STARWEST 2021 - Concurrent Sessions

How’s the culture of quality in your organization? In 2021, many companies will still place QA at the end of the delivery lifecycle - acting gatekeepers to production. Does your leadership act as a gatekeeper in your release cycles or do you have the final say? Gatekeeping creates a wasteful test experience that ultimately drives longer delivery cycles and does not cultivate a culture where everyone is empowered to assure quality. In this talk, Erika Chestnut, Head of QA at Calendly will share 5 concrete steps to transform your leadership from costly gatekeeping to enabling quality. If you...

We all know that Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are critical in the modern economy, however, if you don't pay attention to the security or performance aspects of APIs, the results can be catastrophic. From large scale data-breaches, major system-wide outages and executives being hauled in front of Congress, failure to adequately plan and carry out API performance and security testing will definitely make the front-page news.... not in a good way. This session will discuss the present a comprehensive strategy for performance and security testing of your APIs, it will include best...

Maryam Umar comes from a household of high achievers. Her parents never asked to be awesome in what she studied. They always had this unsaid expectation. Luckily, she did really well throughout school, college and university. She likes to think she got her dad’s sense of achievement and her mum’s great way of organizing her tasks. From her teens onwards, she started developing a high sense of perfection for every-thing she took on. However, she did not realize that having this high bar was slowly consuming her. Maryam will talk about how the desire to be awesome slowly engulfed her. The...

Performance testing isn’t the first thing organizations think about when moving to DevOps – in fact, it’s often ignored as traditional approaches don’t jive well with the fast and nimble world of DevOps. However, performance is still a critical part of the user experience, and poor performance and outages will quickly negate the value of the features you’re delivering. Lee believes that organizations don’t have to gamble with application performance. He will discuss techniques for implementing continuous performance testing in your pipeline, so you don’t have to roll the dice on your user...

This talk is about applying best practices of testing to your serverless applications. Serverless technologies allow you to focus on building your application by reducing the work you do managing infrastructure. You'll learn how to overcome the challenges of testing in a serverless architecture, and how to efficiently test your Lambda functions efficiently. This includes unit testing, integration testing, and end-to-end testing. After this talk, you will gain an understanding of the benefits of using the AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM) CLI to test code manually, and verifying...

How many news stories have you seen recently where a company puts out a statement stating they have been hacked? As applications grow in complexity and scale with technologies such as mobile, microservices and cloud hosting, testers are finding themselves on the forefront of needing to understand how to add security to their suite of testing skills. Paired with an uptick in bad actors trying to take advantage of any application that can be reached via the internet, there is a large need for security testing. Unfortunately, combined with the move to push testing left, security is oftentimes...

Testing is a crucial enabler for the success of chatbots and voice assistants. Doing it manually requires enormous time and effort. As DevOps and furthermore AIOps grow in importance, automated testing will remain critical to ensure that bots actually do what their designers intend. Unlike traditional software where the application follows a predefined flow, a chatbot runs without any restrictions. Talking to a chatbot has no barriers. Combining this with an unpredictable user behavior, it becomes utmost difficult to verify the correctness of conversational AI. Training data and test sets...

The allure of a "happy path" in testing (and in many other walks of our professional and personal lives) is strong. “A happy path? Sign me up!” you might say to yourself. Imagine yourself standing before two roads. One of them is well lit, maybe you’ve taken it before. Maybe you can even see the end. and you’re confident in what’s waiting for you there. The other road…is different in every way. It’s overgrown, poorly lit, and you can’t see anything past a sharp turn only a few steps in, leaving you with little confidence how long it will take you to walk it, and if you will even reach the...

Agile is all about speed and one of the fundamental principles of Agile is adherence to technical excellence. Microservices  is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of services that are: Highly maintainable and testable; Loosely coupled; Independently deployable; Organized around business capabilities. Learn how a large Fortune 20 financial institution used microservices to deploy code faster. We will focus on Understanding the using Microservices and how to map technical practices to the business strategy behind microservices. The session will detail how...