STAREAST 2023 - Test Strategy, Planning, Metrics
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...
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,...
Wednesday, May 3
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...
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...
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...
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...
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.
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,...
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...
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...
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,...