Test Automation

Tutorials

MA The Challenges of BIG Testing: Automation, Virtualization, Outsourcing, and More

Hans Buwalda, LogiGear

Mon, 10/13/2014 - 8:30am

Large-scale and complex testing projects can stress the testing and automation practices we have learned through the years, resulting in less than optimal outcomes. However, a number of innovative ideas and concepts are emerging to better support industrial-strength testing for big projects. Hans Buwalda shares his experiences and presents strategies for organizing and managing testing on large projects. Learn how to design tests specifically for automation, including how to incorporate keyword testing and other techniques.

MB A Rapid Introduction to Rapid Software Testing

Michael Bolton, DevelopSense

Mon, 10/13/2014 - 8:30am

You're under tight time pressure and have barely enough information to proceed with testing. How do you test quickly and inexpensively, yet still produce informative, credible, and accountable results? Rapid Software Testing, adopted by context-driven testers worldwide, offers a field-proven answer to this all-too-common dilemma. In this one-day sampler of the approach, Michael Bolton introduces you to the skills and practice of Rapid Software Testing through stories, discussions, and "minds-on" exercises that simulate important aspects of real testing problems.

MC Getting Started with Risk-Based Testing

Dale Perry, Software Quality Engineering

Mon, 10/13/2014 - 8:30am

Whether you are new to testing or looking for a better way to organize your test practices, understanding risk is essential to successful testing. Dale Perry describes a general risk-based framework—applicable to any development lifecycle model—to help you make critical testing decisions earlier and with more confidence. Learn how to focus your testing effort, what elements to test, and how to organize test designs and documentation. Review the fundamentals of risk identification, analysis, and the role testing plays in risk mitigation.

MD Introduction to Selenium and WebDriver NEW

Alan Richardson, Compendium Developments

Mon, 10/13/2014 - 8:30am

Selenium is an open source automation tool for test driving browser-based applications. WebDriver, the newly-introduced API for Selenium against which tests are written in Java, contains classes including ChromeDriver, AndroidDriver, and iPhoneDriver. Sometimes test authors find the API daunting and their initial automation code brittle and poorly structured. In this introduction, Alan Richardson provides hints and tips gained from his years of experience both using WebDriver and helping others improve their use of the tool.

MF Application Performance Testing: A Simplified Universal Approach SOLD OUT

Scott Barber, SmartBear

Mon, 10/13/2014 - 8:30am

In response to increasing market demand for high performance applications, many organizations implement performance testing projects, often at great expense. Sadly, these solutions alone are often insufficient to keep pace with emerging expectations and competitive pressures. With specific examples from recent client implementations, Scott Barber shares the fundamentals of implementing T4APM™, a simple and universal approach that is valuable independently or as an extension of existing performance testing programs.

MH Take a Test Drive: Acceptance Test-Driven Development NEW

Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans

Mon, 10/13/2014 - 8:30am

The practice of agile software development requires a clear understanding of business needs. Misunderstanding requirements causes waste, slipped schedules, and mistrust within the organization. Jared Richardson shows how good acceptance tests can reduce misunderstanding of requirements. A testable requirement provides a single source that serves as the analysis document, acceptance criteria, regression test suite, and progress-tracker for any given feature. Jared explores the creation, evaluation, and use of testable requirements by the business and developers.

MI A Dozen Keys to Agile Testing Maturity

Bob Galen, Velocity Partners

Mary Thorn, ChannelAdvisor

Mon, 10/13/2014 - 8:30am

You’ve “gone agile” and have been relatively successful. So, how do you know how well your team is really doing? And how do you continuously improve your practices? When things get rocky, how do you handle the challenges without reverting to old habits? You realize that the path to high-performance agile testing isn’t easy or quick. It also helps to have a guide. So consider this workshop your guide to ongoing, improved, and sustained high-performance. Join Bob Galen and Mary Thorn as they share lessons from their most successful agile testing transitions.

MK Being Creative: A Visual Testing Workshop SOLD OUT NEW

Andy Glover, Exco InTouch

Mon, 10/13/2014 - 1:00pm

The reality is that technology is complicated. As testers, we are challenged with complicated problems that need solving. Andy Glover presents a hands-on workshop that describes a new way of looking at testing problems and ideas. Andy demonstrates how thinking with pictures can help testers discover and develop new ideas, solve problems in unexpected ways, and dramatically improve their ability to share their insights with others.

MP Jon Bach: On Testing NEW

Jon Bach, eBay, Inc.

