Conference Schedule

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, and cost-effective; how to...Read more

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 videoconferencing) but rather a...Read more

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 automated testing framework in the...Read more

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 data. Sharing a case study,...Read more

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 assess the bigger picture,...Read more

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 testing. Learn the key...Read more

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 agile development and...Read more

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 volume. As the data moves on...Read more

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, learning when to say no, and...Read more

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 drawn from myths, legends...Read more

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 dependencies do not necessarily...Read more

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, validation strategy...Read more

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 manual test case execution...Read more