STARWEST 2022 - Test Management
Customize your STARWEST 2022 experience with sessions covering test management.
Monday, October 3
Test Automation: How to 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 will explain 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,...
Test Design for Fully Automated Build Architecture
Imagine this … as soon as any developed functionality is submitted into the code repository, it is automatically subjected to the appropriate battery of tests and then released straight into production. Setting up the pipeline capable of doing just that is becoming more and more common and something you need to know about. But most organizations hit the same stumbling block—just what IS the appropriate battery of tests? Automated build architectures don't always lend themselves well to the traditional stages of testing. In this hands-on tutorial, Melissa Benua introduces you to key test...
Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization
The DevOps movement is here. Companies across many industries are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, IT organizations have been staffed with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding to stay relevant and add greater value to the business. DevOps really...
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...
Tuesday, October 4
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...
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 Tom Stiehm 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...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Thursday, October 6
From 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...
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,...