Mon, 10/13/2014 - 1:00pm

Jon Bach has been in testing for twenty years. Is testing in 2014 different from testing in 1994? If you’ve been in the business that long, maybe you’ve seen it move from a little bit of automation and tooling to almost total automation and tooling. Maybe you’ve seen lab setups go from hours of loading OS images on “boat anchor” boxes to virtual, on-demand, scalable cloud provisioning in seconds. Maybe you think testing is dead because we live in a DevOps world where it’s good enough to run a happy path checklist.

TB Successful Test Automation: A Manager’s View SOLD OUT

Mark Fewster, Grove Software Testing Ltd.

Tue, 10/14/2014 - 8:30am

Many organizations invest substantial time and effort in test automation but do not achieve the significant returns they expected. Some blame the tool they used; others conclude test automation just doesn't work in their situation. The truth, however, is often very different. These organizations are typically doing many of the right things but they are not addressing key issues that are vital to long term test automation success.

TE Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps SOLD OUT NEW

Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.

Tue, 10/14/2014 - 8:30am

In many organizations, agile development processes are driving the pursuit of faster software releases, which has spawned a set of new practices called DevOps. DevOps stresses communications and integration between development and operations, including continuous integration, continuous delivery, and rapid deployments. Because DevOps practices require confidence that changes made to the code base will function as expected.

TG Testing Cloud Services SOLD OUT NEW

Martin Pol, Polteq Testing Services BV

Jeroen Mengerink, Polteq Testing Services B.V.

Tue, 10/14/2014 - 8:30am

Cloud computing is rapidly changing the way systems are developed, tested, and deployed. New system hosting capabilities—software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS)—are forcing us to review and revise our testing processes. At the same time, cloud computing is affording us opportunities to employ new test tooling solutions, which we call testing as a service (TaaS). In this technical session, Martin Pol and Jeroen Mengerink focus on testing SaaS systems, describing relevant IaaS and PaaS capabilities along the way.

TH Planning, Architecting, Implementing, and Measuring Automation SOLD OUT NEW

Mike Sowers, Software Quality Engineering

Tue, 10/14/2014 - 8:30am

In automation, we often use several different tools that are not well integrated. These tools have been developed or acquired over time with little consideration of an overall plan or architecture, and without considering the need for integration. As a result, both efficiency and effectiveness suffer, and additional time and money are spent. Ensuring that tools we currently have, or the tools we develop or acquire in the future, work well with other application lifecycle tools is critical to our testing team’s success.

TL Security Testing for Test Professionals

Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.

Tue, 10/14/2014 - 1:00pm

Today’s software applications are often security critical, making security testing an essential part of a software quality program. Unfortunately, most testers have not been taught how to effectively test the security of the software applications they validate. Join Jeff Payne as he shares what you need to know to integrate effective security testing into your everyday software testing activities. Learn how software vulnerabilities are introduced into code and exploited by hackers. Discover how to define and validate security requirements.

TM End-to-End Testing with the Heuristic Software Test Model NEW

Paul Holland, Doran Jones, Inc.

Tue, 10/14/2014 - 1:00pm

You have just been assigned a new testing project. Where do you start? How do you develop a plan and begin testing? How will you report on your progress? Paul Holland shares new test project approaches that enable you to plan, test, and report effectively. Paul demonstrates ideas, based on the Heuristic Software Test Model from Rapid Software Testing, that can be directly applied or adapted to your environment. In this hands-on tutorial, you’ll be given a product to test.

TP Introducing Keyword-Driven Test Automation SOLD OUT

Hans Buwalda, LogiGear

Tue, 10/14/2014 - 1:00pm

In both agile and traditional projects, keyword-driven testing—when done correctly—has proven to be a powerful way to attain a high level of automation. Many testing organizations use keyword-driven testing but aren't realizing the full benefits of scalability and maintainability that are essential to keep up with the demands of testing today's software. Hans Buwalda describes the keyword approach, and how you use it to can meet the very aggressive goal that he calls the "5 percent challenge"―automate 95 percent of your tests with no more than 5 percent of your total testing effort.

TR Test Automation Strategies for the Agile World SOLD OUT NEW

Bob Galen, Velocity Partners

Tue, 10/14/2014 - 1:00pm

With the adoption of agile practices in many organizations, the test automation landscape has changed. Bob Galen explores current disruptors to traditional automation strategies, and discusses relevant and current adjustments you need to make when developing your automation business case. Open source tools are becoming incredibly viable and beat their commercial equivalents in many ways―not only in cost, but also in functionality, creativity, evolutionary speed, and developer acceptance. Agile methods have fundamentally challenged our traditional automation strategies.

