STARWEST 2021 - Keynote
Wednesday, October 6
The Deal—Quality & Development Together
Why are developers and QA professionals so often at odds? We know that it takes both disciplines to make better software faster. So how do we get from an adversarial relationship to a beneficial one? Join Jenny Bramble, Director of Quality Engineering, and Adrian P. Dunston, Director of Backend Engineering, as they discuss and explore “The Deal”—a pact between one test engineer and one software engineer that can make a huge impact for the two and for the teams around them by strengthening both disciplines. They will describe The Deal (development supports test; test keeps development safe...
Open Testing: What If We Opened Our Testing Like We Open Our Source?
Testing is a vibrant discipline with well-established practices, but many times, nobody but the testers who write the tests ever see them. Tests could offer so much value if they were openly shared—with developers, product owners, and perhaps even end-users. So, why don’t we open our tests like we open our source? There are so many parallel benefits: helping others learn, helping teams develop higher-quality software, and helping users gain confidence in the products they use. Opening tests includes sharing the tools, frameworks, and even test cases themselves. With AI and ML technologies...
Lightning Strikes the Keynotes
Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR conferences. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consists of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. And now, lightning has struck the STAR keynotes. Some of the best-known experts in testing will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning. Get multiple keynote presentations for the price of one—and...
Thursday, October 7
Performance—Really What Is It These Days? Why Does It Matter?
System performance has become critical with the pace of agile and continuous delivery, where things like microservices, cloud, IoT, and many other environments keep changing the landscape of the IT world. Unfortunately, many teams still try to hold on to the old testing methods and only load test. Or worse, they think performance testing is the same as load testing. There are many ways we can expand how we test performance—everything from testing, assurance, validation, verification, optimization, notification, and many other activities. These actions will enable our organizations to...
Life After Selenium
Selenium has been the unchallenged leader in open source UI testing since 2004. As the web evolved, Selenium adapted and abstracted alongside it. Unfortunately, that abstraction came with performance and reliability penalties. Now, UI testing is understood to be "slow" and "flaky." Test automation architecture was shaped into "pyramids" to avoid the performance penalty. As a result, QA could not shift left because our results were too slow or unreliable. In 2021, there are now open-source alternatives that will make you consider changing your framework as well as your test strategy. Now,...