STARWEST 2019 - Quality Assurance

If 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...

Have you ever worked on a project where you felt testing was thorough and complete—all features were covered and all tests passed—yet in the first week in production the software had serious issues and problems? Join Dawn Haynes to learn how to inject robustness testing into your projects to uncover those issues before release. Robustness—an important and often overlooked area of testing—is the degree to which a system operates correctly in the presence of exceptional inputs or stressful environmental conditions. Dawn shows you how—by expanding basic tests and incorporating specific...

Anyone who has ever attempted to estimate software testing effort realizes just how difficult the task can be. The number of factors that can affect the estimate is virtually unlimited. The keys to good estimates are understanding the primary variables, comparing them to known standards, and normalizing the estimates based on their differences. This is easy to say but difficult to accomplish because estimates are frequently required even when we know very little about the project—and what we do know is constantly changing. Throw in a healthy dose of politics and a bit of wishful...

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...

Serverless 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...

AI is here. Will it take over your job? Is it possible to make it beneficial, not detrimental to your career? Kevin Pyles and his team jumped right into the AI universe. Untrained and inexperienced, they realized immediately that they knew nothing, but they were motivated to learn and experiment so they could be part of this revolution. Kevin will show you how his team went from little knowledge of machine learning algorithms, artificial intelligence, and, in some cases, even programming and automation to implementing custom automation frameworks, data analytics, and machine...

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.

Testing artificial intelligence- and machine learning-based systems presents two key challenges. First, the same input can trigger different responses as the system learns and adapts to new conditions. Second, it tends to be difficult to determine exactly what the correct response of the system should be. Such system characteristics make test scenarios difficult to set up and reproduce and can cause us to lose confidence in test results. Yury Makedonov will explain how to test AI/ML-based systems by combining black box and white box testing techniques. His "gray box" testing approach...

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...

The approaches to testing are continuously evolving as we try to keep up with the application needs of today’s users. Our industry is facing a new paradigm where AI is helping achieve scale, coverage, and business impact for many organizations that have been primarily focused on finding defects and refactoring test cases. Are your teams struggling to figure out how to leverage AI to improve their testing? To successfully do this, you must first understand one of AI’s underpinning foundations: data mining. Lorna Smyth will explain the fundamentals of data mining and how it is the...

Once upon a time, in a land far away, application performance was a differentiator in the market. But in today's competitive landscape, having a highly responsive and scalable application is a basic expectation. Performance no longer lives on the fringe of the quality world, and it is becoming more common for organizations to include performance testing as part of their CI/CD pipelines. However, engineers are faced with a common dilemma: Do they implement small and simple performance tests that may not be very realistic but are fast and reliable in the build pipeline, or do they...

In 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...