STARWEST 2017 - Agile Testing
Sunday, October 1
Fundamentals of DevOps Certification—ICAgile (2-Day) - SOLD OUT
Agile Tester Certification (2-Day)
Fundamentals of Agile Certification—ICAgile (2-Day)
Software Tester Certification—Foundation Level (3-Day) - SOLD OUT
Monday, October 2
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 puzzles that help you practice...
Selenium Test Automation: From the Ground Up
Selenium expertise, 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 tool 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 tests, work with JavaScript...
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 Mary Thorn says help is at hand. Enter behavior-driven development (BDD) and Cucumber and SpecFlow, two tools for running automated acceptance tests and facilitating BDD. Mary explores the nuances of Cucumber and SpecFlow, and shows you how to...
Exploratory Testing: Explore with Intent
NewThe skill to self-manage our testing work and our learning—making learning and reflection a habit—is what differentiates skilled exploratory testing from simply putting random testing activities together. Maaret Pyhäjärvi says that exploratory testing treats test design, test execution, and learning as parallel, mutually supportive activities—with the goal of discovering things that we don’t know we don’t know. Exploratory testing frames our thinking about the system and engulfs the idea of creating artifacts to support testing. Join Maaret to experience exploratory testing hands-on and...
Measurement and Metrics for Test Management
PreviewTo 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—measures of product...
Test Automation Strategies for the Agile World
Sold Out!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 that must be made when developing an automation business case. Open source tools are becoming incredibly viable and often best their commercial equivalents―not only in cost but also in functionality, creativity, evolutionary speed, and developer acceptance. Agile methods have fundamentally challenged our traditional automation strategies. Now we must keep up with...
Influence Diagrams: A New Way to Understand Testing
PreviewInfluence 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 diagrams as a tool to...
Unit Testing: What Every Tester Should Know
Do you want to take your testing skills to the next level? Are you trying to stay relevant on an agile team where testing is shifting to the left on the project timeline? Do you want to help your organization reap the full benefits of testing earlier? Then join Tariq King to explore the fundamentals of unit testing so you can find bugs as soon as they happen and do more thorough, targeted testing during software development. This introductory session is for everyone—of all programming skill levels. Learn how to apply program-based techniques such as testing by looking, automated unit...
Tuesday, October 3
A Rapid Introduction to Rapid Software Testing
You're under tight time pressure with barely enough information to proceed with testing. How do you test quickly and inexpensively—yet still produce informative, credible, and accountable results? Rapid Software Testing, adopted by context-driven testers worldwide, offers a field-proven answer to this all-too-common dilemma. In this one-day sampler of the approach, Michael Bolton introduces you to the skills and practice of Rapid Software Testing through stories, discussions, and “minds-on” exercises that simulate important aspects of real testing problems. The rapid approach isn't just...
What Testers Must Know about Git and GitHub
With Git and GitHub, testers today have unprecedented visibility into both development and DevOps code. GitHub provides powerful online collaboration, code review, code management, and version control services. GitHub's domination of social coding makes it the professionals’ new business card, indicating their creativity, popularity, capability, and tenacity. Today’s testers need to learn about and use Git and GitHub. In this hands-on tutorial Wilson Mar presents material available nowhere else and a unique explanation of tools, repositories, and GUI programs used by professional...
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 v. 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 to explore the tools, techniques, and mindset you must bring to the table to successfully test in agile contexts. Mary and Bob examine risk-based testing, iterative test planning, exploratory testing, agile automation...
Agile Test Team Leadership: From Concept to Product
Sold Out!Today, many agile organizations are making a terrible error. They are assuming there is no place for test management and leadership in agile, self-directed team contexts. Mary Thorn and Bob Galen beg to differ with this view and believe a strong need exists for testing leadership in agile organizations—just not the way we’ve typically approached it. Join Mary and Bob as they explore what excellent test team leadership looks like in agile contexts. Explore the aspects of self-directed teams and the implications to your previous leadership styles. Look under the covers of Scrum and see where...
Wednesday, October 4
The Lean Startup Method: Its Value for Testers
A startup is an organization created to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Approximately 40 percent of all startups will cease operation with investors losing everything; 95 percent will fall short of their financial projections. And the number one cause of startup failure? No one wants to buy their product. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, learned that under conditions of extreme uncertainty, classical management methods do not bring success. Based on his and others’ experiences, he formulated the Lean Startup methodology consisting of five...
Where Did My Testers Go? Test Management on Agile Projects
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...
Traditional Testing: The Silent Killer of DevOps
Many organizations today are adopting DevOps to accelerate software delivery. However, once they have invested significant time and money optimizing most parts of the software delivery process, testing often holds them back from achieving the desired results. Why? Because software testing is still dominated by yesterday’s tools and processes—which don’t meet the needs of today’s accelerated development processes. How can you ensure that you and your team help the organization achieve its objectives? Wayne Ariola says that the key is continuous testing—and Wayne doesn’t just mean test...
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...
Move from Scripted Manual Testing to Scenario-Based Testing
PreviewThink of manually executed test scripts—like pulling a wagon without wheels. Eventually the wagon will make it to the final destination, but the journey itself will be long and painful. Many people think test scripts are outdated because of the long, painful process of writing and running them. Andrea Fox says that their analytics team shared this way of thinking. To make things worse, the team also was dealing with defects being constantly introduced because the restrictive scripts were not catching the issues. Change was vital to provide more efficiency in manual testing, as well...
Transform Your Team from QA to Test Engineering
PreviewAre you being asked to shorten your testing timelines? Do you feel pressured to increase your test automation coverage but don’t have the time, staff, or budget? How do you as a leader upgrade your existing teams’ programming skills and technical abilities without bringing in external resources—and still meet your daily release deliverables? Join Jennifer Scandariato as she shares her journey in transforming the QA department at iCIMS into a Test Engineering Center of Excellence, where manual testers are now automation engineers who apply appropriate automation technologies to...
