STARWEST 2017 - Special Topics
Wednesday, October 4
Mind Maps for Testers
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...
What to Do—Develop Your Own Automation or Use Crowdsourced Testing?
PreviewModern 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...
Machine Learning: Will It Take Over Testing?
PreviewMachine learning (ML), a branch of artificial intelligence, is gaining widespread adoption and interest on software development projects. Paul Merrill says that ML isn't typical programming. Algorithms can be changed and checked for accuracy at runtime to “learn” from data. Some companies are already generating and executing test cases using machine learning algorithms. It is projected that significant areas of the labor force—16 percent in transportation and 9 percent of healthcare—could see job cuts in the next few years. So it's time to start thinking: Might testing be on that...
Thursday, October 5
Story Time for Testers
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...
Globalization Testing for Cloud Products
PreviewEvery 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...
Use Model-Based Testing to Navigate the Software Forest
PreviewEven 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...
Testing Enterprise Software Rewrites
PreviewMost enterprises have legacy code that needs to be rewritten to keep pace with industry standards, new technologies, and modern infrastructures. The primary purpose of an enterprise software rewrite is to ensure functional compatibility before retiring a legacy system. However, replacing large, complex, bread-and-butter legacy systems is a risky and costly project endeavor, frequently resulting in projects failing, being shelved, or abandoned. Software rewrites face significant challenges due to detailed code requirements, legacy infrastructure, and lack of support. Umang Nahata...