STARWEST Virtual+ 2020 - Test Transformation
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Monday, October 5
Critical Thinking for Software Testers
Critical thinking is the kind of thinking that specifically looks for problems and mistakes. Regular people don't do a lot of it. However, if you want to be a great tester, you need to be a great critical thinker. Critically-thinking testers save projects from dangerous assumptions and ultimately from disasters. The good news is that critical thinking is not just innate intelligence or a talent—it's a learnable and improvable skill you can master. Michael Bolton shares the specific techniques and heuristics of critical thinking and presents realistic testing puzzles that help you practice...
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...
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Skills for the Testing World
PreviewSoftware continues to revolutionize the world, impacting nearly every aspect of our work, family, and personal life. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are playing key roles in this revolution through improvements in search results, recommendations, forecasts, and other predictions. AI and ML technologies are being used in platforms for digital assistants, home entertainment, medical diagnosis, customer support, and autonomous vehicles. Testing practitioners are recognizing the potential for advances in AI and ML to be leveraged for automated testing—an area that...
Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization
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...
Better Test Design for Great Test Automation
Test automation is an essential element in modern system development. And test design can make or break automation efforts throughout the entire CI/CD pipeline. We want automated tests to find problems in a build quickly, run without a hitch, and be easily maintained. However, if tests are badly structured and unnecessarily detailed, you may have a hard time automating them—even with great tools and great technical expertise. Hans Buwalda explores how testers, both technical and non-technical, can design or restructure tests to make them suitable for automation. In this session, you’ll...
Tuesday, October 6
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...
Test Design for Fully Automated Build Architecture
PreviewImagine 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...
Automation Framework Essentials
Automation 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...
Holistic Performance Testing for Modern Applications
PreviewWith 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...
Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics
PreviewTo 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...
Wednesday, October 7
Dynamic Test Environments for Continuous Testing
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...
Thursday, October 8
Quality 1Up : How to Use Game Theory to Drive a Cultural Change and Improve Quality
How do you inspire developers, testers, and teams to improve their testing practices and code quality? Have you ever wanted to provide greater visibility into your quality practices? Join Janna as she talks about one way you can help inspire teams to not only improve testing and quality practices, but drive and own that change. She’ll talk about how gamifying your quality practices and modding your role as a tester can build a community and a culture of quality. In today’s age of agile development and DevOps, software development has truly become a social activity. So we need to stop...
Not a Pipe Dream: E2E & Combinatorial Test Automation in the Pipeline
Is your development organization migrating to a more continuous integration/continuous delivery environment using containers in the cloud and pipelines, but you are not sure how to adapt your test automation to this change? You are not alone! Dom and Ed were facing a similar problem in their organization. With limited test engineer resources and the rapid rate of code change, it was no longer efficient and provided less business value to have the test engineers manually execute test automation with every deployment. If the test automation could be integrated into the development pipeline,...
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Leveraging Cloud Architecture (AWS Focused) to Build a Robust Test Automation Platform
A huge opportunity exists for testing practitioners to leverage the power of the cloud for testing environments and testing tools. I recently designed a serverless cloud based test automation platform for a F500 company that allowed them to retire a legacy testing lab that was costing them $250k per year to maintain. The new platform was not only about 1/10th the cost, but also provides unlimited scalability on-demand as their needs grow. I will start the presentation with an overview of some relevant cloud native services and expand on the architecture of a few of those services and then...
Thursday, October 15
Breaking the Glass Ceiling and our Biases
Gender bias exists not only in our workplace, but also in our personal lives. Companies and communities have been working hard to be more inclusive and diverse, yet this is a very difficult problem to solve. Why? Is it just a matter of time or can there be other factors involved? Let's take a dive into what is preventing women from progressing or reaching the top and how we can help bring the balance. To go beyond mere stereotypes, we will get familiarized with the basics of how our brain operates, how biases form, and other factors that contribute to a gender-biased system. We will work...
How to Be a Today's Superhero (Yes, that's You) In Case You Haven't Noticed
The world has changed, so many people are out of jobs, so many people are wondering what will happen next. So many are feeling alone and like no one understands them. Instead of spending your days building your resume, let’s focus on building your legacy…the thing people remember you for. How? Join us and find out!
The Year of Change!
We interrupt your regularly scheduled life to bring you 2020! A year of unprecedented unknowns and uncertainty. Many of us have faced countless challenges in our personal lives and in our careers and frankly, it is hard to not feel STUCK! In order to get unstuck, we must learn what to do to bring about personal change. How can we identify the changes we want to make and then find new ways to make those changes? Let’s talk about the steps we need to take to intentionally shift our mindset and habitual patterns that may be holding us back. Join Jessie and Alison for this interactive session...