STAREAST 2023 - Concurrent Sessions

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...

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,...

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...

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...

Usually 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...

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-...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

Find 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...

To 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 &...

The 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...

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....