STARWEST 2019 - Product Owner
Customize your STARWEST 2019 experience with sessions for product owners.
Monday, September 30
Agile Test Team Leadership: From Concept to Product
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...
Tuesday, October 1
Agile Testing: Team Tactics that Deliver the Goods
Sold Out!Let’s face it—agile testing is different. Challenges exist in successfully integrating within the teams themselves. Scrummerfall continues to run rampant. The dichotomy of testing vs. quality—and balancing both the team’s and your focus—still exists. Delivering value is both an imperative and a challenge. In this dynamic workshop, join agile coaches Mary Thorn and Bob Galen to explore the tools, techniques, and mindset you must bring to the table to successfully test in agile contexts. Mary and Bob examine risk-based testing, iterative test planning, exploratory testing, agile automation...
Driving Lessons for Test Automation Managers
PreviewIn order to support their automation team effectively, test managers must be able to recognize when the team is taking a ‘bad’ turn and know how to steer it back, or, when starting, know how to do things right from the very beginning. They don’t need to know all the technicalities, but they must know the basics of good automation and be able to explain to higher management what automation can or cannot deliver in order to secure and sustain their support. In this tutorial Seretta Gamba introduces the Test Automation Patterns Wiki and explains in detail the patterns test managers...
Wednesday, October 2
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...
Using Design Thinking to Create Better Test Cases
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...
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'...
Making the Marriage of Product and Engineering Thrive
PreviewBy now you have probably heard that there should be a healthy tension between the product and engineering teams. The key word there is "healthy"—when this relationship is unhealthy, silos tend to form, ideas may be thrown over the wall, and a lack of ownership can develop. But what exactly goes into making this relationship work? Vidya Dinamani and Heather Samarin will explore this question and provide the product perspective in not just identifying and overcoming the root causes of most dysfunctions, but getting on the path to thriving. They will share examples from their...
Testers: The Unsung Data Heroes
PreviewConnor Dodge believes that data is the most valuable commodity in the world, and that testers generate some of the most valuable data in product development organizations. Test data can inform release schedules, aid in decision-making, and shape the direction of the product. However, such benefits can only be realized if test data is effectively tracked and presented, and if testers learn how to present that data in compelling and persuasive ways. Join Connor as he talks about how testers can create and use real-time dashboards to analyze the status of agile projects and...
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...
Connected Cybersecurity: Stories from the IoT Hall of Shame
PreviewThe amount of IoT software in everyday things is growing at an alarming rate. Some cars now have over 100 million lines of code. Software exists in everything from our home security systems and thermostats, our televisions and phones, our children’s toys, and our cars to the systems we rely on every day but don’t think about, like our water supply, electricity, and power plants. Unfortunately, the amount of security testing being done on these devices is not growing at the same rate, as evidenced in the so-called IoT Hall of Shame, which keeps a running account of IoT...
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...
Test Data as a Service: Fueling Quality at Speed
PreviewAny business that uses technology to interface with or provide service to their customers, suppliers, and partners requires customer-facing applications that have exceptional quality. The assurance of business outcomes must become an imperative for IT professionals, which means we must learn how to continually engineer quality into every product and process to provide confidence that our technology solutions protect the company brand. However, delivery within the required time frames is continually constrained by the quality, relevance, quantity, and security of test data. Join...
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...