STAREAST 2023 - Career & Personal Development
Monday, May 1
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...
Tuesday, May 2
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 Jeff Pierce as he...
Wednesday, May 3
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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...
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...
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
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...
Small QA Team Survival Strategies
Are you and your team having trouble managing your workload? Is your Dev to QA ratio completely out of whack? Do you need help convincing management that one or two extra hands would make a difference? Amanda will draw from her experience on teams of various sizes to provide examples of how to organize the QA workload into manageable pieces without losing your sanity. She will also give advice on how to outsource to other non-QA team members that can assist with getting stories to done and avoid potential bottlenecks. We’ll also discuss ways to get developer assistance with unit and...
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,...
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...
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,...