Conference Schedule

More 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...Read more

Congratulations, 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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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,...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

To satisfy the validation requirements and ensure processed data accuracy, QA Test Engineers within an organization often face the challenge of completing major regression tasks that require detailed comparison of multiple pairs of CSV files. These files can be very large at times (thousands of rows & hundreds of columns per file). Testers also need to detect the presence of any duplicate records within those files along with the deltas (extra or missing records on both sides of the CSV pairs). Beyond those challenges the automation utility needed has to be reusable &...Read more

The 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...Read more

The Transformation to an Agile Based Performance Testing Model session will take attendees through an IT transformational effort from waterfall delivery to agile, and from project management to product management. This session will chronical the real-world transformational journey of a manager and a six-person horizontal capacity and performance testing team that created a new testing model that balances the performance testing needs for nearly 20 product teams. Attendees will learn how this small team was built, and the roles and skills necessary to staff this new testing model....Read more