STARWEST 2016 - Software Tester
Monday, October 3
Critical Thinking for Software Testers
Critical thinking is the kind of thinking that specifically looks for problems and mistakes. Regular people don't do a lot of it. However, if you want to be a great tester, you need to be a great critical thinker. Critically thinking testers save projects from dangerous assumptions and ultimately from disasters. The good news is that critical thinking is not just innate intelligence or a talent—it's a learnable and improvable skill you can master. Michael Bolton shares the specific techniques and heuristics of critical thinking and presents realistic testing...
Getting Started with Risk-Based Testing
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 that testing plays in risk mitigation. Develop an inventory...
Better Test Design for Great Test Automation
When we discover—often late in an automation effort—that the automated tests are cumbersome and costly to maintain, we often view this as a technical problem for the automator to solve. However, an often-overlooked cause is the role that testers who designed these tests play in making automation scalable and maintainable. In this interactive tutorial for both testers and automation engineers, Hans Buwalda explores how better test designs will result in much improved test automation and can make the difference between automation success and failure. See why...
Testing the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the next big technology challenge for software testing. IoT testing uses concepts from traditional and mobile environments but has new testing problems and new patterns. Jon Hagar begins by examining how to use data analytics from error profiles and social media to discover the new error patterns in IoT systems. Usage data on IoT devices is growing rapidly and becoming a big data issue. Through hands-on exercises, Jon explains how teams can use data analytics to improve development and testing. Next, he uses the analytics to define...
Fundamentals of Test Design
As testers, we know that we can define many more test cases than we will ever have time to design, execute, and report. The key problem in testing is choosing a small, “smart” subset—from the almost infinite number of tests available—that will find a large percentage of the defects. Join Lee Copeland to discover how to design test cases using formal black-box techniques, including equivalence class testing, boundary value testing, decision tables, and state-transition diagrams. Explore examples of each of these techniques in action. Don’t just pick test cases...
Implement BDD with Cucumber and SpecFlow
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 and SpecFlow, two tools for running automated acceptance tests and facilitating BDD. Mary Thorn explores the nuances of Cucumber and SpecFlow, and...
Get Your Message Across: Communications Skills for Testers
Communication is at the heart of our profession. If we can’t convey our concerns in ways that connect with key members of the project team, our contribution is likely to be ignored—no matter how advanced our testing capabilities are. Because we act in an advisory capacity rather than being in command, our power to exert influence is almost entirely based on our communication skills. Join Thomas McCoy as he draws on techniques from psychology and marketing to help you get your message across. With people suffering information overload and deluged with emails, it is...
Enhance Your Testing Workbox with New Approaches, Methods, and Ideas
What do you do when you are not testing? Whatever it is, you probably have a place where you work on your interests, some tools and equipment, and some things you always have with you. Perhaps you have a room or shed or tool rack with your favorite and most used equipment readily at hand in a workbox. Wouldn’t it be great to have your own workbox for testing? Well, Isabel Evans says you already do! Everyone’s “mental tool set” is different, but we all need versatile, strong, and multipurpose approaches to our work. In thirty years of software testing, Isabel has...
Applying Emotional Intelligence in Your Testing
As test managers and test professionals, we're constantly dealing with fragile egos, highly-charged situations, and pressured people playing a high-stakes game under conditions of massive uncertainty. We're often the bearers of bad news and are sometimes perceived as critics, activating people's primal fear of being judged. The concept of emotional intelligence (EI), popularized by Harvard psychologist and science writer Daniel Goleman, has much to offer test managers and testers. Key EI skills include self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and...
Test Automation Strategies for the Agile World
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...
Requirements Engineering for Testers
Testers often participate in requirement reviews, review requirements for testability, and then use requirements—in the form of user stories—as the basis of test cases. In an agile environment, most testers contribute to the development of user stories and acceptance criteria. Erik van Veenendaal says that unfortunately many testers have little knowledge or skill in requirements engineering. What level of quality and detail is realistic to expect for requirements and user stories? What does testability really mean? How can testers help improve requirements? Erik...
Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle
In test automation, we must often use several tools that have been developed or acquired over time with little consideration of an overall plan or architecture and no consideration for how to integrate those tools. As a result, productivity suffers and frustrations increase. Join Mike Sowers as he shares experiences from multiple organizations in creating an integrated test automation plan and developing a test automation architecture. Mike discusses both the good (engaging the technical architecture team) and the bad (too much isolation between test automators...
