Conference Schedule

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...Read more

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...Read more

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-...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

Selenium has an industry reputation of being a “flaky” tool where individual tests pass, then fail—sometimes with no production changes at all. Such flakiness in your test suites can be extremely difficult, time consuming, and frustrating to debug. The vast majority of these issues stem from using either bad locators or bad wait conditions. But both of these root causes can be addressed by implementing the right framework for your Selenium tests. Craig Schwarzwald shares the most important concepts in creating such a Selenium framework. He has proved that using a framework...Read more

Communication 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...Read more

Competition 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...Read more

Walk the Expo, and you will see all kinds of test automation tools. Some run scripts. Some communicate with the system under test. Some virtualize system components. Some do interesting things that you may never have considered. Yet, none gives you a complete recipe for testing your product and synthesizing the results. That is not their job. It's yours. Mike Duskis says an effective test automation program will reflect the unique nuances of your product and your business. However, unique nuances need not add up to radically different architectures. In fact, effective automation...Read more

When 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...Read more

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To be a well-rounded and analytical tester, Adam Satterfield says you should learn to code. Learning to code empowers a tester to be more self-reliant and less dependent on someone else to write their test scripts, which can take valuable time from the critical and time-crunched testing process. Learning to code positions a tester for long-term career growth, opens up new professional opportunities, and gives them the perspective to be a better tester with a deeper understanding of what questions to ask and how to approach a meaningful testing plan to gain better insights. However...Read more

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...Read more