Agile Testing at Scale
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...
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...
A Shift in Mindset: From Finding Defects to Preventing Them
PreviewAlthough most software companies have adopted agile development, many still treat quality assurance as something that gets handled when coding is finished and ready for test. However, practicing this reactive approach to quality costs teams in rework, context switching, slower code release cycles, growing bug queues, and the release of defects into production. Join Oscar Gracia and Todd Albers as they share techniques you can use to help change this “ready for test” mindset. Learn how to focus on testing and quality from the start by using a pre-grooming approach to ensure stories...
Augmenting Regression Testing in Agile Teams
PreviewToday, 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—...
Thursday, October 5
Use Automation to Assist—Not Replace—Manual Testing
PreviewAutomation is a powerful tool to help testing but too often it is used to replicate existing manual tests. This leads organizations to spend large amounts of time and money constantly updating flaky automated tests and test teams to suffer frustration from having to focus on activities that are not truly testing. This cost and frustration can be avoided by using automation as a tool to assist testing—not to replace tests. Jeffrey Martin shares some real-world examples of using automation to supplement testing by leveraging its true value—the replication and repetition of tasks...
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...
Shift Left Testing: Going Beyond Agile
The concept of “shifting testing left” in the software development lifecycle is not new. Shifting testing from manual to automated and then upstream into engineering is a driving factor in DevOps and agile software development. However, Michael Nauman wonders why test automation, DevOps, and agile software development still frequently fail to deliver on their promises? Aligning and hardening your DevOps and test automation—along with streamlining your agile processes—is critical to your project. Michael shares how AutoCAD’s shifting testing left enabled improvements within their...
Social Skills: The Softer Side of Software Testing
PreviewCommunication breakdowns are a primary cause of IT project failure. Marcia Buzzella believes increasing the success rate of IT projects across waterfall, Agile, and DevOps methods requires a balance of social (soft) and technical (hard) capabilities to improve team performance. Social interactions among team members facilitate knowledge sharing, build relationships, promote trust, and—perhaps most importantly—align expectations. Unfortunately, the fast pace of technological change prompts many software test professionals to prioritize the improvement of technical capabilities over...
Testing in the Year 2020: The Erosion of Governance, Management, and Excellence
PreviewCompetition is driving our business and IT partners to be ever more nimble. And Byron Glick and Jithesh Ramachandran say that the growing agility is eroding the old foundations of testing—test management, project governance, and centers of excellence. An organization pursuing lean startup approaches may reduce or eliminate traditional planning cycles and the related test management and governance. But all is not lost. Understanding why those foundations were effective in their time points to new foundations that will carry us forward into the new world of testing, technology, and...
A Three-Tier Load Testing Program Saved Our Bacon
PreviewEnsuring 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...
How Do I Get a Cool Job Like Yours? A Career Map for Testers
PreviewWhen people hear about my past jobs, my career, and the many places I “work” (at foreign conferences and even on ski lifts), I often get the question “How do I get your job?” However, when people hear some of the details of my career, their reaction is “Gee, that’s a lot of work!” Well, yes, but that does not mean that hard work is not fun. Jon Hagar presents a career map that contains his secrets to getting, keeping, and growing in the fun and exciting career of software testing. These include getting started with learning, seeking challenges, sustaining passion, finding...
The Pothole of Automating Too Much
Is your company spending a lot of time and effort on an automation strategy while your customers believe that product quality has not improved? Does management see automation as a silver bullet that will save money, increase coverage, and reduce headcount? Do you work for a company where the goal is (almost) 100 percent test automation? Paul Holland discusses issues and problems with these approaches and perceptions about test automation. He provides strong arguments why the “automate everything” approach is not likely to be successful and provides details of an alternative, balanced...
Make Your Team Awesome—Yes, You Can!
The key to creating high-performing teams is psychological safety—the ability to be vulnerable in front of others even when they hold diverse viewpoints, and the opportunity to take risks and trust that everything will be OK. However, creating this safety is easier said than done. Maaret Pyhäjärvi shares her story of working with software development and test teams to enable them to be awesome. She explains how to reinforce the positive while enabling great software product development by empowering others in your team. Maaret explores how to be brave when others are not, and how to care...
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 6
Intentionality: Leading an Intentional Culture
As leaders we get the culture we tolerate. What are the steps to create an intentional culture of high performance? The basis of leadership and influencing others depends on understanding that humans make logical decisions illogically. What are the hidden forces that overcome competence, intelligence, and character when choosing our leaders? Learn about the real decision maker of the human mind and how to model this behavior to influence others and create loyal, motivated followers.
Crucial, Pivotal, and Radical Candor Conversations—Closing the Gap
Let's face it. As leaders, we often struggle to create and nurture the sort of communication and conversation that our organizations and teams need. For many of us it's not a comfort zone or a strength. And frankly, these conversations are often uncomfortable and take a great deal of energy. That being said, today's leaders need to face this shortcoming and become much more skilled and comfortable initiating and executing the sorts of conversations that will engage their teams and deliver value for their customers. In this session Bob Galen will explore the central aspects of having...
Think Tank Discussion Part I, II, III, and Wrap-Up
Join your peers in an engaging and highly interactive discussion about the issues that concern you most. Using answers to the question—As a Leader, What Is Keeping You Up at Night?—posed at Thursday’s evening reception, participants will form small groups to work on finding solutions to pressing test management issues. Discussions will review identified issues and barriers to change, and focus on innovative strategies and practical next steps. At the end of the think tank discussion, all feedback will be collected and posted online to encourage further collaboration....