STARWEST 2018 - Systems Analyst | TechWell

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STARWEST 2018 - Systems Analyst

Customize your STARWEST 2018 experience with sessions for systems analysts.

Monday, October 1

Michael_Bolton
DevelopSense
MA

Critical Thinking for Software Testers

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

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...

Tariq_King
Ultimate Software
Jason_Arbon
test.ai
MC

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Skills for the Testing World

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

Software continues to revolutionize the world, impacting nearly every aspect of our work, family, and personal life. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are playing key roles in this revolution through improvements in search results, recommendations, forecasts, and other predictions. AI and ML technologies are being used in platforms for digital assistants, home entertainment, medical diagnosis, customer support, and autonomous vehicles. Testing practitioners are recognizing the potential for advances in AI and ML to be leveraged for automated testing—an area that still...

Isabel Evans
Independent Consultant
MD

Fundamentals of Testing Requirements

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Monday, October 1, 2018 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Testing and requirements are bound together: You use requirements to understand what to test and what your customer expects from the product under test. Requirements appear in many forms—verbal, diagrams, user stories, or formal specifications. But sometimes once we start testing, we find that requirements are missing, inadequate, wrong, or changing. This is normal, and as testers, part of our role is to help the team and the customer clarify what is required. (Sometimes we even build the requirements to clarify our tests!) Join Isabel Evans to understand how to identify, capture, review,...

Wednesday, October 3

Jon Bach
eBay, Inc.
K2

Testing Outside of the Box

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Wednesday, October 3, 2018 - 10:00am to 11:00am

The cognitive skills of testing are being threatened by two major forces: the assumption that automation can replace all other forms of testing, and the acceptance of lower quality by consumers. You might be feeling like you’re living on an eroding island, but there is a way to adapt and even thrive using your testing skills. Your project still needs to have someone who will question assumptions, examine design, create experiments, analyze data, and report meaningful metrics. It needs your social skill to connect teams who work in silos, bring customer insights to light, and track risks...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.com
W4

Testing In The Dark

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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

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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

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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...

Isabel Evans
Independent Consultant
W8

No More Shelfware—Let’s Drive

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

When Isabel Evans learned to drive a car, she also learned how to check, clean, and change spark plugs, mend the fan belt with a stocking, and indicate speed and direction changes with arm and hand signals. Now, we don’t expect to have to do any of those things; we just drive the car. That’s how test tools and automation could be. Just drive and concentrate on the journey of delivering software continuously—concentrate on engineering the solutions, not on the automation. To be effective engineers, we need the support of a powerful toolset that we understand. Is that what we have? Or do we...

Thursday, October 4

Dona_Sarkar
Microsoft
K4

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

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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...

Dawn Haynes
PerfTestPlus, Inc.
T3

Being More Agile Without Doing Agile

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

The most common requests Dawn Haynes gets as a consultant these days is to help testers transition to an agile development process, or to help testers be more effective in “agile-ish” environments. But Dawn recognises that transforming the process and the environment is not enough. Interestingly, the core answer to these questions starts with forgetting the process for a moment and focusing on yourself and what you’re trying to accomplish. Being agile starts with a mindset and an attitude that drive focus, approaches, and solutions. When you start there, the path to improvement can almost...

Peter_Varhol
Kanda Software
Gerie Owen
QualiTest Group, Inc.
T6

What Aircrews Can Teach Testing Teams

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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...

Nimesh_Patel
Valtech Canada
T7

Building a Skilled Testing Practice In an Innovative Digital Agency

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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...

ClearSpecs Enterprises
T17

Testing Imprecise Requirements

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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

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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...

Mehmet_Duran
ProRail
Hatim_Chahim
ProRail
T20

An Innovative Test Automation Approach without Making Test Cases

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Thursday, October 4, 2018 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Gitte Ottosen
Capgemini
T24

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

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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...