STARWEST 2022 - Concurrent Sessions
Concurrent sessions offer attendees the flexibility to explore a variety of topics throughout the conference on Wednesday and Thursday in order to customize their learning experience. Learn both enterprise foundations and new methodologies to grow your skills, supercharge your knowledge, and re-energize your career growth.
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Wednesday, October 5
How to Build and Implement Your Salesforce Test Automation Strategy
Today enterprise applications like Salesforce are now at the heart of your business processes and 59% of organizations deploy a new software build daily. But as a test automation professional unfamiliar with the complex Salesforce ecosystem, it can feel daunting to build a Salesforce test automation strategy from the ground up.
In our session, Mala Punyani, Engineering Manager at Splunk will share 3 core principles for building and implementing a Salesforce test automation strategy for you and your delivery teams. Key takeaways include: - How to create a checklist of prerequisites...
Testing Machine Learning Models
More companies are building ML and AI systems and applications, but they lack the same rigorous testing because many Testers don't know how to approach testing them. After having built and tested many different ML models and systems and talking to ML teams of small and large organizations, one thing always stands out: "We need better testing and automation in our MLOps lifecycle." So, we'll start by demystifying Machine Learning by breaking down a Prediction application so the audience better understands the "magic algorithms" behind the scenes. We'll explore an example of ML systems that...
Software Testing from Individual Contributor to Management
Software testing is a critical role for any organization. When you are a individual contributor you are putting your heart and soul to identifying how the qualify the software and finding edge cases to make sure you find the defects before your customer. So you are adding the value to the bottom line. When you want to excel your career in Software Testing in management role, what does that mean? How you make the difference? How to make that transition from doing it all by yourself to delegate and make it work as a team? What is important for the first time manager? What makes a good...
A Realistic Approach to Scalable and Cost-effective Cross-browser and Device Solution
Problem Statement: Current cross browser/device platforms are not built to handle the real scalability that software development design patterns require, in a cost-efficient way.
Most or all cross-browser platforms offer their services based on the number of parallel connections. The more connections you need, the more expensive it gets. Here you must choose quality vs cost. With the current providers, without spending in millions, you would not be able to implement shift left with full scalability. This is because the current platforms are not aligned to the best practices of CI CD...
A Testing Teams Journey to The Great Unknown — Oops, I Mean DevOps
As more and more companies continue to adopt DevOps practices to help streamline their software development, it is becoming increasingly essential for testing teams to become more efficient in modern tools and technologies, which help in quickly delivering high-quality products. Unfortunately, the roadmap for implementing DevOps across an organization, let alone a specific team, can be a daunting task. Bob Foster will walk you through a real-world testing team's journey from using a fragile, unreliable test automation framework to a custom-built framework fully integrated into their...
Automation Face-Off
What do you think about when you hear the words "test automation"? Are you considering developing your own tools to help you probe the product deeply, or will you apply a commercial tool for automated checking? Are you excited by new, powerful, enabling technologies, or do you worry that a robot will replace you? One thing is for sure: when we apply tools, we fundamentally change the context and the nature of the work we do.
Our panelists are software testing experts who will discuss all this and more with you! Together, we'll probe what people mean by automation, the power that...
The Quest of a Performance Engineer. A Tale of the Adventures of This Mythical Creature.
Once upon a time, a mythical creature was called a performance engineer. This creature has been living experiences and adventures with another mythical creature since its dawn—the computer. Think of it as a species of mythical dragons that the performance engineer tames constantly.
As in every fantastic story, the challenges for the performance engineer have been changing as those dragons evolve. And sadly, those dragons have been evolving quickly and in multiple directions. Many times those changes are outpacing the poor performance engineer.In this presentation, Leandro will tell...
Are You Ready for AI to Take Over Your Automation Testing?
We all know that Artificial Intelligence is here and here to stay. Most teams are wondering how to leverage AI for their automation. In this session, I will cover a case study on how to successfully leverage Artificial Intelligence in your automation strategies. Attendees in this session will take away a few key points. First, how to determine if your automation strategy can leverage AI tool, discuss the learning curve and mindset shift necessary for your QA team to embrace AI Tool, and discuss success case study of using AI tool as part of automation testing. Then, how to leverage AI...
