STAREAST 2023 - Test Automation
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 &...