STARWEST 2021 - Test Strategy, Planning, Metrics
Monday, October 4
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Skills for the Testing World
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 still...
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...
Test Estimation in the Face of Uncertainty
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 thinking,...
Wednesday, October 6
End to End Performance Testing - Automated!
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...
APIs – Security & Performance – How to Avoid Getting in the News!
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...
Does Low Code Mean Low Testing?
Low Code and No Code are new on the block. There are very much low code and no code platforms and the number of organization that use low code or no code is growing. And does low code or no code mean we don't have to test or have to test less on these systems? We will go deep into this question in this talk and explore the risks of low code and no code systems. This presentation will start with a short introduction in low code. We will explain what they are, how they work and will tell that the vendors promise us and that reality is. In the second part we will dive deep into the question...
Thursday, October 7
Storytelling with Data for Test Transformation
Teams use project statistics and insights to improve and deliver better products to customers, but as each team has their own set of definitions, formulas and tools, it can be difficult to consolidate data and create clear reporting for leadership. There is an opportunity to improve how data and analytics are presented to leadership, to increase consistency in the data collection and evaluation processes. In this conversation, we will answer two important questions: How can we balance the autonomy teams have with the need of aggregated reporting for leaders? And, how can we leverage data...
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...