STARWEST 2016 - Concurrent Sessions
Concurrent sessions offer attendees the flexibility to follow a specific track or to explore various topics throughout the conference in order to customize their learning experience. Learn both enterprise foundations and new methodologies to grow your skills, supercharge your knowledge, and re-energize your career growth.
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Wednesday, October 5
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 hard...
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 develop...
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...
Thursday, October 6
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...