White Box Testing: What Every Tester Should Know
Do you want to take your testing skills to the next level and help your organization reap the full benefits of testing earlier? Are you trying to stay relevant on an agile team where testing is shifting to the left of the project timeline? Join Tariq King as he explains the fundamentals of white box testing so you can find bugs as soon as they happen, and do more thorough, targeted testing during software development. Learn how to apply white box testing techniques such as testing by looking, automated unit testing, mocking, and code coverage analysis. This...
Building Your Mobile App Quality Strategy
Jason Arbon invites you to join him and build an app quality and testing strategy together. Whether you have a web, hybrid, or native app, building a quality and testing strategy means (1) knowing what data and tools you have available to make agile decisions, (2) understanding your customers and your competitors, and (3) testing your app under real-world conditions. Jason guides you through the latest techniques, data, and tools to ensure you have an awesome mobile app quality and testing strategy. Leave this interactive session with a strategy for your very own...
Tuesday, October 4
The Challenges of BIG Testing: Automation, Virtualization, Outsourcing, and More
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 behavior-driven development. Discover...
Selenium Test Automation: From the Ground Up
Knowledge of Selenium, the industry-standard tool for testing web applications, is a much sought after skill in today’s world of test automation. Many believe it is a must-have skill for test engineers. If you want to learn Selenium, then this tutorial is a great start. Cheezy Morgan shows you how to build test automation using Selenium. But he doesn’t stop there. He uses his years of experience to show you how to build automation that is clean and easy to maintain. Cheezy introduces other tools that work with Selenium to help manage the data used to drive your...
Test Attacks to Break Mobile and Embedded Software
In the tradition of James Whittaker’s book series, How to Break Software, Jon Hagar applies the testing “attack” concept to the domain of mobile and embedded software systems. First, Jon defines the environments of mobile and embedded software. He then examines the issues of software product failures caused by defects found in these types of software. Next, Jon shares a set of attacks against mobile and embedded software based on common modes of failure that teams can direct against their software. Like different kinds of software design patterns,...
Performance Testing: Planning for a Successful Test
In today’s fast paced, ever changing world of software and technology, software performance testing is becoming essential to successful product implementation. To be successful, we must understand several fundamental factors about performance testing. Join Dale Perry as he examines these activities and identifies key issues, how they determine our level of success at implementing the necessary testing, and potential pitfalls. He addresses the tester’s role in performance testing, the performance test planning process, and integrating performance testing into the...
Influence Diagrams: A New Way to Understand Testing
Influence diagrams provide a simple-to-create and easy-to-understand approach to address the complexities of real-life problems. As testers we may want to find more bugs, but this may have an unintended consequence for developers. Developers now have more defects to debug, which affects their capacity to deliver new functionality. Isabel Evans has found that influence diagrams provide a means of understanding and managing the complexities of key interactions among testers, developers, and business stakeholders. In the past few years, Isabel has used influence...
The Impact of IoT on Testing: What’s in Store?
No longer just a futuristic concept, the Internet of Things (IoT) has a strong presence in our world even today. If your business is not prepared for it, you’re already behind. With the proliferation of connected “things”—devices, appliances, cars, and even clothes—Jennifer Bonine says that the stage is set and IoT apps are here to stay. Testing, product management, and development teams must address developing and testing in this paradigm. Testers, accustomed to traditional platforms, are now asked to test on more complex devices and more advanced platforms....
Agile Testing: Team Tactics that Deliver the Goods
Sold Out!Let’s face it—agile testing is different. Challenges exist in successfully integrating within the teams themselves. Scrummerfall continues to run rampant. The dichotomy of testing vs. quality and balancing both the team’s and your focus still exists. Delivering value is both an imperative and a challenge. In this dynamic workshop, join agile coaches Mary Thorn and Bob Galen as they explore the tools, techniques, and mindset you need to bring to the table to successfully test in agile contexts. Mary and Bob examine risk-based testing, iterative test planning,...
Security Testing for Test Professionals
Today’s software applications are often security critical, making security testing essential in a software quality program. Unfortunately, most testers have not been taught how to effectively test the security of the software applications they validate. Join Jeffery 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. Explore effective test...
