STAREAST 2023 - Testing in DevOps
Monday, May 1
Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization
The DevOps movement is here. Companies across many industries are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, IT organizations have been staffed with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding to stay relevant and add greater value to the business. DevOps really...
Tuesday, May 2
Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps
In many organizations, agile development processes are driving the pursuit of faster software releases, which has spawned a set of new practices—DevOps. DevOps stresses communications and integration between development and operations, including rapid deployment, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Because DevOps practices require confidence that changes made to the code base will function as expected, automated testing is essential. Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the unique challenges associated with integrating automated testing into continuous integration/continuous...
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...
Leveraging Machine Learning & AI for Quality Assurance
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...
The 10 Steps for Effective Mainframe Testing
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,...
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...
High Octane DevOps: Supercharged CI/CD Pipelines
PreviewTo reinvent the wheel is to attempt to duplicate, most likely with inferior results and technical debts. Within a large-scale organization the true cost of CI/CD is the toil involved when effort is repeated to create the same or similar pipeline functionality. What we discovered during a CI/CD journey is that the key to creating powerful and efficient CI/CD or automation testing pipelines is in not writing pipeline logic at all. The formula that was unlocked is in focusing on the atomic level of the reusable code within pipeline stages. By harnessing the power of creating small...
Tactics for Testing DevOps Infrastructure Code
With the cloud, infrastructure such as networking, security, virtual machines, and much more is entirely software code. Instead of manually creating cloud environments for applications and making changes, administrators write code to do that work. When changes are needed, that code is enhanced and re-run. Just like application code, infrastructure code needs to be tested. After all, code that introduces defects into existing environments can put developers, testers, and even end-users out of service. That said, most organizations do not adequately test infrastructure code. Anybody in this...
Thursday, May 4
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.
Comprehensive API Testing Ecosystem
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...
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,...
Building an API Automation Framework Using Cypress
In this session, Greg Patterson will share his experience starting on a new team that was directed to use Cypress for automation, and API automation was also a requirement. Cypress has the ability to support both of these needs, but it is something that takes a little work. After some short training sessions, Greg was able to help all of his team to contribute to the automation efforts by creating a simple framework that could be used for both UI and API automation. Greg will share his experience with integrating the frameworks into Azure DevOps to run tests in the cloud. Key features to...
Meet GitHub Advanced Security
PreviewFind 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...