Do About It)
We all estimate tasks and predict schedules, whether it’s forecasting how long it will take to complete a project, how long it will take to hike to a camping spot, or how long it will take to drive to grandma’s house. We all know the basics of scheduling: 1) Build a to-do list, 2) Determine the sequence of tasks, 3) Estimate tasks, 4) Commit arithmetic & calculate completion date. We also know from experience that this doesn’t work as well as we think it should. Most projects are hard pressed to meet their schedule goals, why? It turns out that math has something to do with it. In this...
Metrics to Benefit Continuous Delivery with Confidence
To many companies, quality is bottleneck to continuous delivery and often still a waterfall process in their agile methodology. Another bottleneck is how developers have lost confidence and rely solely on testers to ensure the quality of their work, while also enforcing a quality gate. The objective of this session is to share best practices and metrics in order to generate conversations of continuous optimization in integrating code and increasing frequency of confident & quality deliveries. Additional takeaways from this session include bringing quality into the process sooner (shift...
Meet GitHub Advanced Security
PreviewFind and fix security vulnerabilities before code hits the main branch in your repo. GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS) helps teams secure their software supply chain and proprietary code with the only community-driven, native application security testing solution. GHAS is built to optimize the developer experience through automation. Identify and fix reported security issues quickly and efficiently by integrating security testing into every step of the developer workflow. GHAS components: - Code scanning: Find and fix security issues in your code before they reach production with...
Women in QA: Challenges Faced by Women at Work and How to Solve Them
One of the major concerns faced by working women in technology these days is work‐life prioritization and resource management. Many women tech leaders have to make bolder decisions in life, leading to a career break or ending their professional careers early in their life due to their personal commitments towards their families. However, there can be a “best‐fit” for these women who seek support from their organizations, especially leadership and their teams. There are a lot of organizations that support women to grow and become impactful tech leaders, while also providing programs to...
Automated CSV Data Comparison & Advanced Field-Level Validation Utility
PreviewTo satisfy the validation requirements and ensure processed data accuracy, QA Test Engineers within an organization often face the challenge of completing major regression tasks that require detailed comparison of multiple pairs of CSV files. These files can be very large at times (thousands of rows & hundreds of columns per file). Testers also need to detect the presence of any duplicate records within those files along with the deltas (extra or missing records on both sides of the CSV pairs). Beyond those challenges the automation utility needed has to be reusable &...
Ukrainian Lessons Learned: How to Build Continuous Testing and Project Management from the Trenches
PreviewOn the 24th of February, life in Ukraine changed dramatically, and it hasn't stopped. Projects had to be delivered according to release schedules and Business Continuity Plans (BCP) had to be built in parallel with deploying shelters and evacuating teams to safe zones. Despite risk mitigation plans, the war was such a critical factor that the existing hierarchal management structure began to show inefficiency. As two Directors of Software Quality in a company with 14,000 employees in Ukraine, Maryna will share their approach to governance of software quality, release management, and...
Agile and Earned Value Management
PreviewThe Agile Earned Value Management (A-EVM) approach provides effective scope variance analysis, comprehensive performance reporting, and predictability that aid in keeping the program on time and on budget. A-EVM is an adapted implementation of the traditional EVM method. In A-EVM, we use the agile framework artifacts as inputs, use traditional EVM calculations, and value delivery is expressed in traditional EVM metrics. The A-EVM approach leverages the iteration or program increment time-boxes, in place of the traditional PMI Release, to provide boundaries around a set of epics or...
Engineering Productivity via Metrics
Even at a startup, engineering teams can grow quickly, with a proliferation of tools, teams. processes, agile methodologies, meetings, interviews and so on. How does one begin to think about getting a pulse on how the teams are performing, how code is being delivered, what are the obstacles that developers are facing? Where do you start? We addressed the problem by taking a stock of all things in flight, starting to think about how to even begin assigning metrics to seemingly intangible things like developer happiness and related obstacles Having one source of truth for all these metrics,...
Transformation to an Agile Based Performance Testing Model
The Transformation to an Agile Based Performance Testing Model session will take attendees through an IT transformational effort from waterfall delivery to agile, and from project management to product management. This session will chronical the real-world transformational journey of a manager and a six-person horizontal capacity and performance testing team that created a new testing model that balances the performance testing needs for nearly 20 product teams. Attendees will learn how this small team was built, and the roles and skills necessary to staff this new testing model....
Unplugged Tech Woman's Essential Survival Guide
Women have made great progress in the technology industry, however, challenges remain. In this session, we will delve into the obstacles that women face in the tech industry, and provide effective solutions to overcome them. Janna, an experienced woman in technology, will share her personal experiences and insights on what it takes to succeed in this field. She will provide practical advice and tips on how to navigate the unique challenges faced by women in technology. Janna will also discuss how to build a successful career in tech by showcasing her own journey and the strategies that...