Test Estimation in the Face of Uncertainty
Anyone who has ever attempted to estimate software testing effort realizes just how difficult the task can be. The number of factors that can affect the estimate is virtually unlimited. The keys to good estimates are understanding the primary variables, comparing them to known standards, and normalizing the estimates based on their differences. This is easy to say but difficult to accomplish because estimates are frequently required even when we know very little about the project—and what we do know is constantly changing. Throw in a healthy dose of politics and...
How Testers Master Git and GitHub
GitHub—a powerful online collaboration, code review, code management, and version control service based on the open source Git tool—is the new business card for professional developers working on software projects. That's why job interviewers often look to GitHub to gauge a potential development hire's creativity, popularity, capability, and tenacity. Today’s testers need to learn about and use GitHub, too. Join Wilson Mar as he examines the major GitHub repositories testers should know about. In this hands-on tutorial, you’ll learn why and how GitHub is being...
Testing Cloud Services
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, linking relevant IaaS and PaaS capabilities along the way....
How to Break Software: Robustness Edition
Have you ever worked on a project where you felt testing was thorough and complete—all features were covered and all tests passed—yet in the first week in production the software had serious issues and problems? Join Dawn Haynes to learn how to inject robustness testing into your projects to uncover those issues before release. Robustness—an important and often overlooked area of testing—is the degree to which a system operates correctly in the presence of exceptional inputs or stressful environmental conditions. By expanding basic tests and incorporating...
Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps
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 rapid deployment, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Because DevOps practices require confidence that changes made to the code base will function as expected, automated testing is essential. Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the unique challenges associated with integrating automated testing into...
Measurement and Metrics for Test Managers
To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he addresses common metrics—...
Take a Test Drive: Acceptance Test-Driven Development
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....
Exploring Usability Testing for Mobile and Web Technologies
It’s not enough to verify that software conforms to requirements by passing established acceptance tests. Successful software products engage, entertain, and support the user experience. Goals vary from project to project, but if your users do not embrace your software—no matter how robust and reliable it is—business can slip through your hands. Rob Sabourin shares how to elicit effective usability requirements with techniques such as storyboarding and task analysis. Testers, programmers, and users collaborate to blend the requirements, design, and test cycles...
Wednesday, October 5
Lessons Learned in Leadership: Give Your Team the Edge
Selena Delesie recognizes that highly successful teams embrace several specific principles. When every person embodies these principles, teams have people who are passionate about the work they do and who show up every day eager and ready to deliver their best. A self-admitted geek, Selena was thrilled to hear Sir Richard Branson speak live at an event last year—in-person and in the same room! She learned that his success is built on the same principles she coaches: listening deeply, believing people truly matter, having an addiction to learning, serving others,...
Engineering Trust in Complex Systems
Within software and test engineering, two new disciplines—Chaos Engineering and Intuition Engineering—provide avenues to address trust in complex systems. Chaos Engineering is a methodology for test engineers to validate a system’s behavior and establish empirical trust metrics. Intuition Engineering provides new interfaces to navigate complexity, filling in gaps in understanding that classical methods cannot address.
Casey Rosenthal explains how these disciplines are used to improve quality on Netflix.com, one of the largest scaled deployments on the...
The Path to Test Leadership: A Road Less Traveled
Are you interested in growing into a test leadership position? Or do you shy away from leadership because you think you’ll lose your technical, hands-on testing skills? Regardless of your experience level, technical programming knowledge, and company organizational structure, following a test leadership path could be the difference between surviving or thriving as a testing professional. Join Tariq King as he debunks myths about test leadership, and provides a clear explanation of the different software testing leadership roles and positions. If you have ever...
Testing in the Dark
Isn't it amazing? Stakeholders drop software on our desks and expect us to test it—without any requirements, design, or product knowledge whatsoever. About the only clear thing is the absurd and unrealistic deadline. We are expected to bend over backward, spread magic pixie dust, and heroically test quality into a product we have never heard of before. But testing in the dark is not impossible, and as Rob Sabourin shows, it can even be a very valuable and fun experience. Learn strategies to emerge from a murky fog into clear, meaningful quality insights. Leverage...
Automated Testing: Go Beyond the Basics
You've been through some initial automation bootstrapping and training. You're now three to six months down the road and spending too much time chasing intermittent test failures and maintaining your scripts. You're dealing with frustration and trust issues in the automated tests. What you're not doing is adding a lot of value around new feature work. Sound familiar? Jim Holmes says that pattern is common across nearly every team that is new to building significant automation suites. Jim helps you with a few approaches—all based on his years of experience and...
