STARWEST 2017 - Concurrent Sessions

Mike Cohn’s Test Pyramid describes a test automation strategy consisting of a wide base of unit tests, service-oriented acceptance tests for business logic, and a thin layer of tests exercising the user interface. Tests that provide the quickest feedback and fault precision serve as the testing foundation. So, how does this work in practice? How does a team achieve this level of test automation and maintain it over time? How can the team avoid redundancy in the various test layers? Jim Weaver demonstrates the different types of tests for a real feature—enforcing business rules for...

Substantial confusion exists about the roles and responsibilities of test managers in an agile software development process. Agile seeks to streamline project management and leadership under the role of a ScrumMaster. So, what does this mean for test managers? How do they stay involved in the process? What role do they fill? Is it possible that test managers are no longer needed? Join Jeffery Payne for a collaborative dialog on the challenges test managers face in an agile model. Learn the pros and cons of a variety of test management models he has seen used by organizations that have...

Do you ever sit in test strategy or test plan review sessions and get little or no participation from others? Are you looking for a better way to communicate important information around the test plan or strategy? Do you want your stakeholders to understand and engage in providing feedback and suggestions? Jennifer Bonine and Karen Schaefer have a solution for you—a mind mapping tool that can help you address these questions. A Mind Map is a visual approach used to help organize information rather than a text outline or list. Jennifer and Karen will help you download a free mind mapping...

Service virtualization provides many benefits for both development and test teams. For testers, service virtualization empowers them to work in parallel with their development counterparts and take control of their own schedules. They no longer have to wait for development to complete their work or to get access to a restricted system such as a mainframe or a third party API. Test teams can get the basic details from dev and/or use a sample request and response pair to create a virtual service themselves. With no need to wait on others to start testing, testing can start at...

Mary Thorn has had the opportunity in the past twenty years to work at many startups, creating several QA/test departments from scratch. For the past ten years, she has done this in agile software companies. Recently Mary moved from leading small agile test organizations to leading a large agile test organization where she has learned how to lead agile testers and agile testing in large contexts. Mary takes you through what she has learned, identifies the keys to transitioning your test organization as it grows, and discusses the techniques required to lead it through the changes. Agile...

Modern software products tend to have a rich UI that supports many user workflows, all of which need to be covered in testing. Agile organizations quickly discover that manual end-to-end testing neither supports their velocity nor provides respectable regression coverage. A common progression is to move from fully manual testing to record/replay, then to Selenium IDE style tests, then to automation based on Selenium WebDriver, perhaps with a BDD overlay. Daria Mehra has practiced this approach and shares her experience. She compares the Selenium style of automation to an...

A lot of folks doing testing (QAs, BAs, and Devs alike) are experienced with testing applications through the front end—a graphical user interface or a mobile app. However, Hilary Weaver-Robb says that with this type of testing we often miss the internal web services and APIs that power those applications. Integration or web service tests are right in the middle of the Testing Pyramid, so to ensure adequate coverage it’s vital for testers to know how to test at that level. Thankfully, to test web services we can apply many of the same principles we already know. Hilary focuses on...

Today, three things are undeniable facts of business—projects are becoming more agile, teams are learning to function well remotely, and the tester’s role is evolving. Mike Hrycyk believes that testers in agile teams face daunting challenges and often struggle to keep up with the pace of new feature development while performing all the needed regression testing activities. Mike offers a strategy as an alternate path: the creation of a regression testing team to augment feature teams, one that works in parallel, handling the testing regression cycle while the feature teams—...

For testers, creating tests is critical for a healthy testing process, so it is painful to see how boring writing test cases can be. In classical approaches, test cases are overcrowded with words—mostly project information that everyone already knows. What test cases don’t have is distilled information that allows testers to focus on the core functionality. Hipo has recently changed their approach to writing test documentation. Ömürden Cengiz believes that checklists are poised to take the throne from test cases, especially among startups and client-servicing shops where projects...

