STARWEST 2021 - Test Leadership
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...
Holistic Performance Testing for Modern Applications
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 the...
Wednesday, October 6
Gatekeeper to Enabler: 5 Steps to Make QA the Darling of Your Company
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...
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...
Thursday, October 7
Testing Your Serverless Applications
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...
From Fear to Risk: Redefine What Drives Your Enterprise Testing Strategy
Many quality engineering leaders say they do risk-based testing, but walking the walk is showing to be more challenging than enterprises realize. Often, quality engineering teams practicing risk-based testing end up testing “everything” because they continue to test from a place of fear as opposed to calculated risk. Others never reassess or renegotiate risk as their application matures. Additionally, sometimes quality engineering teams lack accurate testing data in order to make well-informed decisions.
Enterprise quality engineering leaders must apply a truth-telling question: What...
Friday, October 8
Opening Remarks
Welcoming remarks from Leadership Summit Moderator, Jeffery Payne to kick the Summit off and discuss the days agenda.
Do Not Assure Quality, Advocate for it!
As software testing professionals, we know there is never enough time for testing. There are always going to be those issues and bugs that slip through the cracks and out into production. Many times, this is because there was something that we could just not control in order to assure quality. Even if we could control everything, could we still really assure quality? Exhaustive testing is never possible for large-scale applications meaning we will always have to assume some amount of risk. As testing leaders, it's time to stop trying to assure quality and start advocating for it. Only...
Perceptive Leadership
When I was a new leader, I spent a considerable amount of time figuring out what I needed to learn to become the type of leader who created the best experiences possible for my team. Many books, articles, and speakers emphasized having empathy and high emotional intelligence. These were often described as fundamental traits you either had or didn’t have. It took years of practice and experience to fully understand not only why these skills matter for great leaders, but also how to develop them, apply them, and get better using them every day. I learned these skills (and more) were at the...
Think Tank Discussion Part I—Problem Definitions
Join with your peers in an engaging and highly interactive session to discuss the issues that affect you most. Using answers to the question “As a Leader, What is Keeping You Up at Night?”, participants will form small groups to work on finding solutions to pressing test management issues. Discussions will review identified issues, barriers to change, and focus on innovative strategies and practical next steps. At the end of the think tank, all feedback will be collected and posted online to encourage further collaboration.
Think Tank Discussion Part II—Leadership Solutions
Based upon the problem definitions developed during Part I of the Think Tank, small groups will brainstorm on how to best solve these challenges, leveraging the collective wisdom of peers and Summit speakers. Each group will designate a representative to present its results and practice delivery.
Think Tank Discussion Part III—Presentation of Results
Small group representatives will each be given five minutes to present their leadership solutions. Summit participants will vote on which group produced the best solutions.