Engineering Productivity via Metrics
PreviewEven at a startup, Engineering teams can grow quickly, with a proliferation of tools, teams. processes, agile methodologies, meetings, interviews and so on. How does one begin to think about getting a pulse on how the teams are performing, how code is being delivered, what are the obstacles that developers are facing? Where do you start?
We addressed the problem by taking a stock of all things in flight, starting to think about how to even begin assigning metrics to seemingly intangible things like developer happiness and related obstacles Having one source of truth for all...
The Rise and Benefits of Robotic Process Automation
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a term given to technology that allows developers to programmatically emulate the actions of a human to execute a business process. RPA often operates on the user interface (UI) layer to capture data or interact with an application or across multiple applications to perform tasks that are considered repetitive or time-consuming. Originally focused on business processes, many RPA solutions now integrate with SDLC tools. While the promises of easy adoption and scaling are made by almost every vendor, the reality is long-term commitment to an RPA program is...
DevSecOps by Default: What Have, Can and Must We Learn from Log4Shell?
PreviewEnd of 2021 Log4Shell ruined many Christmas holidays for developers, architects, ITOps and especially Dev(Sec)Ops teams. How did this incident help us strengthen our software supply chain? How have DevSecOps adopted their delivery and operations orchestration to prevent using vulnerable code or react faster once a new breach is detected?
In this session we cover stories from DevSecOps teams that were on the frontlines when Log4Shell hit. We look into application security approaches and tools to detect vulnerabilities during testing, delivery as well as in production and see how...
Metamorphosis from Manual to Automated Testing
Do you have a fully manual testing environment and want to move to automation but not sure how? Follow the journey of a heavy manual testing organization that capitalized on the strong manual testing skills of their employees, expanding their skill sets and helping to move the careers forward for the entire organization. Shay Hibler, Daniel Jiregna, Latha Vatti, and Cheryl Raya will take you on that journey of how our organization took on that task with tool evaluation to find the best tool to fit our needs, how doing selective talent acquisition moved our test automation forward at an...
Mastering Cross - Browser Testing with Selenium, Cypress, and Playwright
Agile mandates continuous testing processes. Within Agile there are various personas trying to accomplish exactly that, however, they bring different constrains including time lines, skillsets, and testing objectives. With the growing adoption of Cypress and Playwright test frameworks that appeals to front-end developers, how does Cypress & Playwright from Microsoft plays within a single pipeline together with Selenium? Do they compete or complement each other? In this session, Eran Kinsbruner, DevOps chief Evangelist, Author and Sr. Director at Perforce will uncover the main benefits...
How Testers Can Revolutionize AI and Machine Learning
You may have heard that software ate the world and AI is eating software. However, if you’ve been paying attention, then you’ve probably realized that the world is filled with bad software. Many organizations struggle with meeting their quality goals and keeping testing-related costs contained. Software is indeed revolutionizing the world, but the world is also paying a revolutionary price for bad software. So where do AI and machine learning (ML) fit in? Are AI/ML breakthroughs just new ways of filling the world with bad software? Or do they offer a path towards better software?
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Dos Oruguitas: Software Testers...and Everyone Else
Disney's smash hit, Encanto, will be nearly a year old by the time STARWEST 2022 comes around, but my prediction is that we’ll all still be uncovering common threads between ourselves and the characters of this amazing film when we gather together in October. Software testers may find more similarities between Mirabel, Luisa, Camilio, Julieta, and others (you better BELIEVE we’re going to talk about Bruno!) than any other persona along the software development and testing lifecycle.
Learn the importance of knowing the characters (and gifts!) of this masterpiece you most align with,...
Intelligent Test Automation for Agile Teams
Traditionally, test automation was implemented with frameworks that require a specialized workforce (SDETs), need a significant amount of maintenance and infrastructure for the executions, notifications, and reporting. Today, the QA Automation Tools industry is ripe for the adoption of newer technologies and had been somewhat late to shift to SaaS, ML, and AI. Here at Fox, we have teams using various tools to augment our testing needs, and it's been very challenging, inefficient, and somewhat unreliable. Looking for a unified solution, we've conducted several POCs and have adopted the SaaS...
