STARWEST 2017 - Test Leadership
Sunday, October 1
Fundamentals of Agile Certification—ICAgile (2-Day)
Software Tester Certification—Foundation Level (3-Day) - SOLD OUT
Fundamentals of DevOps Certification—ICAgile (2-Day) - SOLD OUT
Agile Tester Certification (2-Day)
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...
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...
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...
Tuesday, October 3
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...
End-to-End Testing with the Heuristic Test Strategy Model
You have just been assigned a new testing project. Where do you start? How do you develop a plan and begin testing? How will you report on your progress? Paul Holland shares new test project approaches that enable you to plan, test, and report effectively. Paul demonstrates ideas, based on the Heuristic Software Test Model from Rapid Software Testing that can be directly applied or adapted to your environment. In this hands-on tutorial, you’ll be given a product to test. Start by creating three raw lists—product coverage outline, potential risks, and test ideas—that help ensure...
Test Estimation in the Face of Uncertainty
Anyone who has ever attempted to estimate software testing effort realizes just how difficult the task can be. The number of factors that can affect the estimate is virtually unlimited. The keys to good estimates are understanding the primary variables, comparing them to known standards, and normalizing the estimates based on their differences. This is easy to say but difficult to accomplish because estimates are frequently required even when we know very little about the project—and what we do know is constantly changing. Throw in a healthy dose of politics and a bit of wishful thinking,...
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...
Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle
PreviewIn test automation, we must often use several tools that have been developed or acquired over time with little consideration of an overall plan or architecture and no consideration for how to integrate the tools. As a result, productivity suffers and frustrations increase. Join Mike Sowers as he shares experiences from multiple organizations in creating an integrated test automation plan and developing a test automation architecture. Mike discusses both the good (engaging the technical architecture team) and the bad (too much isolation between test automators and test designers) on...
Testing Leadership IQ
Have you ever needed a way to measure your testing leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies and the evolution of testing and testing leadership. Join Jennifer as she explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can...
Building Your Mobile App Quality and Test Strategy
PreviewLet’s build a mobile app quality and testing strategy together. Whether you have a web, hybrid, or native app, building a quality and testing strategy means (1) knowing what data and tools you have available to make agile decisions, (2) understanding your customers and your competitors, and (3) testing your app under real-world conditions. Jason Arbon guides you through the latest techniques, data, and tools to ensure the awesomeness of your mobile app quality and testing strategy. Leave this interactive session with a strategy for your very own app—or one you pretend to own. The...
Wednesday, October 4
Rise of the Machines: Can Artificial Intelligence Terminate Manual Testing?
The state of the art in automated software testing is far from being a replacement for human-guided testing. There is more to testing than setting up preconditions, applying inputs, verifying outputs, and logging the results. Testing requires significant planning, exploring, learning, modeling, inferencing, experimenting, and more. Therefore, before we can truly automate testing, we must bridge the gap between the testing capabilities of humans and machines. Tariq King says that breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are challenging our thinking about the...
Testing and DevOps: Organizations and Their Culture Must Change
The DevOps movement is here. Now, companies with mature systems are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams and departments. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, development organizations have been filled with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. Adam Auerbach says this has to change. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding to stay...
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...
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...
Thursday, October 5
Elegant Dev and Test Processes for a More Civilized Age
Software engineering as a discipline has come a long way. For some teams, months-long cycles of dev-test-build-release have shrunk down to mere days—or even hours. In the fastest, leanest organizations, most testing happens in parallel with development as part of a slick, continuous integration pipeline. Come along with Melissa Benua as she explores just how quickly and safely a product can be released using ultramodern engineering technologies. All testers know how to file a bug, but more testers should know how to configure a continuous integration (CI) pipeline tool, how to wrest code...
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...
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...
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...
Manage Testing by Dependencies—Not Activities
Traditionally, test management has focused on two areas—test planning and test execution. Test planning creates the test strategy and prepares test cases. Test execution focuses on who is responsible for and assigned to executing the respective test cases and logging defects. These views, however, are not inclusive of everything a tester does. For example, the work of team members must be coordinated, environments made ready, and test data prepared. For this reason, Jim Trentadue says the testing effort should be managed by dependencies—not activities. Jim shares logical models for...
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...
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.
It's Not All Rainbows & Unicorns (The Picture This Clothing Story)
When Picture This Clothing launched in August of 2016 and instantly went viral, the media made it sound like Jaimee was a "simple mom" who stumbled upon a great idea and struck gold. What they didn't share is the teamwork, the trials-and-error, and the years of work that happened before this viral success. While her current day-to-day is quite literally surrounded with imagination, unicorns, and rainbows, Jaimee delves into the struggle of self-worth, re-designing her life, and how her compass of intention positioned everything that has unfolded as she shares the story of how Picture This...
Bold and Fearless Leadership
Stacy Kirk has always had entrepreneurial dreams but she found that one of the biggest obstacles to growth was fear. Over her 15 years of technical leadership, she found that many of the women that she mentored and led had similar fears that blocked their career and technical growth. Stacy will share her account of how her fears stifled her career and how the realization of one of her deepest fears became her biggest change agent. In this open and honest conversation, she will talk about how she overcame her fears and utilized them to drive both her technical knowledge and business success...
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....
The Power of Collective Experience
Bring your biggest challenges to this session and tap the wisdom of others. In this immersive session, you will tackle some of the most widely mentioned challenges brought to light from the group. Whether it’s a software testing conundrum, a project setback, a management blocker, a group or team dysfunction or an interpersonal hurdle, all of these can slow our progress and reduce our effectiveness. And when we hunt for options, we all have blind spots and biases that prevent us from thinking out of the box and finding new and different solutions. Typically the best ideas come from...
Creative Trespassing: How to Sneak Creativity into Companies, Jobs and Life
Tania Katan knows a little something about sneaking principles from art into the tech space in order to start social media revolution! As the former Brand Evangelist for Axosoft she co-created the internationally viral campaign #ItWasNeverADress and now she has a map for you to use to find your creativity too! She will share uniquely developed exercises for flexing your creative muscles, funny stories from the front-lines of an everyday disruptor and enough empowering quotes and inspirational shouting (GO get ‘em, Creative Tiger!) to make your high school soccer coach crack a smile. You...
Panel–Career Superpowers
Let’s discuss and define the most important career superpowers for women. Hear what industry professionals, leaders, and idea disruptors think the important career superpowers are for women in 2016 and going forward.