Automated acceptance testing is an essential component of a healthy agile software development process. Unfortunately, attempts to adopt this approach in mobile often result in slow, brittle, and highly complex device tests, based on UI automation. This approach harms confidence in mobile development. Automation used in this way often creates more problems than it solves, leaving development teams and businesses wondering where it all went wrong—often blaming tools rather than their approach. Revisiting fundamentals via a simple example of a mobile app, Paul Stringer helps us re-...

Stories help us learn. They can be fun or scary, exciting or relaxing. People worldwide tell and listen to stories, and we access them through books, film, TV, and IT. But the direct experience of 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 country would sit and listen to a story. Join Isabel and become your inner child. Bring your testing parent and listen to her stories. In fifteen-minute sections, Isabel recounts stories drawn from...

All testers have users with unique needs. Are these needs included in your requirements? Lisa denDekker-Redemann says that was not always the case at UPS. Were we testing the mobile systems that our crew members use like we should? Sometimes to get it right, we have to go out into the wild—or in our case, out into the wild blue yonder. To get the whole story (and awesome test coverage), we boarded an aircraft to design scripts and test live 18,000 feet in the air. We found real conditions our users face that didn’t make the user stories and test conditions. Lisa shares why she went into...

Your company has decided to move into the 21st century and is developing a shiny new mobile app. But you don’t know where to start. How many devices do you need to test? Can you take existing tests and modify them? How do you account for conditions such as loss of connectivity, a virtual keyboard, and new user interactions? What about the questions you don’t even know to ask? Join Bambi Rands as she introduces you to the world of mobile testing. Learn from Bambi’s first-hand experience testing mobile apps and building a mobile test strategy. Discuss the shift from testing web...

Every year, VMware has hundreds of releases for its virtualization products that cover data centers, networking, storage, cloud management, and digital workspace. Testing many different products while adapting to their development lifecycle introduces some special challenges for the product globalization team. Vincent Truong describes the processes and testing techniques a large-size software company needs to correctly support the globalization of its products. Vincent examines the agile process of globalization—internationalization and localization—testing and how the test...

Ensuring a website will scale with excellent performance under peak levels of load is no easy task. Any number of problems can occur—from switch hardware failure to third party service outages, to a poor choice of algorithms or memory use in the code. Melissa Chawla describes Shutterfly's three-tiered approach to prevent site outages during peak load. First, check the development team's designs for scalability by holding performance design reviews for each project including identifying throughput requirements for all down-stream resources. Second, automate continuous load testing...

The age of the Internet of Things (IoT) has come. IoT devices enable a new realm of services and applications—medical devices, fitness and fashion, appliances, industrial, etc. The market is expected to exceed $1.7 trillion by 2020 with more than 200 billion connected devices—and 90 percent of automobiles. Join Amir Rozenberg as he describes the ingredients to ensure quality IoT applications: IoT-enabled lab, test tools and methodologies, and compliance and test evidence. Test professionals need to expand their perspective to include IoT; new IoT dev testers need to adopt proven...

Even seemingly simple software systems can be a dense forest of intersecting logical pathways which may leave you wondering if your testing was robust enough. Traditional test cases are flawed since they only execute the pathways the tester considered at the time the test case was written, and they will execute the same way—every time and without variation. Jon Fetrow shows how, using model-based testing, you can create a map of your software forest and answer the question “Did you test enough?” Jon discusses the use of models to catch defects in the requirements and design phase...

Container-based and microservices architectures have become the ideal setting for faster development cycles and more robust applications. As companies shift to these technologies, an integral part of the solution is the development of a continuous performance testing pipeline. Adopting a containerized architecture presents a variety of challenges. There are concerns about introducing additional overhead into the application performance. At the same time, a new paradigm implies defining new testing strategies, new metrics, and new tools that can better adapt to these architectures....

In the past few years, deployment of applications in the cloud has become an industry standard. Meher Nori believes that it is very important for QA/testing organizations to understand the impact the cloud may have on them and prepare accordingly. The impact primarily involves a change in the testing strategy, and two items become very important. (1) Security testing and elasticity/scalability testing—new types of tests which previously were not so important—need to be created and executed once an application is hosted in the cloud. (2) Some traditional tests—availability testing...