STARWEST 2021 - General Management
Customize your STARWEST 2021 experience with sessions covering general project management.
Monday, October 4
Test Automation: Start and Succeed
Many organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems as their product matures and changes over time. As a leader, how can you ensure that your new automation efforts will get off to a good start? What can you do to ensure that your automation work provides continuing added value? Chris Loder explains the critical issues you need to know to get a good start, and he will share his extensive experience in building great automation. He covers the most important management issues you should address for test automation success,...
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
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
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...
DevOps: Test Alone
As in the movie HomeAlone, it seems that Dev and Ops have gone on a journey and forgot to take testing/QA with them. We hear big companies tell stories that they have no more testers, all testing is done in production, everything is fully automated by dev, etc. The actual truth lies somewhere in between these statements!
For most DevOps implementations, QA is actually crucial in order to succeed. DevOps however has a dramatic impact on the way we do QA! In this session, I will give you some concrete examples and tips on how we as QA...
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.