STARWEST 2019 - General Management
Customize your STARWEST 2019 experience with sessions covering general project management.
Monday, September 30
System-Level Test Automation: Ensuring a Good Start
Many organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems later on. As a leader, how can you ensure that your new automation efforts will get off to a good start? What can you do to ensure that your automation work provides continuing value? This tutorial covers both “theory” and “practice”. Chris Loder explains the critical issues for getting a good start and his experiences in getting good automation started at a number of companies. The tutorial covers the most important management issues you must address for test automation success...
Tuesday, October 1
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...
Holistic Performance Testing for Modern Applications
NewWith 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...
Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics
To be most effective, leaders—including development and testing managers, ScrumMasters, product owners, and IT managers—need metrics to help direct their efforts and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important evaluation activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, the progress and results of both development and testing must be measured. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because developers and testers often are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he...
Automation Framework Essentials
NewAutomation 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...
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...
The Who, What, Where, When, and How of Test Strategies
What is a test strategy, and how do you develop one? Join Janna Loeffler as she talks through developing a test strategy. She’ll discuss how different software development methodologies influence your test strategy, as well as how techniques like common and coordinated test planning and risk-based testing can be applied to the creation of your test strategy to improve its quality. Janna will also detail how to develop a test strategy when working with different team dynamics; for example, does your test strategy look different for internal teams versus developing a test strategy when...
Fuzz Testing for Fun and Profit
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...
AI in Testing: A Moderated Panel Discussion
Artificial intelligence is the newest trend in software testing. But what is it, and how will it impact the tester's role, both today and in the future? What do you need to do to embrace this emerging technology? Adam Auerbach will moderate this panel discussion—which will include Jason Arbon, Jennifer Bonine, and Tariq King—to give you an opportunity to hear the opinions of industry leaders about AI in testing. You will have a chance to drive the debate, so come prepared with all your AI questions.
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
Fun as a Productivity Tool
We should all just be professionals and do our jobs, right? There's no need for fun at work as long as everyone comes in and does their hours, right? As long as we have our processes to cover the work needed, we're good, right? Wrong! Kristoffer Nordström will show you why we need to have fun at work, why simply following the processes isn't always right, and, yes, why we sometimes need to bend the rules just a little to get things done. New research and insights into humanistic approaches have illuminated concepts such as grit and drive, which attempt to explain what motivates people. We'...
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...
Driving Quality with the "Yes, If ..." Mentality
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...
Scaling Quality through Community Leadership
PreviewModern 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...
The Impact of the IoT: What’s in Store for Testing
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...
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...
Storytelling in the Age of AI
Around the world, citizens are actively engaging in civic tech, social robots are tweeting, and veteran storytellers are capturing and curating stories in new and dynamic ways using virtual and augmented reality. This explosion of tools, sources, voices, and data is indicative of a new, more collaborative era for storytelling. But is the public getting quality stories? Join award-winning storyteller and entrepreneur Davar Ardalan for a dynamic look at the intersection of emerging technology, transparency, and inclusivity in media. The founder and storyteller-in-chief of IVOW, a cultural...