STARWEST 2019 - Concurrent Sessions

A software test is no better than the data that drives it. Fuzz testing is a great way to find buggy, exploitable, or otherwise bad code – and if you’re working with a native application that operates on file input, it’s a solved problem. Grab AFL or some other all-in-one suite, hit go, and profit! But what about web services? What about managed applications? For a service-based developer, fuzz testing your HTTP serving layer isn’t all that interesting if you’re running on the latest version of Apache. Fuzz testing your application along its interface boundaries, though? Very interesting...

Designing good test cases can be described as an art. With test cases being written with a focus on business, testers should be part of the discovery and design phase of the project, and the business drivers should dictate test case design. But how can we ensure we are focusing on the user and bringing the biggest value possible in this phase? Larissa Rosochansky will describe what design thinking is, how it relates to the testing methodology, and how to use it in the design phase of your project. She will also show you how to better frame the business drivers and select the persona and...

We all spend enough time thinking about the next feature and its development plan. Days, months, and sometimes years go by working on things that are a priority for our team and company. But how much time do we spend on discovering what is crucial for us and our own development? We can give more when we are at our best. This is not limited to career aspirations, but also applies to work-life balance, as it takes a family and a team to make anyone successful. Aprajita Mathur will work with you in a live session to build your own development plan. She will discuss six strategies that...

Accessibility empowers users, increases diversity, and can drive higher adoption and higher growth of your digital services. The axe family of open source technologies has been designed with speed, ease of integration, and zero false positives in mind. It is the perfect tool to start automating the testing of your websites and applications for accessibility issues. Dylan Barrell is the founder of the axe family of technologies and will talk about how they can help you get started with accessibility testing. He will show a complement of tools that integrate with a variety of technologies,...

For many test organizations, the first hurdle to automating the testing of a product is deployment of that product in its test environments. Infrastructure as code can be used to facilitate the basic processes of provisioning servers, from bare metal to virtual to cloud, as well as configuration management of the software that resides on the servers. Off-the-shelf infrastructure-as-code tools such as AWS CloudFormation, Chef, Puppet, and Ansible provide less expensive alternatives to developing proprietary in-house deployment solutions. Join Kat Rocha to learn how infrastructure as code...

Testers tend to be innately curious creatures. Being curious and evaluating risks—that is what the testing job is about. Often it is the statement “I don’t know” that drives our curiosity in testing. We don’t really know if it’s a good “I don’t know” or a bad “I don’t know” until we start communicating with others. Part of being a great tester is becoming comfortable with saying “I don’t know” and explaining what that means so that people remain confident in you. Join Janna Loeffler as she talks about when it is okay to say “I don’t know," when it’s not okay to say “I don’t know,” and how...

We are often reminded by those experienced in writing test automation that code is code. The sentiment being conveyed is that test code should be written with the same care and rigor that production code is written with. However, many people who write test code may not have experience writing production code, so it’s not exactly clear what is meant. And even those who write production code find that there are unique design patterns and code smells that are specific to test code. Join Angie Jones as she presents a smelly test automation code base littered with several bad coding practices...

Six or seven years ago, the norm for update rollouts was a single Microsoft Windows OS release every three years being validated with an annual tick-tock cadence of Intel CPUs. About three years ago, new OSes started to be released twice a year, with new platforms developed several times a year. For us at Intel, this meant we had to increase the speed of our integration and test processes up to tenfold. At the time, our scaling challenges included slow software delivery mechanisms, inefficient testing strategies, and lengthy times to find and fix bugs. If we were going to meet the...

The internet of things (IoT) brings connectivity to a range of previously non-internet-enabled physical devices and real-world objects. This shift has an impact testing—changing what we test, when we test, and the way we test. For one thing, once you’re in the real world, the number of possible issues explodes due to environmental conditions. Just like a race car must adjust its tires for different track conditions, IoT devices must account for environmental factors such as temperature and humidity to prevent unanticipated failures. Jane Fraser believes that for the IoT to be successful,...

The holy grail of a modern QA professional is to achieve high quality while continuously delivering features to customers, and the only way to achieve that mission is via continuous testing and delivery. The most critical step in agile transformation and continuous delivery adoption is identifying the bottlenecks in the product development cycle. Tanya Kravtsov will describe tools and methods that facilitate that discovery process and explore ways you can use mind maps, innovation games, and more to identify, prioritize, and resolve bottlenecks. You'll learn ways to deal with the most...

