STARWEST 2018 - Product Owner | TechWell

Conference archive

STARWEST 2018 - Product Owner

Customize your STARWEST 2018 experience with sessions for product owners.

Monday, October 1

Wilson Mar
JetBloom
MB

What Testers Must Know about Git and GitHub

Add to calendar
Monday, October 1, 2018 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Skill with Git is a prerequisite for most software jobs today. This is because the vast majority of software developed is stored in Git-based repositories such as GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket. GitHub's domination of social coding makes it the new business card to demonstrate your creativity, popularity, capability, and tenacity. “Configuration as code” is a standard DevOps practice so testers must know how to set up and use Git to obtain and update versions of their infrastructures. In this hands-on tutorial, create your own website and learn the GitHub markdown used to format documents....

Tuesday, October 2

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
Mary_Thorn
Mary Thorn Consulting
TE

Agile Testing: Team Tactics that Deliver the Goods

Preview Sold Out!
Add to calendar
Tuesday, October 2, 2018 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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 vs. 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...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
Mary_Thorn
Mary Thorn Consulting
TK

Agile Test Team Leadership: From Concept to Product

Sold Out!
Add to calendar
Tuesday, October 2, 2018 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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 different from 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...

Wednesday, October 3

Mary_Thorn
Mary Thorn Consulting
W3

Help! I am Drowning In 2 Week Sprints....Please Tell Me What NOT to Test!

Add to calendar
Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Sometimes we allow ourselves to drown in work… Mary Thorn hears it all the time: testers complaining at retrospectives to their teams that they do not have enough time to test everything. She often sees testers work overtime the last week of a sprint to ensure the definition of done is accomplished. Why do they do this? Why do we, as testers, enable the bad behaviors of “Scrummerfall” or a lack of whole-team ownership of quality? Mary aims to arm testers with techniques that allow them to test smarter, not harder, and enable the testers and the team to have better conversations that make...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.com
W4

Testing In The Dark

Add to calendar
Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Michael_Bolton
DevelopSense
W6

The Logic of Verification

Add to calendar
Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

W12

Improve Planning Estimates by Reducing Your Human Biases

Preview
Add to calendar
Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - 1:45pm to 2:45pm

Are you puzzled about why your estimate turned out wrong, or stressed from working to meet an impossible deadline? Some teams on inaccurately estimated projects suffer stress, burnout, and poor quality as pressure is applied to stick to an unrealistic schedule. Such project teams also descend into irrational decision-making—with potentially catastrophic consequences. Frustratingly, even when teams perform well, they are often judged by their failure to meet impossible deadlines. Andrew Brown will show how estimation errors are caused not just by new technology or intentionally...

Aprajita_Mathur
Guardant Health
W15

Compliance and Agility—How It Can Be Done

Preview
Add to calendar
Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Delivering a compliant product is a resource intensive and challenging activity for most teams. Whether a team is trying to adhere to company, industry, or international standards, it needs to produce deliverables under tight deadlines with the right level of quality. When you work with Forensic teams the stakes are high! Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) is a new forensic DNA sequencing technology which can result in increased detection ability for degraded and complex mixture samples. It can also provide ancestry and physical trait information which help's narrow down suspects....

Jenny_Bramble
WillowTree Apps
W18

Risk Based Testing: Communicating WHY You Can't Test Everything

Add to calendar
Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

The idea of testing everything is a popular one—in fact many stakeholders think that’s exactly what their quality teams do. It usually isn’t and can’t be; but how can teams communicate this? Join Jenny Bramble as she helps to pave the way using the language of risk-based testing. By defining risk in two simple parts, the team and project have a tangible and usable metric. She shares how to apply this metric and use it to determine where the team should focus testing, making it more effective and efficient whilst communicating that effort through the creation of a risk matrix. As a result,...

Thursday, October 4

Dona_Sarkar
Microsoft
K4

Be the Lord of Your OWN Rings: How to Build Your OWN Insider Testing Program

Add to calendar
Thursday, October 4, 2018 - 8:30am to 9:45am

Many testers just don't plain get listened to. Management doesn’t seem to listen despite you having a really good idea on how to reduce costs without reducing quality. How can a well-meaning tester act as an agent of change and change your corporate landscape? Dona is the Lord of the Rings at Microsoft where she co-creates the future of Windows with 10M + #WindowsInsiders all over the world. They are one of the biggest fan and influencer programs in the tech industry—one that helps shape the future of Microsoft technology every single day. She will guide you on how to create a fan and...

