STARWEST Virtual+ 2020 - Tutorial | TechWell

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STARWEST Virtual+ 2020 - Tutorials

Full- and half-day tutorials are consistently the most popular and highly rated part of the conference. Tutorials allow you to take a deeper dive into a specific topic so that you can learn to make improvements to everyday processes in the areas that matter most to you.

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...

MB

Test Management in Agile

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

System Development has changed due to the introduction of Agile. So, test management has to change as well. How do you position yourself as test manager and how do you add value in an Agile organization? In this tutorial you will learn how test management fits in modern system development. Based on four key questions we will assess the value of the test management activities we spent our time on. We will make our own agile test strategy at sprint level and learn how we can plan and monitor testing. We will do an exercise with light weight documentation (one-page test plan and test...

Janna_Loeffler
Equinox Media
Adam_Satterfield
Global Payments
MC

Test Strategies for a Modern World

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

With the advent of DevOps, Agile, and ever-increasing complex technologies under test, the classic, the bloated test strategy document has quickly become outdated. Many testers struggle to understand how to convey complex testing tasks concisely. However, there is hope! There is a way to create a concise, actionable, and useful test strategy for Agile, DevOps, and even the dreaded Waterfall! Janna and Adam will leverage real-world test strategies that they have used and will break down the critical components and detail out how to create a test strategy, no matter what development style...

Jennifer-Bonine
AI Appstore, Inc.
MD

Introduction to AI Testing

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

How do you train an AI bot to do your software testing? Integrating AI into your testing activities can be intimidating, but in reality, it is pretty easy, and it just takes some understanding and work. Learn how to directly apply AI to real-world testing problems without having a Ph.D. in computer science. Jennifer will share a wide survey of all the different ways AI is applied to software testing today. Get some hands-on experience using AI with a testing focus with no coding skills required. Whether you are just AI-Curious or want to reap the benefits of AI-based testing...

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...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.Com, Inc.
MG

Automating Test Design for Agile Projects

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

Traditional requirement and analysis techniques just don’t fit in short iterations. Testers can save a lot of time—and focus on what really matters—by using automated test design and implementation tools. Traditional test automation helps testers execute tests, report progress, and offer insights into test coverage and completeness, but little emphasis has been made on automating effective test design. Rob Sabourin will share automated test design techniques using a selection of free and open source tools. He has implemented automated test design in conjunction with automated unit tests...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
MH

Getting Smart on API Testing & Automation

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

API testing has become more and more popular as service-oriented architectures have become common. In addition, testing at the API level can be effectively automated to provide maintainable regression tests that work well in a DevOps process. In this tutorial, Jeffery Payne discusses what API testing is all about and how it is effectively done. Techniques and tools are discussed that highlight where in the testing process API testing makes the most sense to perform. Various open source and commercial tools will be demonstrated and the pros and cons of various solutions discussed. Effective...

MI

Differentiated Management: Building Stronger Teams

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

Hiring and team-building are two significant issues faced by every quality manager or director. However, what happens once you have hired your team? How do you keep valued members on board and help struggling members to become better, all while continuing to manage your organization and meet deliverables? During this highly interactive workshop, you will learn how to differentiate content, process, and products by learning more about employee readiness, interest, and lived experiences. You will participate in a role-playing game and will work as a team to practice each of these skills. The...

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...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
MO

Application Security Tools for Continuous Testing

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

There are lots of tools out there to support security testing activities. You’ve probably seen some of the acronyms used to describe them when looking at marketing material or reading about application security - SAST, DAST, IAST, RASP, etc. But the question is always which tools to use where within your testing process. This is particularly important in a DevOps model where continuous testing is used to continuously validate code as it changes. Selecting the wrong tools or using them at the wrong place can impact your delivery process significantly. In this tutorial, Jeffery Payne...

MP

Develop and Refine Your Company Testing Strategy

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

Every quality director wants to implement a modern, forward-looking testing strategy, and many test managers look to other companies to figure out the "magic bullet" for achieving excellent quality quickly and reliably. But the truth is that everything you need to know about your best test strategy is already in your company. In this workshop you will use your quality priorities, strategies, and code base as the foundation for defining and improving your testing strategy. You’ll work individually and in small groups to examine your current testing structure and methodologies, perform risk...

Jennifer-Bonine
AI Appstore, Inc.
MQ

Testing Leadership IQ

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

Have you ever needed a way to measure your testing leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies and the evolution of testing and testing leadership. Join Jennifer as she explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can...

Jenna Charlton
Coveros, Inc.
MR

Running Risk Assessment Sessions

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

Risk is a feature of every project. We work to minimize it when we're aware of it and mitigate it regardless. However, we have very few avenues to formally discuss risk with our teammates, which is why we need risk assessment sessions. Jenny will lead the group through the five stages of a well-run risk assessment session, and you will be able to break off into smaller groups to run your mini risk assessment on an example application! You will pick your features: how do we select the features for a risk assessment session? Jenny will suggest several methods, including grouping by pages and...

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...

Jenny-Bramble
WillowTree Apps
TI

Making and Managing Mind Maps

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

Organizing complex thoughts on a topic can be a challenge, especially if the topic has many different directions you can take it. It can be difficult to keep everything straight and follow the threads that are most important. Mindmaps are an organizational tool that lets you group similar thoughts and find links between them. They can be used to investigate test cases and test plans, create personas, work through presentations, and more! Jenny will take you for a dive into the history of mind maps, some modern tools, and some interesting use cases like menu creation for a restaurant,...

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...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.Com, Inc.
TP

The Tester's (New) Role in Agile Development

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

Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s so easy for agile teams to fall into the rut of testers only doing traditional testing activities and programmers strictly doing their time-worn coding activities. But there are actually many places testers can contribute value on a cross-functional team. Rob Sabourin will share a number of examples of how testing skills can be applied to a wide variety of activities in an agile project. For instance, testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Risk analysis in self-organized agile...