STARWEST 2021 - Career & Personal Development
Tuesday, October 5
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...
Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics
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 Jeff Pierce as he...
Wednesday, October 6
8 Bit Pro—A Gamer's Guide to Testing
Let me take you back in time to the 1980s and tell you a story. A story of an 8-year-old boy, seaside arcades, chunky cartridges, tape drives, floppy discs, pokes, cheats, and magazines full of code! This is the start of how I became a tester. Gaming is often written off as a wasteful pastime. Hours of time are sunk into playing the latest games, just to get kudos amongst other fellow gamers. Some do take it to extremes and ignore all other aspects of their lives. I would argue that gaming is a productive activity. Gamers test all the time. Gamers explore, model, tweak, mod, exploit and...
The Human Side to Testing
We’re known for breaking things and testing the limits, and patience of our team and our systems. We advocate for quality in all things and we advocate for the end user. But, none of us actually think about how our varied backgrounds influence what we do and how we test. In this session we’ll explore how our previous (and current) experiences subconsciously affect our testing and how to bring those experiences to the forefront in order to be better testers all around. We’ll show how our experiences with tech and outside of tech influence how, what, and why we test the way we do. We’ll also...
How I Became Agile When It Came to Mental Health
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...
AI-Driven Test Automation: A Tour De Force
The use of AI for testing is one of the latest trends in the software industry. Within the last decade, there has been a vast increase in the number of vendors and startup companies promoting AI-driven test automation tools, platforms or frameworks. But what are the real benefits of this technology? Does it have any weaknesses? Are all AI technologies created equally? Join Tariq King as takes you on a journey and shows you the true strength of AI in testing. In this tour de force, Tariq will describe some of the recent advances in AI-driven test automation, while keeping it down to earth...
Thursday, October 7
Don't Ignore the Happy Path—Know That It Was Never There
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...
Demystifying Microservices—Breaking Down Legacy Applications to Deploy Faster
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...
Conducting an Agency Accessibility Audit
Often it is up to IT to conduct an accessibility audit. Most government organizations (and private ones for that matter) are hopelessly behind in digital accessibility and vulnerable to litigation. In addition to the legal requirements to be WCAG 2.0 and Section 508 compliant, being digitally accessible is simply the right thing to do. This is our success story of conducting an organization-wide audit, establishing a baseline, conducting a gap analysis, and recommending a remediation plan, all within six months in the one of the largest agencies in Washington State government. No...