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Agile Testing

Tutorials

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 techniques like keyword testing and BDD. Discover what roles virtualization and the cloud can play—and the potential pitfalls of such options. Hans also describes the major challenges with global teams including time zones and cultural differences, and offers seven common problem “patterns” in globalization and what you can do to address them. Among the other takeaways from this class are tips to make your automation more stable and recommendations on how to deal with the numerous versions and configurations common in large projects.

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MC Selenium Test Automation: From the Ground Up
Dave Haeffner, The Selenium Guidebook
Mon, 09/28/2015 - 8:30am

Want to learn how to use Selenium from the ground up? Join Dave Haeffner as he shows you how to start from scratch and build a well-factored, maintainable, resilient, and parallelized set of tests that will run locally, on a continuous integration server, against a Selenium Grid, and in the cloud. These tests will work reliably and across all your browsers, while exercising relevant functionality that matters to your business. This session is for anyone—whether just getting started or experienced—who wants to use Selenium successfully in their organization and boost their career. Learn a repeatable baseline approach for Selenium test automation—regardless of your context. And if you are new to programming, don't sweat it. The core programming concepts you need to know will be covered in an approachable way as well. At the tutorial’s conclusion, you'll leave knowing how to get started on your journey and what it takes to successfully implement Selenium in your organization.

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MG Exploratory Testing Explained
Paul Holland, Doran Jones, Inc.
Mon, 09/28/2015 - 8:30am

Exploratory testing is an approach to testing that emphasizes the freedom and responsibility of testers to continually optimize the value of their work. Exploratory testing is the process of three mutually supportive activities—learning, test design, and test execution—done in parallel. With skill and practice, exploratory testers typically uncover an order of magnitude more problems than when the same amount of effort is spent on procedurally-scripted testing. All testers conduct exploratory testing in one way or another, but few know how to do it systematically to obtain the greatest benefits. Even fewer can articulate the process. Paul Holland shares specific heuristics and techniques of exploratory testing that will help you get the most from this highly productive approach. Paul focuses on the skills and dynamics of exploratory testing, and how it can be combined with scripted approaches.

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MH Take a Test Drive: Acceptance Test-Driven Development
Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans
Mon, 09/28/2015 - 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. Learn how to transform requirements into stories—small units of work—that have business value, small implementation effort, and easy to understand acceptance tests. This tutorial features an interactive exercise that starts with a high level feature, decomposes it into stories, applies acceptance tests to those stories, and estimates the stories for business value and implementation effort. The exercise demonstrates how big requirement stories can be decomposed into business-facing stories, rather than into technical tasks that the business does not understood.

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MI The Keys to Agile Testing Maturity
Mary Thorn, Ipreo
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
Mon, 09/28/2015 - 8:30am

You’ve “gone agile” and have been relatively successful. So, how do you know how well your test team is really doing? And how do you continuously improve your test practices? When things get rocky, how do you handle the challenges without reverting to old habits? The path to high-performance agile testing isn’t easy or quick, and it helps to have a guide. So consider this tutorial your guide to ongoing, improved, and sustained high-performance agile testing. Join Bob Galen and Mary Thorn as they share lessons from their most successful agile testing transitions. Explore actual team case studies for building team skills, embracing agile requirements, fostering customer interaction, building agile test automation, driving business value, and testing at-scale—all building agile testing excellence. Examine the mistakes, adjustments, and successes, and learn how to react to real-world contexts. Leave with a better view of your team’s strengths, weaknesses, and where you need to focus to improve.

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Concurrent Sessions

W4 Agile Is Changing the Face of Software Testing
Harini Gupta, Microsoft
Wed, 09/30/2015 - 11:30am

In this changing world of software development processes, where does software testing stand? How can we adapt our testing methodologies to keep pace with rapid development processes? Agile testing is a paradigm shift and is one of the challenges that teams face when transitioning from a traditional testing model to agile. Harini Gupta explores different agile methodologies that are used in large software development programs across Microsoft to promote software agility. Harini shares her own experiences with agile software testing methodologies including continuous integration, continuous delivery, and the ability to enable or disable features by configuration settings. Harini talks about validating features with unit/integration testing in production,flighting (aka A/B testing), metrics analysis, and how to validate the health of features on a live site by synthetic transactions and availability testing. Join Harini for this eye-opening session on how agile teams at Microsoft test today.

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W10 The Agile Testing Survival Guide
Ingo Philipp, Tricentis
Wed, 09/30/2015 - 1:45pm

As innovative businesses reduce their time-to-market and shorten release cycles, the need for continuous delivery methods becomes inevitable. Testers are constantly asked to rapidly and reliably deliver comprehensive test results in ever-decreasing or continuous cycles. Meanwhile, testing is butting heads with hard budget, tight time, and limited resource constraints, causing frustration for everyone involved. How can we turn these pains into gains? First, Ingo Phillip shows how to measure test coverage in terms of risk coverage on both the requirement and test case level—and why this matters. Second, Ingo shows how novel test design techniques help us test smarter, not harder, while keeping the entire test case portfolio straightforward. Third, he demonstrates how this effort results in a robust synthetic test data approach with repeatable, stable test execution. Finally, Ingo explains how to enable continuous delivery through continuous testing without drowning in test cases.

