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Virtual Conference

 

Tune in to the Virtual Conference and be a part of the action!

 

Live Event Dates & Times

Wednesday, October 2
8:30am–5:30pm PT

and

Thursday, October 3
8:30am–5:30pm PT

 

 

 

The STARWEST Virtual Conference will be streaming live on October 2–3 from Anaheim, California. The Virtual Conference features presentations and interviews straight to your desktop—including the latest testing solutions and networking opportunities. Watch keynote sessions and industry technical presentations as they are happening live at STARWEST.

STARWEST Virtual Conference features live interviews with conference speakers. Plus, you are able to visit the virtual Expo and learn about the most recent solutions from top industry providers.

Attendance is complimentary—so reserve your seat now. Or, view the full program details below.

                                                          

8:30 AM PT  •  KEYNOTE–What Executives Value in Testing

 

     Michael Kelly, DeveloperTown, and Jeanette Thebeau, Ex2 Partners

 

Professional testers and test managers are feeling the pressures of low-cost competition and tools that claim to replace them through automation. So, how can test teams add more value to their projects and organization? In a recent survey of executives and testers, Mike Kelly and Jeanette Thebeau found major disconnects between what executives and testers believe are most important to the business. They explore new insights into the risks and concerns executives perceive and what you should do differently. In the survey, most testers believed that finding ways to cut operational costs was a low priority test objective, but executives listed operational cost reduction as a high value testing activity. On the flip side, testers believed that regulatory compliance was a high priority, while most executives reported compliance testing was a low priority. Join Mike and Jeanette to find new ways to help ensure the products you test solve the business problem, meet customer needs, reduce operational costs, scale easily as demand increases, and are built to quickly add new features over time.

10:00 AM PT  •  KEYNOTE–Testing the Xbox: Lessons for All

 

       Alan Page, Microsoft

 

Testing a game console isn’t all fun and games. However, with more than 50 million Xbox 360 consoles sold and the amazing success of the Kinect sensor, it’s certainly a hotbed of excitement for software developers and testers alike. Veteran tester Alan Page is having a blast on the Xbox console team and shares an insider’s view of what it’s like to test one of the most popular entertainment systems ever created. Learn the details of testing the Xbox from the guts of the operating system to the latest applications—and everything in between. Discover how the Xbox team creatively balances test automation with hands-on testing, how they’ve turned traditional measures of code coverage and test pass rates on edge, and many other ways the Xbox team  builds, tests, and delivers software that both end-users and game developers love. Join Alan to discover new ideas, see exciting demonstrations, and take away practical ideas that any team can use.

11:30 AM PT  •  Industry Technical Presentation • Compuware

 

      Performance is Not an Afterthought—Make it a Part of Your Agile Delivery

 

      Andreas Grabner, Compuware

 

Did you know that most problems that lead to app crashes, slow performance, or incorrect application behavior come from just a handful of root causes? Non-optimized database access, deployment mistakes, memory leaks, deadlocks due to synchronization issues, or inefficient coding are just some examples of these root causes.

All of these problems are well known, and that’s why it is time to level up engineering so that you don’t have to find and chase the same old problem patterns for every release or build.

In this session, we will talk about automatically detecting architectural and performance regressions in your continuous integration and load environments. This will give you more time to focus on the challenging things and allow your organization to advance from an Agile Development to Agile Delivery with the same level of quality.

12:30 PM PT  •  Industry Technical Presentation • HP

 

     Enterprise Agile—Balance velocity and quality for the new style of IT

     Kelly Emo, HP, and Michael Cooper, HP

 

The time is now to take a fresh look at the way you and your teams define, build, test and deliver applications. In this session, we’ll share insights, best practices and introduce specific software innovation designed for rapid delivery of today’s user-centric applications.  And, we will cover HP’s approach to Enterprise Agile with Quality Assurance and testing -- leveraging automation, virtualization, collaboration and traceability—all designed to speed application delivery timeframes for today’s mobile, social, constantly changing user base while maintaining dependable and remarkable quality. 

  1. We’ll highlight best practices to gain agility in the way you and your teams build, test and deliver applications
  2. We’ll describe specific software innovation for the challenge of rapid delivery of today’s user-centric applications
  3. And, we will unveil HP’s approach to Enterprise Agile testing -- leveraging automation, virtualization, collaboration and traceability—for faster application time-to-market

3:00 PM PT  •  Industry Technical Presentation • Softtek

 

     The Future of Testing

 

     Leonel Navarro, Softtek

 

The accelerated pace of technology requires new and innovative ways of doing things. As agility is incorporated into software development processes, quality increasingly becomes a top-of-mind concern for customers and end users; mobile development changes the way the software adds value to business and end users; and cloud environments promise huge value in automating application deployments. So what does this mean for testing practices? 

In this session, Leonel Navarro, Quality Assurance Offering Director & Information Security Practice Director at Softtek, will go over how a more evolved approach to testing requires teams with a fresh mindset and highly technical skills.

4:30 PM PT  •  KEYNOTE–Lightning Strikes the Keynotes

 

     Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering

 

Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR conferences. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consists of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation.

And now, lightning has struck the STAR keynotes. Some of the best-known experts in testing will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning. Get ten keynote presentations for the price of one—and have some fun at the same time.

 

 

 

 

8:30 AM PT  •  KEYNOTE–Selling (and Buying) “Live Site Quality” at eBay

 

     Jon Bach, eBay, Inc.