Speed Up Your Cloud Transformation by Giving Developers Back Control Over Their Dev & Test Environments
Todays Cloud Transformation is accompanied by a number of vital policies and norms, important for delivering scalable and robust systems at high quality. Yet, the same practices can also be road-blockers for cloud developers who are striving to build bleeding-edge systems. Although fast, iterative development processes with quick feedback loops are vital to creating a culture of continuous innovation across the organization, handcuffs are all too often imposed on cloud developers by important, yet cumbersome cloud approval processes, or unnecessarily long wait times during...
Modern Test Automation Strategies - A Panel
Love it or hate it, test automation drives a large part of our day-to-day lives as testers. But writing and maintaining software automation doesn't HAVE to be painful! Learn from a panel of automation experts - including Janna Loeffler, Adam Auerbach, and more - about how their teams have built reliable automation tooling and infrastructure that can stand the test of time. Moderated by Melissa Benua, the panel will answer YOUR questions about and help you address the challenges that we all face when scaling our test automation to match modern continuous delivery needs. You...
Thursday, October 6
A Journey to Better Automation with the Screenplay Pattern
Anyone who has spent time automating tests quickly learns that writing interactions is a challenge. People often struggle to write automation that remains reliable and avoids code duplication. The Page Object Model is a popular way to handle interactions, yet it still falls into some of these problems. In this session, we’ll take a journey with a simple C# search engine test to refactor its interactions from inadequate traditional ways to improved ones offered by the Screenplay Pattern. By the end, you’ll be able to use Screenplay calls with Boa Constrictor to make reliable interactions...
Better Test Coverage Through API Automation
Tackling Microservices architecture testing through data-driven and contract-based testing, presented by Royal Cyber. System performance has become critical with the pace of agile and continuous delivery, where things like microservices, cloud, IoT, and many other environments keep changing the landscape of the IT world. There are many ways we can expand how we test performance—everything from testing, assurance, validation, verification, optimization, notification, and many other activities. With AI and ML technologies, we could even build a future where generic open tests for common...
Open Sourced Tests: A Retrospective
Open MCT announced its Open Source e2e Testing Initiative late last year. While the project continues to be a success, there were some learning opportunities (read: challenges) we'd like to share with the testing community.... when crowdsourcing a seven year old application... with no existing e2e tests... with a nascent framework like Playwright Test. In this talk, come learn about what was necessary to start the open source e2e test initiative, how we prepared, what we learned, and how we adjusted. We'll discuss test automation architecture patterns, an alternative to the Screenplay and...
Tips and Tricks for Effective Agile Testing
DevOps Fireside Chat with Adam Auerbach
What is DevOps? How is your organization trying to adopt? Are you running into roadblocks? What tools and metrics are you using to show value? What lessons learned do you have that could help others? Join Adam as he moderates this "fireside" chat. Bring your questions and be ready for a lively, interactive discussion.
It’s Only “Gherkin” if It’s From the Cucumber Region of BDD; Otherwise It’s Just “Sparkling Behavior Specs”
Given I am a tester When I write Gherkin scenarios Then software development and testing go much more smoothly
Gherkin has become a quintessential part of BDD. Love it or hate it, Gherkin's simple "Given-When-Then" syntax makes it easy to frame behaviors and, by extension, test cases. What most folks don't realize, however, is that writing "good" Gherkin is more about semantics than syntax. We could argue over how many lines a scenario should be or how granular steps should be, but that misses the bigger picture: developing readable, runnable behavior definitions.In this talk, we'...
A Performance Testing Pyramid
PreviewFrom Quality Advocate to Quality as a Service - Transforming a Legacy Quality Practice
Maturing a new organization's quality practices, while challenging, is doable as processes are normally built with quality in mind. This can't be said for legacy applications, built on architectures that are decades old and supported by organizations leveraging varying development methodologies to deliver their products and capabilities. In this presentation we will discuss how T-Mobile embraced the diversity of our successful culture to not only transform but truly migrate to Quality as a Service.
During our discussion we will map the path that T-Mobile took to identify a horizon...