Testing in an Agile World: The Current State and Future Possibilities
Delivering high quality applications in an agile world is becoming more complex and challenging because of the changes the web and mobile are undergoing. Web testing continues to get much more difficult due to: increasing use of open technologies (HTML, JavaScript, and CSS) and web components in apps; lengthening the approval processes for plugins; and Chrome, Mozilla, and Edge browsers blocking specific APIs. On the mobile front, Apple, Google, and Microsoft are making it easier for developers to build cross-platform apps, resulting in more to test in less time...
Testing in a Continuous Delivery Pipeline: Faster, Better, Cheaper
The continuous delivery pipeline is the process of taking new or changed features from developers, and getting features deployed into production and delivered quickly to the customer. Gene Gotimer says testing within continuous delivery pipelines should be designed so the earliest tests are the quickest and easiest to run, giving developers the fastest feedback. Successive rounds of testing lead to increased confidence that the code is a viable candidate for production and that more expensive tests—time, effort, cost—are justified. Manual testing is performed...
IoT Software Testing Challenges: The IoT World Is Really Different
With billions of devices containing new software connected to the Internet, the Internet of Things (IoT) is poised to become the next growth area for software development and testing. Although many traditional test techniques and strategies remain viable, challenges in IoT testing include huge amounts of data, multiple communication channels, device protocols, resource limitations (battery or memory), addressing sensors and controllers, cloud-hardware-device integration, and security concerns. Jon Hagar says that for IoT testers to be successful, they must...
The Art of People Facilitation: Servant Leadership and Team Dynamics
Some of the greatest products come from great teams with exceptional servant leaders. These leaders use influence instead of authority and know when to just get out of the way. Unfortunately, some teams are asked to be self-empowered, change on the fly, think for themselves—and then are told exactly how they have to do all of these things or else. Poor leadership can break a great team, ruin great product, and damage a great organization. In this highly interactive session, Robert Woods explores team dynamics, highlights servant leadership skills, and explains...
Full Stack Testing of Node.js Applications
As the popularity of Node.js grows, so does the complexity and scale of the applications based on it. More than other technologies, this environment has a growing number of valuable open source modules to promote test-driven development and integrated testing. When organizations like PayPal, Walmart, Netflix, and LinkedIn are leveraging Node.js, it’s clear that it is here to stay. With the increasing number of enterprise deployments, the need for a comprehensive full stack testing strategy becomes even more critical. Join experienced Node.js QA architect and...
Adaptive Automation: Tests that Recover Instead of Failing
Are you tired of flaky automation scripts that fail without apparent cause? Are most script failures due to bugs in the test script rather than bugs in the product? Do you simply want to get more out of your automation framework? Many testers and organizations are frustrated with the high cost and low return of their automation frameworks. Scott Miles shares a range of techniques to convert your existing framework from brittle to adaptive. Learn how to improve the quality of your automation framework while reducing the required maintenance. Adaptive automation...
Agile Testing at Etsy: How and Why It Works
Growing team skill sets, resource management, pipeline management, career development, career definition, scaling issues, and optimizing efficiencies are just a few of the problems agile QA test teams face. If you have asked yourself How can I do more with less?, How can I increase the impact of QA testing at my organization?, or How is the QA testing helping or hurting product launches?, then don’t miss this stimulating presentation! Join Arylee McSweaney as she shares Etsy’s value driven—yet individualistic—approach to quality...
The Journey to Continuous Testing
Capital One’s highly integrated environment creates many interdependencies for its agile teams. Because these dependencies were not being completed until late in their sprints, Adam Auerbach says that Capital One faced prolonged integration and regression testing phases and did not realize expected improvements in quality or time-to-market. As technology leaders pushed for continuous delivery (CD), testing needed to shift left and occur simultaneously with development. To shift left, the testing community needed to learn basic development skills, including Ruby...
Become a Mindful Tester: Eliminate the Clutter, Weather Any Storm
Losing your focus because change is hitting you from all sides? Meetings and technology disrupting much of your day? End the day not knowing what you’ve accomplished? It’s for you to learn the power of mindfulness techniques. Francie Van Wirkus guides your discovery of how mindfulness provides calm and clarity in the face of great change, which exponentially enhances your problem solving and creativity. Once you regularly practice mindfulness, you are free to grow your champion heart. Like an athlete who doesn't quit, successful testers must be resilient and...