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W11 Test Strategies for Continuous Delivery
Melvin Laguren, Wrap Media
Wed, 09/30/2015 - 1:45pm

Classic testing methods and tools can’t keep pace with agile development practices and emerging continuous delivery models. Melvin Laguren describes how Macy's Ecommerce Merchant System uses a variety of tools to support its rapid delivery pipeline. A code coverage tool such as Karma determines if they need additional tests or if the existing tests provide satisfactory coverage. Using data analysis tools such as Code Maat with source code control, they have a robust approach to improve the code review process and easily identify necessary file changes to prevent issues in production. By incorporating these two tools, Melvin’s team members get real-time informative feedback that helps them make better testing decisions within their continuous delivery pipeline. Testers, developers, and all stakeholders have easy access to a dashboard reporting tool that showcases findings from unit, functional, and performance testing. Join Melvin to explore new tools and practices you can implement to smooth the road to continuous delivery in your systems.

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W16 Behavior-Driven Development and Testing Using Cucumber
Mary Thorn, Ipreo
Wed, 09/30/2015 - 3:00pm

We’ve all been there. We work incredibly hard to develop a feature and design tests based on written requirements. We build a detailed test plan that aligns the tests with the software and the documented business needs. And when we put the tests to the software, it all falls apart because the requirements were changed without informing everyone. But help is at hand. Enter behavior-driven development (BDD) and Cucumber—a tool for running automated acceptance tests and facilitating BDD. Mary Thorn explores the nuances of Cucumber and shows you how to implement BDD and agile acceptance testing. By fostering collaboration for implementing active requirements via a common language and format, Cucumber bridges the communication gap between business stakeholders and implementation teams. If you experience developers not coding to requirements, testers not getting requirements updates, or customers who feel out of the loop and don’t get what they ask for, Mary has answers for you.

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W17 Putting Quality First through Continuous Testing
Adam Auerbach, Capital One
Wed, 09/30/2015 - 3:00pm

Capital One has a highly integrated environment, which creates many dependencies for its agile teams. Because these dependencies are often not completed until late in their sprints, Capital One faced prolonged integration and regression testing phases, and did not realize the expected improvements in quality or time to market. As technology leaders pushed for continuous delivery, testing needed to “shift left” and execute test in real time concurrently with development. Adam Auerbach shares Capital One’s experience implementing continuous testing. He explains the core principles of continuous testing, service virtualization, and the continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline—and why testers need to understand and leverage these important concepts. Adam believes that testers need to learn basic development skills, including Ruby and Java, so they can take advantage of advanced automation practices. Because continuous testing is not easy and many companies have large populations of manual testers, Adam will provide a learning map to help you plan your personal and team’s transition.

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T3 Selenium: Practical Tips and Tricks
Andrew Krug, Revcontent
Thu, 10/01/2015 - 9:45am

Already using Selenium but have some unanswered questions? Want to learn how to use Selenium like a pro? Join Andrew Krug as he shares the best and most useful tips and tricks. Topics covered include headless test execution, testing HTTP status codes, blacklisting third-party content with a proxy server, repurposing your Selenium scripts to build an initial load testing suite, various ways to perform broken image checking, testing “forgot password” end-to-end, working with A/B testing (most notably, how to opt-out of it), testing file downloads (both the easy way and the hard way), how to add robust debugging output to your tests, and adding visual testing to your existing Selenium tests. If you're already using Selenium and looking for a way to take your automated testing practice to the next level, then this session is for you.

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Keynotes

K3 Lightning Strikes the Keynotes
Lee Copeland, TechWell Corp.
Wed, 09/30/2015 - 4:15pm

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 multiple keynote presentations for the price of one—and have some fun at the same time.Lightning Strikes the Keynotes

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K4 I Don’t Want to Talk about Bugs: Let’s Change the Conversation
Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.
Thu, 10/01/2015 - 8:30am

It’s time to change the conversation about testing and quality―from bugs and poor requirements to products and solutions. Instead, Janet Gregory says testers and managers working in agile organizations need to learn more about the business, the market, and the customers. With that knowledge, we have the information necessary to identify key problems and formulate solutions that reduce uncertainty and increase product value. Janet challenges testers and test managers to lead the way to change how organizations talk about quality. She explores ways to measure value and focus on the positive rather than a more negative cost-of-quality perspective. In an agile organization testing is not a job or a phase or a department; testing is a crosscutting concern and a skill which is vital to every contributor on a project and to a product. Join Janet to learn ways to rethink your priorities and ways to optimize your test practices.

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