STARWEST Virtual+ 2020 - Concurrent Sessions

Many testing teams today use Selenium for their automation needs, and rightfully so: Selenium allows for cross-browser and mobile support, it’s free, and it has a large open source community behind it. Regardless of its feature set, Selenium—and test automation in general—has its own list of pain points that can have a large impact on testing metrics, depending on the test architecture used and the design patterns being followed. To address these pain points, a team can use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) via open source libraries. This enables the tests to...

Your team has followed industry trends and shifted from a monolithic system to a widely distributed, scalable, and highly available microservice architecture. However, instead of solving all your problems with fragile legacy architecture, you ended up with a set of federated services that have hidden dependencies which are maintained by teams that don't talk to each other. You’re stuck with the inability to figure out which versions work together driving the need to test your still-monolithic system in pieces and as a whole. This looks suspiciously like a DevOps problem and your delivery...

Agile principles and associated approaches to software development have been in use for more than a decade. However, teams are still unsure of how to integrate testing as not only specific tasks within a given process (Scrum, kanban, TDD, etc.), but as an extension of the philosophies and mindset that produced the Agile Manifesto in the first place. As a result, teams either ignore testing, test less than is necessary, or dramatically over-test by acting like we’re still on a waterfall project in 1987. Paul Herzog will take a trip back to the very beginning of agile by walking...

The challenge was simple: Build a voice-powered mixologist capable of making drinks based on whichever spirits and mixers were placed into it. Working with his team, Mark Gharibian designed an AWS-powered, Alexa-driven, Arduino/Raspberry Pi-running, laser-cut bartender prototype. Using an iterative approach, they designed and developed the hardware and software in tandem. Each iteration taught them something new and changed the way they approached testing in the innovation space. They operated in a nontraditional way, on a nontraditional project, using nontraditional tools—and how they got...

Everyone wants to develop software quickly, but there is a valid concern that increasing velocity may decrease quality. At Indeed, we set a company-wide goal to double velocity of our software development without hurting the quality of our releases. To accomplish this goal, we looked at each stage of the software development lifecycle and found which parts took the most time. Deployment and verification in our QA environment was one of the biggest bottlenecks and was due to our historic reliance on human quality assurance testing for each release. To alleviate this bottleneck, we...

Waterfall project development used to result in an overly expensive and drawn-out testing process, eating up valuable project schedule days. As project management transformed to product management, testing took a different approach to meet the demanding needs of product owners and keep up with the speed of agile. Theron Melrose's team recently lived this transition, starting from a centralized approach that performance tested every change and every deployment and caused 10- or 12-week performance testing cycles, and ending with a transformation. Join him to hear how a risk-based approach...

Do you have the seed of an idea that might make an interesting talk? Do you have a burning question that you’d like to discuss with your peers? Do you REALLY miss the hallway track of conferences, and just want to riff on a theme with the other attendees? If you answered yes to any of this, then the open conference IS FOR YOU! Broken up into four 15-minute time slots across three rooms, the open conference is for anyone – new attendee, veteran, or speaker to talk about whatever is interesting to you! No slides or prep needed (but supporting material is fine) – if there’s a topic...

Continuous Testing initiatives cope with several issues, some of them are highly linked to environments and test data. End-to-end environments do not allow on-demand deployments, since they are usually shared across other applications and used by manual testers. Using dynamic environments, which means on demand environment created from scratch for test execution, will help to resolve both these issues: to remove the collision with manual testing or other applications, and to control test data available for testing. During this presentation, I will do a live demonstration of a continuous...

APIs are the backbone of our web and mobile platforms today. They literally run the world, yet we don’t monitor them properly. Traditional approaches to monitoring have focused too much on performance and ping tests. That approach has proven to be highly unreliable, failing to alert teams when an API is not functioning correctly. Now, with more and faster releases thanks to agile, the problem of unreliable APIs is becoming worse. That’s why a new measure is needed that goes beyond uptime - Functional Uptime. Monitors should reproduce actual user flows that validate that the entire chain of...