Keynotes

K2 Balancing the Crusty and Old with the Shiny and New

Bob Galen, Velocity Partners

Wed, 10/15/2014 - 10:00am

In his journeys, Bob Galen has discovered that testing takes on many forms. Some organizations have no automated tests and struggle to run massive manual regression tests within very short iterative releases. Other organizations are going “all in”―writing thousands of acceptance tests in Gherkin. The resulting imbalance in their testing approaches undermines an organization’s efficiency, effectiveness, and delivery nimbleness. Bob shares ideas to bring balance to testing. He explores the choices: manual vs. automated testing, designed and scripted test cases vs.

K3 Lightning Strikes the Keynotes

Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering

Wed, 10/15/2014 - 4:30pm

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.

Concurrent Sessions

W2 Testing Lessons Learned from Sesame Street

Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com

Wed, 10/15/2014 - 11:30am

Rob Sabourin has discovered testing lessons in the Simpsons, the Looney Tunes gang, Great Detectives, Dr. Seuss, and other unlikely places, but this year he journeys to Sesame Street. Sesame Street teaches basic life skills in a safe, entertaining, memorable style. Rob uses them to solve stubborn technical, management, and people-related testing problems. Oscar the Grouch guides us through failure mode analysis. Ernie and Bert help us tackle problems from different perspectives. Big Bird and Mr. Snuffleupagus teach about persistence, rhetoric, and bug advocacy.

W3 Why Automation Fails—in Theory and Practice

Jim Trentadue, Ranorex

Wed, 10/15/2014 - 11:30am

Testers face common challenges in automation. Unfortunately, these challenges often lead to subsequent failures. Jim Trentadue explains a variety of automation perceptions and myths―the perception that a significant increase in time and people is needed to implement automation; the myth that, once automation is achieved, testers will not be needed; the myth that scripted automation will serve all the testing needs for an application; the perception that developers and testers can add automation to a project without additional time, resources, or training; the belief that anyone can implement automation. The testing organization must ramp up quickly on the test automation process and the prep-work analysis that needs to be done including when to start, how to structure the tests, and what system to start with. Learn how to respond to these common challenges by developing a solid business case for increased automation adoption by engaging manual testers in the testing organization, being technology agnostic, and stabilizing test scripts regardless of applications changes.

W9 Functional Testing with Domain-Specific Languages

Tariq King, Ultimate Software

Wed, 10/15/2014 - 1:45pm

Developing high-quality software requires effective communication among various project stakeholders. Business analysts must elicit customer needs and capture them as requirements, which developers then transform into working software. Software test engineers collaborate with business analysts, domain experts, developers, and other testers to validate whether the software meets the customer’s expectations. Misunderstandings between different stakeholders can introduce defects into software, reducing its overall quality and threatening the project’s success.

W10 Agile Development and Testing in a Regulated Environment

John Pasko, Karl Storz Imaging

Wed, 10/15/2014 - 1:45pm

One of the Agile Principles states that working software is the primary measurement of success―generally measured by the level of customer satisfaction. So, how do you measure “customer satisfaction” when it is based on successful surgical outcomes? Join John Pasko as he takes you through a case study of the design, development, testing, and release of a complex system—integrating embedded software with hardware—for a surgical product which met stringent FDA standards and regulations.

W15 End-to-End Test Automation with Open Source Technologies

Ramandeep Singh, QA InfoTech

Wed, 10/15/2014 - 3:00pm

As organizations continue to adopt agile methodologies, testers are getting involved earlier in product testing. They need tools that empower them to manage varied test automation needs for web services, web APIs, and web and mobile applications. Open source solutions are available in abundance. However, most of these solutions are independent and not integrated, significantly increasing the tester’s work around test automation development. Ongoing test automation suite evolution and building a robust regression test suite have become cumbersome.

T2 Release the Monkeys: Testing Using the Netflix Simian Army

Gareth Bowles, Netflix

Thu, 10/16/2014 - 9:45am

The cloud is all about redundancy and fault tolerance. Since no single component can guarantee 100 percent uptime, we have to design architectures where individual components can fail without affecting the availability of the entire system. But just designing a fault tolerant architecture is not enough. We have to constantly test our ability to actually survive these “once in a blue moon” failures. And the best way is to test in an environment that matches production as closely as possible or, ideally, actually in production.