We are all leaders. At a minimum, we must lead ourselves every single day, but many of us also have teams that we lead and serve. Have you ever stopped to analyze yourself to determine if you are the best leader you can be? Amy Jo Esser has had the joy of learning from many great leaders outside the testing arena, including John C. Maxwell, Tony Robbins, Mel Robbins, Brendon Burchard, Michael and Megan Hyatt, and Rachel Hollis. She continues to learn from leaders in our testing community, including the inspiring leaders and speakers who have been a part of the Women Who Test community....

Behavior-driven development has been a buzzworthy term in the testing and development community for several years. At first glance, the elements of BDD seem simple: testing scenarios, living documentation, automation, and reports. That all sounds great, but then why isn't everyone doing it? Upon a deeper dive, it becomes obvious that the implementation of BDD needs a lot of forethought and planning, and teams must approach it for the right reasons. Christine Fisher will follow the evolution that one team is currently experiencing in their shift to BDD. BDD was selected to help them...

DevOps and continuous delivery have produced exceptional results in the industry, and most of this success has been in the area of distributed systems. Tim Wheeler will discuss identifying problems delivering products in a large, integrated, legacy systems environment with PL/I, COBOL, IMS, and large-batch testing. Tim will talk about the journey his company, State Farm, took toward development and implementation of a plan to address inefficiencies in their delivery mechanism and to adopt modern DevOps practices and tools. You'll leave with a greater understanding of mainframe...

It can be easy to feel like the villain when you work in testing and QA. After all, part of the job is to point out when things are broken, people have made mistakes, timelines aren't realistic, or a plan just can't work. But if your team feels like you're a frequent naysayer, trust can and will erode, and quality suffers because of it. If you find yourself constantly saying, "No, because ..." and being the baddie, it's time to reframe how you approach your team's ideas and development processes. Join Jane Jeffers as she talks about the power of instead saying, "Yes, if ..." and what this...

How can you know that your services will handle the requests of millions of users a day? Or that making a fundamental change to one of your technologies won’t break your user experience? The answer: By having your entire team use and build on a phased approach to testing the right pieces at the right time. The Pokémon Company International services group develops and updates the services used for logging into the Pokemon.com website and applications like Pokémon Go and Pokémon TV. Since the launch of Pokémon Go in 2016, their quality-focused team has worked to develop strategies that...

Docker is the most popular containerized solution being used in the software industry for development. Like any other test automation tool, however, implementation can get complicated, tricky, and unmaintainable if all you understand is the record-and-playback features or think it is the same as using a virtual machine. Whether you are already using Docker for your automation needs or plan to start using it soon, join Aprajita Mathur as she shares her journey of using Docker for testing complex and constantly evolving data analysis pipelines. She will discuss basic concepts of...

Modern software development organizations often build teams around features. Unfortunately, these teams tend to become siloed, building tools and processes without being aware of how other teams have solved the same problems. As quality and test engineers are federated out to these feature teams, quality itself becomes decentralized. And as an organization scales, this fragmentation can put product health at risk. How does an organization provide guidance and standards to decentralized teams? How can information, tools, and resources be shared among quality engineers? Can we bring...

No longer just a futuristic concept, the internet of things (IoT) has a strong presence in our world. If your business is not prepared for it, you’re already behind. With the proliferation of connected “things”—devices, appliances, cars, and even clothes—Jennifer Bonine says that the stage is set and IoT mobile apps are here to stay. Testers are now being asked to test on more complex devices and more advanced platforms, so they must keep up with the demand for new skills, new strategies, and an entirely new set of knowledge for testing IoT apps. Jennifer will review where we are today and...

Many people confuse continuous testing with test automation, but continuous testing is much more. It requires that all tests to certify a feature are automated and part of the continuous integration pipeline, and the results of those tests determine automatically when the next step should be run. We will discuss how companies have enabled this process, common pitfalls and how to avoid them, and how to move from automation to continuous testing. In a fishbowl discussion, the audience members sit in a circle of chairs in the middle of the room. Several brave souls will fill all but one of...