STAREAST 2023 - Test Automation Engineer

Imagine this…as soon as any developed functionality is submitted into the code repository, it is automatically subjected to the appropriate battery of tests and then released straight into production. Setting up the pipeline capable of doing just that is becoming more and more common and something you need to know about. But most organizations hit the same stumbling block—just what IS the appropriate battery of tests? Automated build architectures don't always lend themselves well to the traditional stages of testing. In this hands-on tutorial, Melissa Benua introduces you to key test...

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...

Everyone is focused on data and metrics to make major decisions. When it comes to software quality, KPI metrics can become a myth. Sometimes it works, sometimes you miss it. KPI metrics help determine the health of the product, as well as provide guidance for continuous improvement. In this session, Lisette will share what KPI have worked based on her experiences, and discuss how you can determine what KPI will work for your organization. Key takeaways from this session include:

This 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...

A11y audits have been one of the essential disciplines of software quality assurance for years. For some time now, these accessibility audits can be performed easily by any end user in the browser (e.g., Google Lighthouse, axe add-on for Firefox, etc.). These checks can be integrated easily into an existing selenium test automation. This session will speak to the pitfalls when doing automatic audits and why they happen. This session will also showcase how these audits can be integrated into an existing test framework using Selenium. Attendees will discover a concrete solution with code...

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...

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...

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...

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...