Virtually Speaking: Leading Distributed Test Teams
As a newly promoted quality assurance manager, Willie Smith assumed responsibility for a large application that allows UPS customers to ship packages worldwide. His team was distributed worldwide and had varying levels of automation experience, application knowledge, and QA processes in place. With the next deployment date only a few months away, Willie found that the testing side of the project was in trouble. To align the test team with project and company goals, he had to develop virtual training plans and implement new practices to deal with the host of...
Design for Testability in Practice
With the drive for continuous integration and delivery, the implications and approaches for designing more testable software are receiving substantial discussion and debate. What does testability really mean in practice? How do you take the idea of testability—how easy it is to test software—and put it into action through the different dimensions of designing and testing a real world product? Nir Szilagyi recognizes that the challenges of difficult-to-test software can transform a testing cycle from a small automation and exploratory effort to a long struggle of...
Go Test Yourself: A Self-Testing Automation Pattern
Today even the simplest applications are built with numerous technologies, creating an ever-expanding need for tests. If you’ve built an automation framework and a suite of tests, Prakash Karaka says you are off to a good start. However, as your application changes expand, you are required to add more and more tests. Even though most new application pages are built from existing code patterns, maintaining your test suite is tedious work. You have a nagging feeling you could use a robot assistant to automate the creation of most tests, freeing you to focus more on...
Agile Testing for Embedded and IoT Software Development
Much of the success of agile adoptions is due to the automated testing approach used in agile projects. Because many of these techniques were pioneered in the development of web applications, it can be difficult to see how these techniques can be leveraged for a project where software is being built for an embedded or Internet of Things (IoT) application. Thomas Stiehm describes ways to leverage agile testing techniques for embedded systems. Whether you are building a medical device, embedded controller, or IoT device, learn how to leverage these testing...
A DevOps Primer: Whole Team Approaches for Better Software Quality
With fingers wagging and eyes squinting, they query Why didn’t you find this problem during testing? How many times have you tried to defend yourself with things like We can’t test everything or It’s a corner case? Everyone knows you can’t improve quality with testing alone, so what can you do? Marianne Hollier shares practices and tools that help improve your test effectiveness and overall software quality. Learn how early collaboration across your whole team can remove bottlenecks and surprises. See how capturing and agreeing on interfaces...
It’s Time to Automate Your Exploratory Testing
Exploratory testing (ET) is a great complement to traditional test approaches. Testing professionals often see ET as an approach for manual testing. However, trying to organize ET from a test process perspective can be a challenge. There is an important question to ask—and answer: Is exploratory testing compatible with test automation? Jim Trentadue explores how automated test cases can be designed to include provisions for exploratory testing. Examples of this are data used in input fields, navigating various paths in your application, encountering unexpected...
Lightning Strikes the Keynotes
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...
Thursday, October 6
Optimize Your Test Automation to Deliver More Value
Mary Thorn walked into an organization that had invested heavily in test automation. Unfortunately they had no strategy, test suites had grown unwieldy, test maintenance was a nightmare, many tests were failing—and no one seemed to care. But Mary’s saddest observation was that they, mainly the leadership but the teams as well, had lost faith in test automation. Mary knows it doesn’t have to be that way. She’s a well-known automation disaster recovery agent who is going to share her secrets with you. Mary begins with how to keep your test automation light, nimble...
What Time Is It Over There? Managing Your Global QA Team
Cheaper … faster … smarter—words familiar to modern QA test team leaders everywhere. Although many organizations recognize that a globally-distributed QA model will achieve some of these objectives, it comes with obvious challenges. Lack of immediate communication, not knowing what the other is doing, and even cultural clashes can result in a lack of trust within the team, an absence of team spirit, and high attrition. Elizabeth Wisdom identifies the key to mitigating the risks associated with each challenge. And it’s not a technical solution (like advanced...
Making the Move to Behavior-Driven Development
Behavior-driven development (BDD) is a hot topic in the development community. Not only does a properly implemented BDD process help drive increased automation and quicker development cycles, it also facilitates better collaboration between departments and reduces siloed communication. An ideal partner of continuous integration/delivery, BDD can help solve many testing bottlenecks associated with DevOps. For all its benefits, BDD is underadopted. Only 10–25 percent of development organizations have implemented or are experimenting with a BDD process....