Stop Test Sprints! Develop a CLEAR Agile Product Roadmap
Test sprints in an Agile environment are a certain indication that testing is being held out of the equation as almost unimportant. It shows we are not slicing the product well and waiting too long before our testers have the ability to help us see where we need to adjust and fine tune. It often includes bulky hand-offs and slow environment swaps. By using the CLEAR (Collaborative, Lean, Evolving, Adaptive, Reportable) principles of Product Development, testing professionals have found themselves back in the direct line of development in iterative and valuable testing practices. This...
AI in Testing: A Moderated Panel Discussion
Cypress Holds the Belt. Is Selenium Still in the Fight?
PreviewSoftware Architecture for Testers– Where the Bodies are Buried!
PreviewThis session is designed to provide an overview of software architecture and design to testers so that you can understand how the different tiers and components fit together in a modern, complex system, and help you assess where the risks lie. When developing a robust test strategy, it is very important for all members of the team, including testers, to know how the system is put together. This session provides a brief historical perspective on how software architecture has evolved from mainframe to client-server, to web, to mobile, to micro-services. It includes examples of where...
The Wheels of the QA Process Go Round and Round.
If we all know how to be good QA, why do the Star conferences exist? The truth is, we don't know because there isn't a Quality Assurance Engineer degree. We've made it up as we went along and are seeking help cobbling together tools and tricks to do our jobs better. The process I will go over isn't the end-all, be-all for QA but gives them the steps in the circular pattern that will help them find the success they are looking for. Agile development methodology is best done in a circle as each time the process completes, it lead directly into doing it again. Within that framework exists a...
Avoiding the Chaos of an Agile Transformation
Agile is not a fairy tale. You have to face real life challenges well prepared in order to succeed. The reality is: the bigger and older your organization is, the more difficult it is to pass through process level changes and that's when Chaos is born. Resolving all the issues with Chaos could potentially take years. Peter will share his story of one of his projects where he had to face numerous obstacles as a Test Manager in achieving proper Agile implementation and to raise the quality of the products of his client.
Some of the obstacles included: agile ceremonies not followed,...
Performance Assurance and SRE - Panel
Delivering performance applications is a multilayered challenge these days. Teams must assure that the application performs on multiple fronts. Each new function must have quick responses and be as slim as possible from the coding moment. It must be quick and light for a single request, handle concurrency and coexist with multiple other processes even in micro-serviced applications spread all over the place. Not to mention to handle lots of loads once in production. It must stay performant and available within the agreed thresholds.
The impressive amount of tasks to tackle, coexist...
Building Resiliency in Test Automation
DevOps on Auto Pilot
PreviewMicroservice Architecture - Modernizing the Testing Strategy / Techniques at Different Layers
As companies move towards a Microservice-oriented architecture, modernizing the Microservice Testing Strategy for modular distributed systems can be a challenge. A modernized testing strategy needs to adapt to these changes and involve a collaborative effort from Dev’s, SDET and DevOps to facilitate implementation of quality gates and enhance business value of the product. How do you ensure that a service that tests an individual functionality works seamlessly with other services? Are services resilient and fault tolerant? How to ensure seamless integration between cross functional teams...
Quality Assurance Legacy - 30 Years of Tips and Tricks to Make QA Easier
When companies are in trouble management starts cutting expenses. Quality Assurance departments, groups and teams are often viewed as “cost centers” and not “profit centers”; in other words, an expense that can be cut. Ensuring that your QA team and department runs efficiently and effectively will make sure that QA is viewed as a “profit center”, an essential part of the company, and not as something extra to be cut at the slightest hint of trouble.
Quality Assurance teams use various tools such as bug trackers and test case repositories. Many such tools are available and marketed,...
Upskilling Your Team for Agile Testing
Agile and DevOps are transforming software development: production cycles are accelerating, more functions are being automated, and silos across the organization are coming down. But software testing continues to be a challenge: 43% of software developers say that testing is their biggest pain point during development. To help their organizations embrace agile development, QA leaders need a plan to upskill their teams. The agile tester needs a wide-ranging skillset: manual and automated testing, DevOps tools, communication, project management, and the ability to connect code to the...