STARWEST 2019 - Testing in DevOps
Monday, September 30
Test Data: Mining, Morphing, Managing and Maintaining It!
NewAccording to the 2018/2019 World Quality Report, the number one challenge in applying testing to agile development is overcoming the challenges of creating, managing, and maintaining test environments and test data. Over 48% of respondents had issues with test data. As our systems complexity and time to market demands have increased, the appetite for resolving the test data issue can be diminished or be viewed as test data doesn’t really matter. Join Julie Gardiner as she shares the good, bad and ugly of test environments and data, defines an approach to establish where you are in terms of...
Testing Today's Web Applications: Tools You Can Use
NewIf you are a software tester today, chances are you're testing a website or web application. Whether you are testing in a browser, within a web “wrapper” framework like Electron, or even in a web app wrapped in a mobile application, your customers are using web apps and websites constantly—and they want them to work well. Our challenge in testing, of course, is to test as thoroughly and efficiently as we can, given our time and resource constraints. Chris Kenst will demonstrate some of his favorite free and inexpensive tools for testing web apps and share stories of using these tools in...
Continuous Testing Using Containers
NewContainers. Every manager thinks they want them, but few teams have experience in knowing what to DO with them. Used thoughtfully, containerization of your services can transform the way your organization thinks about testing. Gone can be the days of maintaining X different compute environments with Y different configurations. Imagine instead spinning up just the code you need, on the machine type it needs, and only for as long as you need it. In this technical training, Melissa will walk through what containerization means for a legacy code base attempting to practice continuous...
Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization
The DevOps movement is here. Companies across many industries are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, IT organizations have been staffed with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. 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 even embrace coding to stay relevant and add greater value to the business. DevOps really...
Test Design for Automation
Test automation is an essential element in modern system development. And test design can make or break automation efforts throughout the entire CI/CD pipeline. We want automated tests to find problems in a build quickly, run without a hitch, and be easily maintained. However, if tests are badly structured and unnecessarily detailed, you may have a hard time automating them—even with great tools and great technical expertise. Hans Buwalda explores how testers, both technical and non-technical, can design or restructure tests to make them suitable for automation. In this session, you’ll...
Tuesday, October 1
Clean Coding Practices for Test Automation
NewWe 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. However, many people who write test code may not have experience writing production code, so it’s not exactly clear what is meant by this statement. And even those who write production code find that there are unique design patterns and code smells that are specific to test code in which they are not aware. Join Angie Jones for this workshop, at which, you will be given a...
Testing Transformation: The Art and Science for Success
Technologies, testing processes, and the role of the tester have evolved significantly in the past few years with the advent of agile, DevOps, and other new technologies. It is critical that we testing professionals evaluate ourselves and continue to add tangible value to our organizations. In your work, are you focused on the trivial or on real game changers? Jennifer Bonine describes critical elements that help you artfully blend people, process, and technology to create a synergistic relationship that adds value. Jennifer shares ideas on mastering politics, maneuvering core vs. context...
Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps
In many organizations, agile development processes are driving the pursuit of faster software releases, which has spawned a set of new practices—DevOps. DevOps stresses communications and integration between development and operations, including rapid deployment, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Because DevOps practices require confidence that changes made to the code base will function as expected, automated testing is essential. Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the unique challenges associated with integrating automated testing into continuous integration/continuous...
Wednesday, October 2
QADevSecOps: Leading a Quality-Driven DevOps Transformation
Have you wondered where QA professionals fit into a DevSecOps transformation? Stacy Kirk thinks they should champion the transformation. Regardless of where your company is on its journey to DevSecOps, quality must be at the forefront for optimal effectiveness and customer value. This means promoting feedback loops that use monitoring and reporting tools effectively, and most importantly, it means creating a culture of collaborative communication and continuous improvement. The role of the QADevSecOps practitioner must evolve from ensuring the quality of software to assessing the...
Keynote - Making the Career Transition from Software Testing to Data Science
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...
Conquering the Testing Challenges of Serverless Applications
PreviewServerless cloud applications are rapidly moving into the mainstream. In this model, teams focus on developing and deploying code on a known technology stack and runtime, with fixed interfaces for application, database, and network, and they offer the advantages of lower costs, faster development, and elastic growth. But testing serverless applications brings significant challenges to testers. Because the stack is typically maintained by the cloud provider, it is updated with new versions and security patches on a regular basis. Testers have to continuously test the stack...
Industrial-Strength Automation: When You Should and How You Can
PreviewYou wouldn't buy a yacht to navigate your swimming pool, any more than you would paddle a canoe to Finland. The first is overkill and the second is dangerous. But we can't conclude that yachts are always overkill or canoes always dangerous; it depends on the context. The same principle applies to test automation. When a simple script is all you need, a full-scale product development effort would be overkill. On the other hand, you will encounter circumstances where inadequate planning or engineering discipline would drown you in a sea of noisy reports from tests that nobody is...
How Infrastructure as Code Can Help Test Organizations Achieve Automation
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...
Enterprise DevOps: Reducing Big-Bang Integrations in Global Organizations
PreviewSix 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...
Thursday, October 3
Getting to Continuous Testing
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...
The Game of Continuous Delivery
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...
Creating Self-Documenting, Reportable, DevOps-Driven Tests
For applications that have fully integrated service middleware, application servers, and backend databases, validation and verification of the entire application ecosystem is critical and complex. The challenge of testing these types of systems is compounded when each integrated application or component is developed by a different team or third-party vendor. Furthermore, application teams with diverse development practices generally require quick responses to system validation checks. Mimi Balcom Meng and her team have developed a testing framework that enables quality engineering teams to...
Mainframe Continuous Delivery: A Journey to the Left Side
PreviewDevOps 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...
Make Your UI Tests Resilient with the Next Generation of Frameworks
PreviewA big problem with test automation on any platform or operating system is synchronizing test automation interactions with the UI. It is challenging to know when the UI is ready for the next automated click(). Traditional black box tools try to address this problem by explicit or implicit waiting, but this technique is slow and error-prone. A new generation of test frameworks, starting with Espresso, understands the internals of the app and synchronizes interactions only when the view is ready, making the framework very fast and reliable. This same technique is making Cypress and...
Before and After You Say ‘I Do’ to Docker
PreviewDocker 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...
De-Risking the Deployment Process
PreviewIn a world of continuous delivery, deployments happen faster than ever. But while every organization wants to move faster, many teams struggle to keep up with digital consumers’ expectations for quality. Join Philip Soffer to learn how smaller companies can reduce risk in their deployment processes by combining automation with human insight and performing functional and nonfunctional tests in a synchronized process. Using real-world examples, Philip will discuss the interactions among continuous integration, automated functional testing, crowd testing, feature flagging, and...
Continuous Testing: A Fishbowl Discussion
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...