STARWEST 2018 - Concurrent Sessions

Test automation projects fail, but why? Could you stop it from happening? In this tongue-in-cheek talk, Seretta Gamba will share seven proven methods to disrupt or utterly ruin a test automation project, including letting a lone champion keep important knowledge to himself, ignoring good programming practices, setting impossible goals, and feigning support. Seretta’s humorous recommendations will provide managers, testers, and automators alike with the early signs of an automation project in danger. By “warning” that the most effective defenses are found using the test automation...

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 and leverage unlikely sources about...

Software testing is sometimes described as “verification and validation”—or, according to Wikipedia, “the process of checking that a software system meets specifications and that it fulfills its intended purpose.” Yet, renowned tester and teacher Michael Bolton argues, if we examine the concept and logic of verification, we quickly recognize that there are serious limitations to what can and cannot be checked and verified. This is not to say that checking is a bad thing—on the contrary; checking can be very valuable. Still, it’s important for testers and their clients to recognize the...

Reality is a great source of inspiration. Real-life situations can present complexities that are not always anticipated—and, as a consequence, not always handled well. Business functional tests should try to present situations that are routed in reality but also aren’t too obvious. Testing and automation pioneer Hans Buwalda came up with a concept for test design called "soap opera testing" based on this concept. It is a style of writing tests where one writes as if they were episodes in an imaginary soap opera on television. Soap opera episodes are based on real life, but usually they are...

Emerging technologies such as the internet of things (IoT) and cloud computing have introduced a significant software variety and complexity. Wendy Siew Wen Chin and Heng Kar Lau explain that testers are challenged to support a wide product portfolio within harsh time, resource and budget constraints. More test automation may seem to be a solution to test efficiency, however there are many inefficient hot spots throughout the test automation life cycle. Join Wendy and Heng Kar as they share their experiences from the Intel IoT team. They share how to make use of artificial intelligence (AI...

Behavior-driven development (BDD) has been around for a while and is here to stay. However, the added abstraction levels pose a technical problem for writing and managing tests. While BDD does a great job of marrying the nontechnical aspect of test writing to the technical flow of an application under test, keeping this information under source control becomes problematic. Frameworks such as JBehave, Cucumber, or Robot give subject matter experts that additional ability to write tests, but they are often restricted access from them; because people treat test cases as code, they get stored...

Teams are sometimes asked to turn a mess of undocumented, poorly structured legacy code into a robust product under impossible deadlines. Test strategies blending automation, exploration, and refactoring can help focus development efforts and converge even the most chaotic projects. But, where do you start? Join Jonathan Solórzano-Hamilton as he shows how automation can help drive products into a state of release readiness. Learn how refactoring, test-driven development, SOLID principles, dependency injection, and mocking frameworks help break down complex development problems into...

The testing community is caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to exploratory testing. Although exploratory testing has been around for ages, it often leads to more confusion than clarity. Is exploratory testing an activity-something that you do? Or is it an approach-a way or a style of doing something? Isn't all testing exploratory? When do you do it? How do you do it properly? How does it relate to the entire software lifecycle? To answer these questions, join Ingo Philipp as he shares the most common confusions and controversies on this topic. He explains what exploratory...

Testing is shifting left, moving closer to testing the code itself before the full product is ready for release. While the backend world already has established methodologies for testing, frontend developers and testers are still trying to figure out how to work together to effectively test the code. Gil Tayar suggests testers need to communicate with the frontend developers to understand the framework by which frontend code is tested, the various kinds of testing that can be performed on frontend code, and which tools can be used. During this session, Gil helps ease your fear of the...

The DevOps movement is front and center across enterprises. 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...

United Flight 232 should have crashed with all 296 lives lost. Asiana Flight 214 should not have crashed at all. But the reality is very different. Peter Varhol and Gerie Owen explain that the critical difference between the two flights was the interactions of their respective aircrews. United Flight 232 divided up responsibilities and worked as a team, using Aircrew Resource Management (ARM) to guide how the crew behaved during the flight, and especially in a crisis. Asiana Flight 214 deferred to the captain, neither communicating nor questioning his decisions in crisis. ARM helps...

API-based applications have become ubiquitous in the past few years. Yet many of us still really don't know what an API is from the inside out. Moreover, many of us don't know much about how to comprehensively test them! Join Paul Merrill to learn what everyone is doing and talking about, related to APIs: microservices, REST, endpoints, requests, request methods, and responses. Paul demonstrates four free tools you can use to directly interact with a simple API: curl, the browser, Postman, and Java (with Rest Assured). Learn techniques for testing APIs at the service level and how to test...

Everybody wants to have their projects tested so that they can deliver top-notch products to their clients. But with multiple projects all running in parallel, all with tight deadlines and all needing testing, simply allocating a tester on a project for some time isn’t going to give you quality. This, in turn, can sometimes make our stakeholders question the value of testing. Join Nimesh Patel as he shares his experience in building a test practice and team from the ground up into valued, credible members of a project, in a digital agency where the focus is often on delivering...

Performance issues substantially impact quality, cost, and customer confidence. Agile teams are challenged to build in performance processes throughout the lifecycle, but it is critical to incorporate performance into your CI/CD pipeline. Join Amit Patel as he shares his recent project experiences and the steps his team took to change processes, leverage different technologies, and align internal stakeholders. He explains how they use production-monitoring solutions to create a real-world production feedback loop in order to ensure they can analyze data and turn the information...

When critical subsystems fail, the resulting losses can be catastrophic. In the insurance industry, if premiums are miscalculated, defect costs can reach well over a million dollars. In this session, Mike Keith and Dom Nunley draw on their practical experience with insurance systems testing to provide an overview of combinatorial automation testing for high-risk backend system areas—i.e., features that absolutely must work correctly. They share a process for categorizing requirement risk levels to determine which requirements warrant combinatorial testing. Mike and Dom illustrate various...

Ashwin Desai has faced the daunting challenge of using measurements and metrics to assess and improve product quality through process change. Join him as he shares what he learned on the journey to move the sports technology firm Hudl from a reactive approach to quality to quantitative, data driven, proactive means to improve product quality. Just as Hudl itself provides the ability for coaches and teams to analyze and improve their performance based on data, they wanted to move the teams building Hudl to use the same approach to improve quality. Ashwin shares how they selected...

To test a product, there are so many questions to ask, and so little time in which to ask them. More often than not, we get caught up in the who, what, when, and how, but Jane Jeffers from Riot Games explains that “why…?” questions can be the most important ones to ask when it comes to QA work. When missing the whys, we can wind up only focusing on specific details like who needs to do the work or when our deadlines are, and subsequently lose the bigger picture of why a project matters, and why we do what we do. Learn some of the key ways that you can ask why for product, for...

Does test automation need traditional test cases? Mehmet Duran says no. Using the open source tool TESTAR, he devised an innovative approach to automated testing. Join Mehmet as he shares the research he conducted to solve this challenge and how he confirmed his findings by comparing test approaches using a new framework with the quality attributes of learnability and usability. Mehmet will also describe he worked with Hatim Chahim of Prorail on a real-world railroad project to try out his theory. After applying the framework, results showed that within this setting, the test automation...

When the atmosphere is hostile to QA, and yet the demands on the QA Team are increasing, how do you transform a team where everything is tested and deployed manually, to an organization that delivers great software multiple times a day? Where do you start and how do you create the strategy for implementing Continuous Testing? Join David Lumpkin as he shares his company's journey to answer these questions and the team's evolution along the way. Over a three-year period, Craftsy went from an environment hostile towards QA, to one that embraces automation and exploratory testing,...