 

In the February Fortune magazine, eBay made the cover with the title “eBay is Back!” The article cited improvements in the look and feel of the site, strategic investments in fulfillment, and technology partnerships with retailers to establish it as more than just an online auction service. Jon Bach joined just as eBay was making big bets to make notable and visible gains with this strategy.

Jon recounts his two and a half years as a quality engineering director and introduces a concept he calls Live Site Quality. It means the value your customers get while experiencing different activity flows through your online product or service. It’s the impression they’re left with as they try to solve a problem or meet a need—whether it’s a simple task or a complex exploration of your site’s capabilities. Jon’s main idea is selling stakeholders on different Live Site Quality perspectives and getting eBay colleagues from different parts of the organization to buy into the idea that bugs that might most affect their Live Site Quality may lie between their team and another.

9:45 AM PT  •  Industry Technical Presentation • LogiGear

 

     Augmenting Visual Studio Coded UI with Test Automation

 

     John Kane, LogiGear

 

Microsoft Visual Studio provides an intuitive, easy-to-use Coded UI development environment for testing the most complex enterprise-level applications. This session will demonstrate how to augment your Coded UI test development environment with Action Based Testing. See how this keyword-driven approach can:

  • Quickly create a large number of high-quality, maintainable, and scalable test cases
  • Eliminate fragile test cases that break when your application changes
  • Focus your test automation effort on test flow and test design—and not the programming details
  • Increase communication and collaboration through understandable business-level test objectives

Gain a deep understanding of how Action Based Test Automation in Microsoft’s ALM and Continuous Integration environment can help you achieve test case maintainability, reusability, and scalability for your most challenging test projects.

11:15 AM PT  •  Industry Technical Presentation • Cognizant

 

      Quality Engineering to Drive Speed

 

      Jim Mondi, Cognizant

 

Jim Mondi will discuss different approaches, analysis techniques, and risk scenarios that QA leaders can leverage to optimize the testing lifecycle, and offer program owners different avenues or paths to choose to generate faster time to market. This discussion will include risk-based quality decision analysis (not risk-based testing, but quality, risk-based analysis), ambiguity reviews and gates, cycle-time optimization, leveraging of metrics and data to offer risk/reward paths, and ultimately how to structure conversations with senior executives to evaluate alternatives and make appropriate selection(s). Jim will share examples of tools that can be leveraged along the way.

12:15 PM PT  •  Industry Technical Presentation • IBM

 

      Service Virtualization for Dummies—Enable Continuous Testing

 

      Allan Wagner, IBM Software—Rational

 

The ability to rapidly release new product features is vital to the success of today's businesses. To accelerate development and software delivery, teams are adopting agile practices and leveraging service-oriented architectures to integrate legacy applications with other systems. At the same time, testing these composite applications can take longer and cost more. Al Wagner explains the whys and hows of service virtualization and shares ways testers can employ this technology to simulate parts of complex systems and begin testing earlier. Attend this session to gain insights on which services to virtualize in order to maximize your ROI. Discover how testing at the API layer can isolate defects for faster remediation and avoid late stage integration issues. Stop waiting until the complete application is available in a test environment to begin your work. Leave with an understanding of how virtual components can make incomplete or unavailable application functionality available for testing.

1:30 PM PT  •  Industry Technical Presentation • Borland, A Micro Focus Company

 

     StarTeam & Borland Connect – Agile Change Management for the Real World

 

     Stephen Vetica, Borland, a Micro Focus Company

 
  • Learn why Agile Change Management is critical in a modern software world 
  • Borland Connect is a connection framework to link SDLC/ALM repositories to each other
  • See how Borland Connect can link Rally to StarTeam in a live demo
  • Then we’ll bring in an additional Subversion repository
  • Understand how additional connectors can be configured to link assets from SharePoint, GIT, etc
  • A technical Q&A session will follow the live demo and presentation

3:00 PM PT  •  Industry Technical Presentation • Wipro

 

    TLA – Test Lifecycle Automation

 

     Phil Weidner, Wipro

 

Software Testing has conventionally been a manual activity with a handful of automation introduced during the test execution phase. Adoption of optimization and automation across all Test Lifecycle activities—namely requirements analysis, estimation, design, execution, and reporting—enhances quality, improves productivity ,and reduces time to market. Organizations having a central Application Lifecycle Management platform integrated with Test Lifecycle Automation can reap immense benefits in their QA journey.

Come, understand, and leverage Test Lifecycle Automation for quick transformation of requirements from models to automated scripts. Explore this transition with Phil Weidner, a Testing Practice Director at Wipro Technologies, and and automate your testing skills today!

4:15 PM PT  •  KEYNOTE–The Bounty Conundrum: Incentives for Testing

 

     Shaun Bradshaw, Zenergy Technologies, Inc.

 

When you think of a bounty, do you think of Dog the Bounty Hunter, a reality series featuring a biker dude with a bad mullet, or maybe Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s latest film about a slave-turned-bounty-hunter? Shaun Bradshaw doesn’t have a mullet and isn’t a movie star, but he has witnessed his fair share of bounty-style incentives used to motivate test teams to find more bugs, in hopes of improving software quality. But bounties can backfire—commonly referred to as the Cobra Effect—and create tension within a development organization without improving software quality.

Join Shaun as he discusses alternate merit-based methods that can add a fresh take on incentivized testing and productivity. Learn why you should keep bonuses a surprise. Start to reward collaboration rather than competition. Understand how to use both subjective and objective measurements in your favor, and implement a rewards system that is “safe to fail.” Shaun explains these concepts and more in “The Bounty Conundrum.”