T3 A Path through the Jungle: Validating a Test Automation System for the FDA

Chris Crapo, Boston Scientific Neuromodulation

David Nelson, Boston Scientific Neuromodulation

Thu, 10/16/2014 - 9:45am

Test automation is difficult to get right. Working under FDA regulation presents its own challenges. Combining the two is a scary proposition because the FDA requires—and will scrutinize—the validation of any test automation used. Despite this, working in a regulated environment only magnifies the value of test automation. Aware that automation is a driver of quality and consistency, the FDA welcomes automated tests as part of an audit submission. The key to success is demonstrating quality in a way that the FDA recognizes.

T9 Automation Abstractions: Page Objects and Beyond

Alan Richardson, Compendium Developments

Thu, 10/16/2014 - 11:15am

When you start writing automation for your projects, you quickly realize that you need to organize and design the code. You will write far more than “test” code; you also will write abstraction code because you want to make tests easier to read and maintain. But how do you design all this code? How do you organize and structure it? Should you use a domain specific language? Should you go keyword driven or use Gherkin? Should you use page objects with POJO or Factories? Do you create DOM level abstractions? Where do domain models fit in?

T11 Checking Performance along Your Build Pipeline

Andreas Grabner, Compuware

Thu, 10/16/2014 - 11:15am

Do you consider the performance impact when adding a new JavaScript file, a single AJAX call, or a new database query to your app? Negligible, you say? I disagree―and so should you. Andreas Grabner demonstrates the severe impact small changes can have on performance and scalability. Many small changes will have an even bigger impact so it is important to catch them early.

T14 Speed Up Testing with Monitoring Tools

Jim Hirschauer, AppDynamics

Thu, 10/16/2014 - 1:30pm

The software development lifecycle is a pretty complex process in many organizations. However, by using monitoring tools and methodologies, you can accelerate testing and release higher quality code―the cornerstone of rapid software delivery. These tools provide immediate feedback with actionable information so you can address problems as they are detected instead of waiting until the end of a testing cycle. Earlier detection, combined with tests that are a better representation of production workloads, are key to releasing better code, faster.

T15 Making Your Test Automation Transparent

Subodh Parulekar, AFour Technologies, Inc.

Thu, 10/16/2014 - 1:30pm

Business analysts, developers, and testers are sometimes not on the same page when it comes to test automation. When there is no transparency in test cases, execution, coverage, and data, review of automation by all stakeholders is difficult. Making automation scripts easily readable and writable allows stakeholders to better participate. Subodh Parulekar describes how his team dealt with these issues.

T16 Ensuring the Performance of Mobile Apps—on Every Device and Network

Steve Weisfeldt, Neotys

Thu, 10/16/2014 - 1:30pm

Applications today are accessed over myriad network configurations—wired, wireless, and mobile networks. Deployed applications may deliver different content and functionality depending on whether the user is accessing it via a browser, smartphone, or tablet. Steve Weisfeldt explains how these combinations significantly impact the performance of applications, creating a previously unseen set of testing challenges.

T17 Build Your Custom Performance Testing Framework

Prashant Suri, Rackspace

Thu, 10/16/2014 - 1:30pm

Performance testing requires knowledge of systems architecture, techniques to simulate the load equivalent of sometimes millions of transactions per day, and tools to monitor/report runtime statistics. With the evolution from desktop to web and now the cloud, performance testing involves an unparalleled combination of different workloads and technologies. There is no one tool available—either commercial or open source—that meets all performance testing needs.

T21 The Doctor Is In: Diagnosing Test Automation Diseases

Seretta Gamba, Steria Mummert ISS GmbH

Thu, 10/16/2014 - 3:00pm

When doing test automation, you sometimes notice that things are not working out as expected, but it’s not clear why. You are so caught up in the day-to-day work that you don't see the bigger picture. It’s like when you get sick―you know something is wrong, but you don’t know what. That’s the time to visit a doctor. Doctors diagnose diseases mainly by asking questions. First, they get a general idea of what’s wrong; then the questions become more and more specific; and in the end, they identify the disease and prescribe the appropriate cure. This method also works well for test automation.

T22 Five Ways to Improve Your Mobile Testing

Dennis Schultz, IBM

Thu, 10/16/2014 - 3:00pm

Few technology shifts have impacted the way we do business as much as mobile. The new and exciting functionality delivered by mobile apps, the pace at which they are being developed, and their emergence as the “face of the business” requires that organizations deliver unprecedented quality in these software systems. Join Dennis Schultz to learn how leading enterprises are approaching their mobile application testing challenges and how they have integrated mobile into their existing processes.