STARWEST 2019 - Test Management

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...

Imagine this … As soon as any developed functionality is submitted into the code repository, it is automatically subjected to the appropriate battery of tests and then released straight into production. Setting up the pipeline capable of doing just that is becoming more and more common and something you need to know about. But most organizations hit the same stumbling block—just what IS the appropriate battery of tests? Automated build architectures don't always lend themselves well to the traditional stages of testing. In this hands-on tutorial, Melissa Benua introduces you to key test...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Software development is trending toward building systems using small, autonomous, independently deployable services called microservices. Leveraging microservices makes it easier to add and modify system behavior with minimal or no service interruption. Because they facilitate releasing software early, frequently, and continuously, microservices are especially popular in DevOps. But how do microservices affect software testing and testability? Are there new testing challenges that arise from this paradigm? Or are these simply old challenges disguised as new ones? Join Tariq King as he...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

We all spend enough time thinking about the next feature and its development plan. Days, months, and sometimes years go by working on things that are a priority for our team and company. But how much time do we spend on discovering what is crucial for us and our own development? We can give more when we are at our best. This is not limited to career aspirations, but also applies to work-life balance, as it takes a family and a team to make anyone successful. Aprajita Mathur will work with you in a live session to build your own development plan. She will discuss six strategies that...

By 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...

DevOps 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...

A 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...

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...

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...

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...