STARWEST 2020 - Software Tester | TechWell

Conference archive

STARWEST Virtual+ 2020 - Software Tester

Customize your STARWEST 2020 experience with sessions for software testers.

Monday, October 5

Michael_Bolton
DevelopSense
MA

Critical Thinking for Software Testers

Monday, October 5, 2020 - 10:00am to 5:30pm

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...

Tariq_King
test.ai
ME

Unit Testing: What Every Developer and Tester Should Know

Monday, October 5, 2020 - 10:00am to 1:30pm

Do you want to take your testing skills to the next level? Are you trying to stay relevant on an agile team where testing is shifting to the left on the project timeline? Do you want to help your organization reap the full benefits of testing earlier? Then join Tariq King to explore the fundamentals of unit testing so you can find bugs as soon as they happen and do more thorough, targeted testing during software development. This introductory session is for everyone—of all programming skill levels. Learn how to apply program-based techniques such as testing by looking, automated unit...

Chris_Loder
Upland InGenius
MF

System-Level Test Automation: Ensuring a Good Start

Monday, October 5, 2020 - 10:00am to 1:30pm

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...

Tariq_King
test.ai
Jason_Arbon
test.ai
MK

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Skills for the Testing World

Preview
Monday, October 5, 2020 - 2:00pm to 5:30pm

Software 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...

Adam_Auerbach
EPAM Systems
ML

Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization

Monday, October 5, 2020 - 2:00pm to 5:30pm

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...

Hans_Buwalda
LogiGear
MM

Better Test Design for Great Test Automation

Monday, October 5, 2020 - 2:00pm to 5:30pm

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...

Dawn Haynes
PerfTestPlus, Inc.
MN

How to Break Software: Robustness Edition

Monday, October 5, 2020 - 2:00pm to 5:30pm

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...

Tuesday, October 6

Michael_Bolton
DevelopSense
TA

X-Ray Vision For Testers: How to Analyze Things

Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - 10:00am to 5:30pm

How do we go about understanding something complex? How do we move from confusion to clarity? What strategies and approaches can we use to identify and reason about things that matter? When we’re dropped into a testing situation, how do we make sense of it all? How can we rapidly achieve a deeper understanding of things that we know little or nothing about? How can we develop skills to make us more powerful testers? The answer to these questions is analysis - the study of things and ideas by examining their elements and structure. In this one-day tutorial, Michael Bolton will lead...

Byron_Katz
Coveros
TB

Introduction to Selenium

Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - 10:00am to 5:30pm

Knowledge of Selenium, the industry-standard tool for testing web applications, is a much sought after skill in today’s world of test automation. If you want to learn Selenium, then this full-day tutorial provides a great start. Byron Katz shows you how to build test automation using Selenium. But he doesn’t stop there. He uses his years of experience to show you how to build automation that is clean, robust, and easy to maintain. You will be introduced to practices and principles that apply to the whole team. You will write Selenium scripts in two languages, Python and Java, and will...

Tariq_King
test.ai
TC

Testing Strategies for Microservices

Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - 10:00am to 5:30pm

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...

Jennifer-Bonine
AI Appstore, Inc.
TD

Testing Transformation: The Art and Science for Success

Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - 10:00am to 1:30pm

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...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
TE

Web Security Testing: The Basics and More

Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - 10:00am to 1:30pm

Web applications are often security critical or serve as front-ends for security critical applications, making web testing for vulnerabilities an essential part of software testing. Unfortunately, most software testers have not been taught how to identify web security issues while testing applications. Join Jeffery Payne as he shares what you need to know to security test web-based applications as part of your overall testing process. Learn about the most common web security vulnerabilities and how they are introduced into web code and exploited by hackers. Explore test techniques for...

Melissa Benua
mParticle
TF

Test Design for Fully Automated Build Architecture

Preview
Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - 10:00am to 1:30pm

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...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.Com, Inc.
TG

Test Estimation in the Face of Uncertainty

Preview
Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - 10:00am to 1:30pm

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...

Chris_Loder
Upland InGenius
TH

Automation Framework Essentials

Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - 10:00am to 1:30pm

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...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
TK

Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps

Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - 2:00pm to 5:30pm

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...

Kaushal_Dalvi
Ultimate Software
TM

Holistic Performance Testing for Modern Applications

Preview
Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - 2:00pm to 5:30pm

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...

Mike_Sowers
Coveros
TN

Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics

Preview
Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - 2:00pm to 5:30pm

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...

Melissa Benua
mParticle
TO

Continuous Testing Using Containers

Preview
Tuesday, October 6, 2020 - 2:00pm to 5:30pm

Containers. Every manager thinks they want them, but few teams have experience in knowing what to DO with them. Used thoughtfully, containerization of your services can transform the way your organization thinks about testing. Gone can be the days of maintaining X different compute environments with Y different configurations. Imagine instead spinning up just the code you need, on the machine type it needs, and only for as long as you need it. In this technical training, Melissa will walk through what containerization means for a legacy code base attempting to practice continuous...

Thursday, October 8

T17

Data Science Testing

Preview
Thursday, October 8, 2020 - 2:15pm to 3:15pm

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...

Scott_Aziz
Independent
T18

Leveraging Cloud Architecture (AWS Focused) to Build a Robust Test Automation Platform

Thursday, October 8, 2020 - 2:15pm to 3:15pm

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...

Belinda_Goodman
SalesLoft
T20

Exploratory Testing, Why Its Important, How to Get Better, and How to Measure Success Around It

Preview
Thursday, October 8, 2020 - 3:45pm to 4:45pm

Exploratory testing is a phrase that is thrown around a lot as something organizations should be doing well. But how do you define success around it, especially since the goal is to not release bugs? And how do testers or organizations know that they are doing it right? Join Belinda as she teaches you how to leverage the team and tools around you to become better at exploratory testing and prevent bugs from making it into the wild. We will be covering how to make the most of pairing with designers, product, developers, support teams and other QA's to build users personas to test...

Dusko Vuksanovic
TheZenith Insurance
T21

Tolerance Metrics in Test Automation

Thursday, October 8, 2020 - 3:45pm to 4:45pm

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...

Sargis Sargsyan
PicsArt
T22

Building in House Scalable Mobile Lab for Automation

Thursday, October 8, 2020 - 3:45pm to 4:45pm

It is becoming more and more challenging to test mobile apps on different devices, with different screen sizes, running different operating systems. During the development of a mobile app, we can easily verify and test the app on a mobile simulator or emulator. However, only simulator or emulator testing isn't enough, we need to make sure that our app works on devices that our users carry with them in their pocket. Creating a in house Automation Mobile Lab will be a good decision if you're looking to do automated testing, for example with Selenium and Appium. An automation Mobile Device...

Thursday, October 15

Aprajita Mathur
Guardant Health
WWT1

Breaking the Glass Ceiling and our Biases

Thursday, October 15, 2020 - 1:00pm to 2:15pm

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...

Dona_Sarkar
Microsoft
WWT2

How to Be a Today's Superhero (Yes, that's You) In Case You Haven't Noticed

Thursday, October 15, 2020 - 2:15pm to 3:15pm

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!

Jessie Shternshus
The Improv Effect
Alison Wade
TechWell Corp.
WWT3

The Year of Change!

Thursday, October 15, 2020 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm

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...