Automated Testing Using Selenium
Is your company thinking about using Selenium to implement test automation in a joint development and operations environment? If your company has already started using Selenium, have you experienced execution or integration challenges? The path to a well-oiled and successful Selenium test automation program comes down to using the right techniques and development standards that incorporate modularity and flexibility. Jin Reck describes how to design effective web test automation development, and shares common challenges and solutions when implementing an...
Seven Steps to Pragmatic Mobile Testing
Mobile testing is getting harder—more devices, multiple operating systems, higher quality expectations, and shorter development cycles. How do you deal with these demands? In order to align mobile testing with product strategies and market goals, Tom Chavez says you first need to (1) know your users and how they will use your app. (2) Knowing the app and how users may actually be using it differently are key to testing to satisfy users—not the designers. (3) With test case matrices vastly larger than ever, prioritizing tests into “must-haves” and “nice-to-haves”...
Understanding Complex Web Performance Measurement
In performance testing we run a suite of tests, modify the system in an attempt to improve its performance, and then repeat the tests. We want to know if the performance is “better.” However, no single performance measure exists; we must consider and evaluate many variables. Although viewing a full histogram of various test runs is more helpful, quantifying the change between the tests becomes the challenge. Parvez Ahammad introduces the relative divergence index (RDI), a multidimensional statistical method to compare differences between two sets of performance...
T-Shaped People: Time to Get in Shape for Your Testing Future
Today, agile testers are being asked to do a lot more than just testing. The notion of “T-shaped people,” who combine technical skills with collaborative capabilities, was created by Tim Brown in the 1990s to describe the new breed of worker. Mary Thorn believes that anyone—including testers—can contribute more to the business than their standard role traditionally dictates. The tester’s critical view and skeptical thinking can be used earlier in the development process. This role can stretch to include other aspects that intrigue them and keep them interested....
Testing the Magic at Walt Disney Imagineering
It takes more than faith, trust, and pixie dust to test a Disney theme park attraction. How does Walt Disney Imagineering ensure quality experiences for their guests? Janna Loeffler faced this challenge when she joined Walt Disney Imagineering (WDI). Since 2015 Janna has led the testing effort on some of Disney’s most complicated show and interactive systems. She describes the history of show software development and testing within WDI and discusses how to implement the right choice of quality solutions when working with different types of software. Learn how to...
Agile Strategies for Traditional Software Development Teams
Many development and test teams are still working on more traditional software projects that release every few months or longer, rather than daily or weekly. Benefits of adopting continuous development strategies into a standard software cycle include immediate feedback on code changes, a clear understanding of the current risk-state of the software, and current and historical data to assess progress. Melanie Drake shares specific “modern” strategies that her development team has added and how these strategies enhance software quality. Some tools include...
Get a Handle on Your Test Data—Starting Now
If you don’t proactively manage and control your application test data, you may be missing out on a big process improvement that will save money, improve test coverage, and may save your systems from embarrassing failures. Paul Merrill describes the advantages and disadvantages of four data strategies—Elementary, Refresh Data Source, Selfish Data Generation, and Selfish Data Generation with Batch Cleanup—to help gain control of test data. Explore the two components of a data strategy—the Creational Strategy and the Cleanup Strategy—and their value to effective...
Three Keys to Mobile Testing for Real User Conditions
Congratulations on making the jump to testing on real mobile devices. But are you also testing under the actual conditions experienced by your users? Do your tests include scenarios of varying location, interrupts (call, SMS), backgrounds, and varying networks in motion? Join Carlo Cadet as he describes modeling user condition testing scenarios with the same personas used by marketing teams. Carlo focuses on three key areas of user-condition testing: 1) defining personas, 2) implementing tests, and 3) analyzing results. He demonstrates how user-condition testing...
Agile Testing Process Analytics: From Data to Insightful Information
In recent years, businesses have raised their expectations for development projects while cutting back on financial resources and demanding shorter production cycles. Jonathan Alexander says that to meet these growing demands and succeed as a testing manager, you need to leverage agile process data and insights to make critical decisions about your team and strategy. However, this is no easy task with everything there is to look at during a development project. How do managers distinguish meaningful data from meaningless data? Jonathan shares the analytics that...
The Role of Testers as Requirements Dealers
Those of us in the business analyst role are encouraged to communicate with clients, while other roles in an organization may not have the same opportunity. However, talking to clients must not be limited to business analysts. Jyothi Rangaiah believes that testers need to talk to the clients, too, because by the time the product information trickles down from a business analyst to a programmer to a tester, valuable information has been lost. Testers are often blamed for defects in the product, but this can be avoided by fostering effective communication between...