“0/100”, or zero defects and 100% first-time-through (FTT), is the holy grail of the Lean manufacturing movement. Zero defects mean that your product or service will have no defects when it is provided to the customer and 100% FTT means that as your in-progress work moves through your workstations or value stream, it is successful on the first try so there is no re-work or in-process repair. In this presentation, I will demonstrate that how the 0/100 principle and other Lean Manufacturing tools and techniques can be applied in automated software delivery process, especially when you have a...

Building a new software product and testing it is a highly innovative and creative process. Things simply don't go to plan all the time, setbacks and failures are inevitable along the way. What makes a difference is how a team deals with them. Each failure is an opportunity to reassess, make a change and try a different approach. In order to succeed, testing teams must become resilient to failure and focus on the learning outcomes that they present. As a QA lead, you need to encourage initiatives and via the right questions assist the team in taking the best possible decision based...

More and more, software architecture moves to use micro service schemes, and how to ensure communication between services has become more important under this distributed software architecture. Other than testing pyramid strategies that we've already known about, I will introduce another layer in the service layer testing. During this talk, I will address the importance of contract testing in micro service architecture, why and how contract testing would help on quality assurance of services. Also, I will introduce some industrial tools and framework we could apply on achieving it. I will...

Enterprises today are all about increasing software delivery velocity. But with shorter release cycles, code quality is often sacrificed. As the first line of defense for software quality and customer experience, development and QA teams are under pressure to prevent code defects from escaping into production, yet they need to also manage unprecedented workloads with less time and resources to invest in testing code than ever before. To help address these gaps, we’ve identified 6 key quality gates that can be built into your CI/CD pipeline using open source plugins and used to clearly...

Testers and test tooling working together can be much more successful than either of them working independently. Both humans and automation have strengths to be taken into consideration when drafting quality strategies and test planning. As an organization evolves, the quality needs should be reevaluated with each step. This session will discuss where humans are still strongest in the software testing discipline, and contrast that with where test tools are most valuable. Various testing tools will be included in the comparison, with a heavy focus on test automation. That information...

The release date is a week away. Development is complete. The code works, and everything looks good. Marketing is ready with the media blitz. Our customers are waiting to get their hands on the new features and are sure to give us good feedback. The only step left is to get the security group to scan the application and give us the approval to release it. Cross your fingers- let’s hope we get the green light! Otherwise, I don’t know what we are going to do. DevOps, and more importantly, DevSecOps, promises to do away with rolling the dice at the end and hoping we are allowed to release...

The presentation will cover from the very basics of data science to my journey into the data science world and how do we actually seek for quality in our product when testing a data rich project. My aim would be to cover the following areas; What is data science? What is testing data science models? How can we achieve a smooth process? Exploratory testing with data science. What have I achieved? What can you achieve/learn? Who would make a good data science tester? and the importance of documentation. Once you understand the how data science it performing to interpret vital and...

As an agile coach working with self-organizing teams, I encounter blockers that can’t be removed by the team. Escalating the blocker to one manager or executive can be ineffective. I have experienced success when a group of managers or executives form a group dedicated to dealing with these kinds of issues, which I call an Impediment Removal Engine (IRE). If you have been in a similar situation and wondered how you could make a difference, come to the talk. Whether you are on a delivery team, managing a team or teams, being part of an IRE can help you understand and empathize with the...

Web applications are not built perfectly. Even though we see our tests passing, it doesn't necessary mean that application is performing well. There are secondary indicators of the application stability, which if not properly observed, can lead to development nightmares. To be more precise, this presentation is about how to cover discovered issues which manifest as slow responses, flaky page loading, browser console error logs, etc. The challenge is how to observe these issues, and properly report on them. How to make sure the business understands what's going on, and can prioritize any...

We are testing everything. We are so devoted to test that we even invented "DevTestOps". And then... Yes... What about our Infrastructure as a Code templates? How many times did you run your template again and again, fix issues, run again, fix issues... This is very common, we all have to admit it. Even if we use the CI/CD tools for our infrastructure (how many of us is really doing it? We are still missing the testing phase. But no worries! Let me show you how CloudFormation templates can be tested; how to be sure that code committed to the repository will be properly prepared and ready...