STARWEST 2019 - Test Transformation

Testing is fundamentally associated with understanding requirements and risk. We use test design techniques to deliver what is required by our customers, and we use testing to help our customers assess risk at every stage of the software’s life. These goals give us a focus for what to test and what to report, but they also present tricky and changing targets. Join Isabel Evans to practice using test design techniques in multiple ways, not just to design tests for execution, but also to understand risks, clarify requirements, and report the information that is most useful to our team and...

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...

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...

Docker is one of the hottest technologies in our industry today. It lets you create and manage containers—like virtual machines but smaller and faster. They can provide on-demand, disposable test environments that start quickly, repeatably, locally or in the cloud. When you want, you can tear down the environment and recreate a pristine copy within seconds. And since the process is automated, anyone on the team can use the same commands to get their own systems. When you finish testing, those containers can be deployed directly into production. At each stage, the environments for...

With the advent of frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue, the landscape of application performance has changed significantly in terms of testing and measurement. Gone are the days of measuring response time as a single value based on back-end performance. In modern web and mobile applications, additional layers need to be peeled apart at the front end to truly understand its performance characteristics. Traditional approaches to performance testing are no longer sufficient to provide a delightfully responsive user experience. Join Kaushal Dalvi as he details new developments in the...

Automation is critical in today’s software delivery lifecycle, and yet many organizations struggle to keep their automation running. How can we mitigate difficulties and get consistent automation runs and results we can trust? The secret is implementing a solid automation framework, but that isn’t as easy as it seems. Chris Loder has built several automation frameworks over his career and has learned what works—and, more importantly, what doesn’t. This tutorial will cover what an automation framework is, the benefits of having one, and the keys to a successful framework, including...

A decade ago Microsoft had over twelve thousand full-time testers, and when you added up all the contract and outsourced testers too, there were more software test engineers than developers. The test automation solutions alone had more than a hundred million lines of code. However, that process was built for a company that would release a new version of a monopoly-scale product once every three years and ship it on a CD. That world had already begun to change, and Microsoft was missing the boat. When Microsoft tester Ken Johnston first encountered agile development and DevOps, he realized...

Max Saperstone tells the story of how a health care company striving to get to continuous releases built up their automation to secure confidence in regular releases. Initially, as no test automation existed, Max was able to take an opportunity for greenfield test automation and, in the span of twelve months, develop over two thousand test cases. A pipeline was created to verify the integrity of the automated tests and build Docker containers for simplified test execution. These containers could be easily reused by developers and the DevOps team to verify the application. Join Max as he...

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...

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 organizations have embarked on a digital transformation in order to stay competitive and gain market share. Whether it is enabling access to legacy applications via a web front end or a migration to the cloud, the journey is complex and requires comprehensive testing. To begin with, most systems use responsive web design to accommodate for the myriad mobile devices retail customers use. How do you test for interoperability across these multiple digital footprints? What about UI testing? ADA compliance? And many digital transformations make use of a microservices architectures using...

When we look at today's gender imbalance in the tech field, it's easy to doubt ourselves and wonder if we even belong. However, the fact of the matter is that at one point in time, women dominated technology. Not only did we outnumber men, but we excelled - to the point that tech was considered a woman's sport. So, what changed? How could we have possibly gone from the initial innovators and dominating force of tech to now being vastly underrepresented? Let's take a trip back to the 1980’s, the period where there was a sharp decline in the number of women entering the tech field. You'll be...

Join your peers in an engaging and highly interactive discussion about the issues that concern you most. Using answers to the question—"As a Leader, What Is Keeping You Up at Night?"—posed at Thursday’s evening reception, participants will form small groups to work on finding solutions to pressing test management issues. Discussions will review identified issues and barriers to change, and focus on innovative strategies and practical next steps. At the end of the think tank discussion, all feedback will be collected and posted online to encourage further collaboration....