The Four V’s of Big Data Testing: Variety,Volume, Velocity, and Veracity
The expression “garbage, garbage out” emphasizes the need for thorough testing in any Big Data and analytics implementation. Big Data testing means ensuring the correctness and completeness of voluminous, often heterogeneous, data as it moves across different stages—ingestion, storage, analytics, and visualization—producing actionable insights. What should be our testing focus? Which of the 4 V’s—variety, volume, velocity, and veracity—are most important at which stage? For example, in the ingestion stage, testing needs to focus on variety of data rather than...
Nonfunctional Testing: Examine the Other Side of the Coin
Creating a highly available, scalable, and high-performing system requires a substantial amount of what we call nonfunctional testing. Developing nonfunctional testing skills is a must for many of today’s quality engineers (QEs). For the past several years, Balaji Arunachalam’s quality team for Intuit Core Services has experienced several highly available and disaster recovery buildup and testing challenges. Their journey includes the evolution of functional QEs into hybrid QEs who are capable of doing both functional and nonfunctional testing. Nonfunctional...
Comprehensive Performance Testing: From Early Dev to Live Production
Although the idea of doing performance testing throughout the software lifecycle sounds simple enough, as soon as you try to combine the concepts of “always testing” (in dev, pre-prod, and production) with “limited time and resources” and throw in the word “comprehensive,” the challenges can be monumental. Quickly the “how” of it emerges as the most important question—and one worth focusing on. Brad Stoner tackles this topic by explaining how he has been able to solve this seemingly impossible puzzle by applying various approaches such as early and often,...
The Boss Chose the Cloud: What Does that Mean for You?
Although most test managers and testing staff know how to cope with new and difficult testing challenges, Martin Pol and Jeroen Mengerink maintain that the cloud phenomenon requires special attention. Testing must evolve and innovate to address the newly introduced risks combined with the changing emphasis for classical quality requirements. How do you test resource elasticity and the “bring your own device” philosophy with their cloud-specific security and performance risks? How do you understand and then cope with local and international privacy legislation for...
Story Time for Testers
Stories help us learn. They can be fun or scary, exciting or relaxing. People worldwide tell and listen to stories. We access them through books, film, TV, and computers. But direct, face-to-face storytelling is still a powerful experience. When Isabel Evans was young, there was a program on the radio called Listen with Mother. For fifteen minutes, mothers and children across the land would sit and listen to a story. Join Isabel and become your younger child, bring your testing parent, and listen to her stories. In fifteen minute sections, Isabel recounts stories...
A Day in the Life of a Test Architect
Although Lee Hawkins stumbled into testing—in 1999 after migrating from the UK to Australia amid a tech boom time—he has since become a passionate member of the worldwide testing community and currently holds the title of principal test architect. So, what does that really mean? A test architect at Dell Software provides technical leadership and strategic direction for testing, and Lee describes what that means in his day-to-day work. His position involves advocacy for great new testing ideas gleaned from the wider testing community, mentoring new testers, and...
Big Data, Big Trouble: Getting into the Flow of Hadoop Testing
Big Data, one of the latest buzzwords in our industry, involves working with petabytes of data captured by various systems and making sense of that data in some way. Maryam Umar has found that testing systems like Hadoop is very challenging because of the frequency with which the data arrives in the system, the number of jobs that run to process that data, and the interdependency of the data. Maryam describes some of the projects at Hotels.com which involve identifying multiple users and using that data to make recommendations of hotels. Testing this is fairly...
Smart Combinatorial Testing
In the right hands, combinatorial testing can be a powerful testing strategy to reduce the number of tests. Unfortunately, when used improperly, it can hurt more than it helps. Ingo Philipp explains that there is not one single combinatorial testing technique that guarantees success. Rather, success lies in creating a tight interaction among all of the techniques, since each is intended to serve a different purpose. In nearly every test project, even small test sets are overrun with countless business-related dependencies. The number and nature of these...
Become a Performance Diagnostics Hero
Andreas Grabner maintains that most performance and scalability problems don’t need a large or long running performance test or the expertise of a performance engineering guru. Don’t let anybody tell you that performance is too hard to practice because it actually is not. You can take the initiative and find these often serious defects. Andreas analyzed and spotted the performance and scalability issues in more than 200 applications last year. He shares his performance testing approaches and explores the top problem patterns that you can learn to spot in your...
