STARWEST 2021 - Quality Assurance
Customize your STARWEST 2021 experience with sessions covering quality assurance for software developers or testers.
Tuesday, October 5
Web Security Testing: The Basics and More
Web applications are often security critical or serve as front-ends for security critical applications, making web testing for vulnerabilities an essential part of software testing. Unfortunately, most software testers have not been taught how to identify web security issues while testing applications. Join Richard Mills as he shares what you need to know to security test web-based applications as part of your overall testing process. Learn about the most common web security vulnerabilities and how they are introduced into web code and exploited by hackers. Explore test techniques for...
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...
Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps
In many organizations, agile development processes are driving the pursuit of faster software releases, which has spawned a set of new practices—DevOps. DevOps stresses communications and integration between development and operations, including rapid deployment, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Because DevOps practices require confidence that changes made to the code base will function as expected, automated testing is essential. Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the unique challenges associated with integrating automated testing into continuous integration/continuous...
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
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...
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...
Thursday, October 7
Say Goodbye to Test Flakiness and Welcome AI into Open Source Mobile Testing
Mobile automation testing, especially if open source (i.e best of breed – Appium), can be frustrating at times, as it comes with quite a few common challenges: complex environments & setup processes, constantly maintaining locator strategies, struggling with team collaboration, tiresome iOS dependencies, trying to avoid fragility and flakiness within your tests, lack of visibility into test results, and so much more... In this talk we’ll deep dive into each of these obstacles and discuss how Agile methods & advanced tools that will leverage your open source mobile testing with the...
Security Testing is Everyone's Responsibility
How many news stories have you seen recently where a company puts out a statement stating they have been hacked? As applications grow in complexity and scale with technologies such as mobile, microservices and cloud hosting, testers are finding themselves on the forefront of needing to understand how to add security to their suite of testing skills. Paired with an uptick in bad actors trying to take advantage of any application that can be reached via the internet, there is a large need for security testing. Unfortunately, combined with the move to push testing left, security is oftentimes...