Gil_Tayar
Applitools
T2

Frontend Testing: Stepping in and Collaborating with Developers

Add to calendar
Thursday, October 4, 2018 - 9:45am to 10:45am

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...

Adam_Auerbach
EPAM Systems
T4

Building a Modern DevOps Enterprise Testing Organization

Add to calendar
Thursday, October 4, 2018 - 9:45am to 10:45am

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...

Julene_Johnson
Lucid Software Inc.
T5

Working with Anxiety: From Personal Weakness to Career Strength

Preview
Add to calendar
Thursday, October 4, 2018 - 9:45am to 10:45am

Each of us has personal weaknesses that are often perceived to have negative impacts on performance and capability in the workplace. When this weakness is prominent to yourself or others, are you capable of benefiting IT teams and qualified to do the job? In dealing with negative impacts of her Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Julene Johnson falls into this category and has experienced personal doubt in her ability to perform her job well. Over time, however, she’s noticed that habits and techniques developed while dealing with anxiety can be applied in a manner that improves her life...

Peter_Varhol
Kanda Software
Gerie Owen
QualiTest Group, Inc.
T6

What Aircrews Can Teach Testing Teams

Preview
Add to calendar
Thursday, October 4, 2018 - 9:45am to 10:45am

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...

TestRigor
T10

Automate Your Application Test Deployments with Docker

Preview
Add to calendar
Thursday, October 4, 2018 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

In a busy world, testing teams are asked to adopt new approaches to increase speed and flexibility of change. What methods and tools can help? Artem Golubev has seen many testing teams being told to use Docker. But for testers, this brings confusion. What it Docker and why is Docker useful to testers? How can Docker be used to increase confidence in our releases? To help you answer those questions, Artem shares his experience using this popular tool and approach. Starting with terminology Artem shares what is meant by Dockerfile, Docker Image, Docker Container, Compose, Kubernetes...

Nimesh_Patel
Valtech Canada
T7

Building a Skilled Testing Practice In an Innovative Digital Agency

Preview
Add to calendar
Thursday, October 4, 2018 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

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...

Griffin Jones
Congruent Compliance
T8

Delivering the Goods: Harmonizing Regulated and Agile Practices

Add to calendar
Thursday, October 4, 2018 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

Agile testing is hard. Testers contend with terse requirements, minimal process, little documentation, continually evolving business, technical and organizational factors. Auditors demand proof of compliance. Some teams have trouble conforming to regulations while preserving agile practices. Griffin Jones, a tenured regulated software testing consultant, says “not only can agile practices blend with regulatory compliance - they can be harmonized with them leading to high quality and more agility.” Griffin feels that regulators are project stakeholders, who join the product owner in...

ClearSpecs Enterprises
T17

Testing Imprecise Requirements

Add to calendar
Thursday, October 4, 2018 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Articles on abc.net and elsewhere reported that Volvo has recently discovered a non-traditional requirement: Any self-driving vehicle approved for use outside Australian cities must recognize kangaroos on or near the roadway and take proper actions. The kangaroo’s bounce confused the large animal detector! In this session, industry expert David Gelperin shares a new perspective on the value of imprecise requirements and explores the nature of testing them. Excess precision may hamper the development of optimal solutions by excluding effective designs. Imprecise statements reduce the risk...

Jane_Jeffers
Riot Games
T18

Why "Why...?" Can Be the Most Important Question for QA to Ask

Preview
Add to calendar
Thursday, October 4, 2018 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

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...

Gitte Ottosen
Capgemini
T24

Risk Based Testing – Are You Talking the Talk, Or Walking the Walk?

Preview
Add to calendar
Thursday, October 4, 2018 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Risk-based testing is essential to focus our testing, but it is not always easy to apply to our projects. Risk management tends to focus more on project and process risks (i.e., Will we make the deadline? Do we follow our processes?) and less on the product risks that can act as a foundation for a risk-based approach to test. Including this aspect of risk in your test coverage will give you a solid foundation for defining a test strategy that implements and executes the right tests with the right intensity to mitigate the most critical product risks. In this presentation, Gitte...