Transform Your Cloud Validation Strategy from Cloudy to Clear
Security, data privacy, reliability, and regulatory compliance are critical factors when evaluating whether to move business applications from in-house, client-hosted environments to a cloud platform. Quality assurance plays a vital role in ensuring that the appropriate level of risk assessment, verification, and validation takes place to ensure business continuity during the migration to a new cloud platform. Vandana Viswanathan shares an introduction to the five components of a sound cloud application validation strategy: cloud provider qualification process,...
The Tester’s Role: Balancing Technical Acumen and User Advocacy
Ten years ago, many of us started our careers in testing, generally moving from a different internal role. It was common for people who were product users to be hired to jump start their technical career. Now, we see the growth of tester positions that require coding experience or a computer science degree. Melissa Tondi discusses the changing landscape of the role of testers, the challenges when hiring developers with no previous testing experience, and a way to shift the pendulum back to balance technical acumen with a user advocacy role. Melissa leads a...
Exploratory Testing and Automated Testing: Create a Healthy Relationship
With the pressure of decreased time-to-market and the demand for error-free web applications, some people erroneously believe that test automation can solve all our defect woes. Dawn Jardine believes that neither test automation alone nor exploratory testing alone can solve quality issues. So, what is the best approach? Where do we invest our resources, time, and money so clients are happy with our product? How can automation and exploratory testing work together to obtain maximum test coverage? Join Dawn as she shares her experience of moving from a solely...
Take Charge of Your Testing Career: Bring Your Skills to the Next Level
Far too often in our careers we trust our fate to employers. We attend training and acquire skills needed for our jobs today. Unfortunately, as far too many have learned, careers can be stalled when you don't have the right skill sets. Much of testing’s future requires automation ability beyond the traditional knowledge and experience of many testers. Jared Richardson examines key skills that you need to acquire to future-proof your career and ensure you are ready for the job you want to have. Jared focuses on deliberate learning and intentional experimentation...
Reception and Summit Kickoff: As a Leader, What Is Keeping You Up at Night?
Kickoff the Testing & Quality Leadership Summit with a reception and some networking.
Friday, October 7
Agile Leadership to Empower Your Team
Leadership used to be about delegating authority to subordinates. Today it’s about enabling and facilitating teams and individuals to help them solve their own problems. Join Rod Jardine, an expert in agile leadership techniques, for an interactive discussion of how to apply agile best practices and principles to management and leadership. Learn tips and tricks for motivating employees to step up and lead, empowering teams to reach new heights, and becoming a servant leader for your organization. Take home practical methods for applying agile leadership...
Creative Leadership for Creative Teams
As developers and testers, we're uniquely creative, we're inspiration driven, we obsess over every detail, and we can rarely turn it off ... we are creatives, and we are different. We think differently, we perform differently, and we need to lead differently. Join Martin Ringlein for a rant, a rave, and a reality check on how to build and lead creative teams. Learn how to manage collaboration and fuel inspiration. Leave the Testing & Leadership Summit with much more than data points, facts, and figures about leadership; see how changing our perspective of the...
The Power of Collective Experience
Bring your biggest challenges to this session and tap the wisdom of others. In this immersive session, you will tackle some of the most widely mentioned challenges brought to light from the group. Whether it’s a software testing conundrum, a project setback, a management blocker, a group or team dysfunction or an interpersonal hurdle, all of these can slow our progress and reduce our effectiveness. And when we hunt for options, we all have blind spots and biases that prevent us from thinking out of the box and finding new and different solutions. Typically the...
The United State of Women Summit: From Dreaming to Doing!
Axosoft evangelist, Tania Katan reports back after being invited to the White House’s United State of Women Summit as a “Changemaker”. She will share stories from leaders, activists and, ahem, the First Lady of the United States on how women are taking on challenges in technology, entrepreneurship and beyond. You will leave this talk with tools for challenging the status quo and becoming a Changemaker! In the spirit of Axosoft’s collaborative tools (GitKraken)—and work culture—this lively talk (and micro-workshop) will engage attendees in working collaboratively...
Panel–Career Superpowers
Let’s discuss and define the most important career superpowers for women. Hear what industry professionals, leaders, and idea disruptors think the important career superpowers are for women in 2016 and going forward.
Panel: Tania Katan, the Curator of Code at AxoSoft and Melissa Benua, Senior Backend Software Engineer at PlayFab, Inc.