STAREAST 2023 - Test Techniques
Monday, May 1
Test Automation: How to Start and Succeed
Many organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems as their product matures and changes over time. As a leader, how can you ensure that your new automation efforts will get off to a good start? What can you do to ensure that your automation work provides continuing added value? Chris Loder will explain the critical issues you need to know to get a good start, and he will share his extensive experience in building great automation. He covers the most important management issues you should address for test automation success,...
Tuesday, May 2
Web Security Testing: The Basics and More
Web applications are often security critical or serve as front-ends for security critical applications, making web testing for vulnerabilities an essential part of software testing. Unfortunately, most software testers have not been taught how to identify web security issues while testing applications. Join Tom Stiehm as he shares what you need to know to security test web-based applications as part of your overall testing process. Learn about the most common web security vulnerabilities and how they are introduced into web code and exploited by hackers. Explore test techniques for...
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...