STARWEST - Conference List Schedule | TechWell

Conference archive

Conference Schedule

Sunday, October 2

Registration — 7:30am – 5:00pm
7:30 am to 5:00 pm
Continental Breakfast — 7:30am – 8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Multi-day Training Classes Begin — 8:30am – 5:00pm
8:30 am to 5:00 pm
Load Testing With JMeter™
Robert Foster
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

Learn to use the open source framework, Apache JMeter™, to manage, record, and execute your tests. The two-day, hands-on class will have students run tests against a sample application to help solve issues that include basic test recording, dealing with SSL, parameterizeing tests, and more.

Agile Tester Certification—ISTQB/ICAgile
Jeff Pierce
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

Explore agile testing processes in this interactive course designed for dev and testing roles. Learn technical and team skills testers need for success, as well as key agile testing techniques. Successful attendees earn the ICAgile Certified Professional—Agile Testing (ICP-TST) designation and can optionally sit for the ISTQB® Certified Tester Foundation Level—Agile Tester (CTFL-AT) exam.

Software Tester Certification Foundation Level—ISTQB CTFL
Susan Harrington
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

Accredited training for the ISTQB® Certified Tester—Foundation Level (CTFL) certification, the world's most widely-recognized certification of software testing skills and knowledge. Find out what it takes to be a successful software tester and gain practical knowledge you can apply now including the relationship of testing to development, test levels, black-box methods, white-box testing, experienced-based testing, and more.

Python® for Testers
Kristoffer Nordström
8:30 am to 5:00 pm
This is a course for testers who are frustrated by the laborious and manual work that makes up day-to-day test activities. Participants will gain a solid understanding of the Python language, its philosophy, and the code syntax.
Foundations of DevOps—ICAgile Certification
Tom Stiehm
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

DevOps combines development, testing, and operations and includes continuous integration, automated testing, continuous delivery, and rapid deployment practices. Learn to avoid the common mistakes of DevOps implementations and to leverage DevOps best practices. Upon completion attendees will be certified by the International Consortium for Agile and awarded the ICAgile Professional (ICP-FDO) designation.

Security Testing for Test Professionals
Jeffery Payne
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

Explore security testing in an interactive workshop setting. This course is appropriate for software development and testing professionals who want to begin doing security testing as part of their assurance activities. 

Lunch — 12:00pm – 1:00pm
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Training Classes Continue — 1:00pm – 5:00pm
1:00 pm to 5:00 pm

Monday, October 3

Registration — 7:00am – 5:00pm
7:00 am to 5:00 pm
Continental Breakfast — 7:30am – 8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Full & Half-Day Tutorials — 8:30am – 12:00pm
8:30 am to 12:00 pm
Multi-day Training Classes Continue — 8:30am – 5:00pm
8:30 am to 5:00 pm
Tutorial MA BDD for Champions! NEW
Andrew Knight, Sarah Watkins
8:30 am to 4:30 pm

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) is a set of pragmatic practices that prioritizes our focus on the behaviors we want to develop. Why? Users get value out of good behaviors. If we focus on developing high-quality features that users want, then everything else falls into place. In the first half of this workshop, we will explore behaviors for an example product using a group activity called Example Mapping. Then, in the second half, we will refine all the scenarios for those behaviors by writing Gherkin "Given-When-Then" scenarios that follow the Arrange-Act-Assert pattern. Through these...Read more

Tutorial MB Getting Started with AI-Driven Automation NEW
Dionny Santiago
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

AI has been rapidly changing the way we approach software testing. Traditional test automation is time-consuming to create and breaks down easily in the presence of change. Thankfully, AI is helping testing teams create less procedural, more resilient tests that are able to self-heal in the presence of modern, rapidly changing, highly dynamic production systems. This sounds great, but you may be asking yourself: How do I get started? What additional skills do I need to learn? What tools are available for me to start using, right now? Join Dionny Santiago as he breaks down different AI...Read more

Tutorial MC Unit Testing: What Every Developer and Tester Should Know
Tariq King
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

Do you want to take your testing skills to the next level? Are you trying to stay relevant on an agile team where testing is shifting to the left on the project timeline? Do you want to help your organization reap the full benefits of testing earlier? Then join Tariq King to explore the fundamentals of unit testing so you can find bugs as soon as they happen and do more thorough, targeted testing during software development. This introductory session is for everyone—of all programming skill levels. Learn how to apply program-based techniques such as testing by looking, automated unit...Read more

Tutorial ME Test Automation: How to Start and Succeed
Chris Loder
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

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,...Read more

Tutorial MG The Influential Tester in Agile Development
Robert Sabourin
8:30 am to 12:00 pm
Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s so easy for agile teams to fall into the rut of testers only doing traditional testing activities and programmers strictly doing their time-worn coding activities. But there are actually many places’ testers can be influential and contribute value on cross-functional teams. Rob Sabourin will share several examples of how testing skills can be applied to a wide variety of activities in an agile project. For instance, testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Risk analysis in self-...Read more
Lunch — 12:00pm – 1:00pm
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Full-Day Tutorials Continue — 1:00pm – 4:30pm
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm
Tutorial MH Test Strategies for a Modern World
Adam Satterfield
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

With the advent of DevOps, Agile, and ever-increasing complex technologies under test, the classic, the bloated test strategy document has quickly become outdated. Many testers struggle to understand how to convey complex testing tasks concisely. However, there is hope! There is a way to create a concise, actionable, and useful test strategy for Agile, DevOps, and even the dreaded Waterfall! Janna and Adam will leverage real-world test strategies that they have used and will break down the critical components and detail out how to create a test strategy, no matter what development style...Read more

Tutorial MI Full-Stack Testing for Microservices Architectures NEW
Tariq King
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

Software development is trending toward building systems using small, autonomous, independently deployable microservices. Leveraging microservices makes it easier to release software early, more frequently, and even continuously, which aligns well with Agile and DevOps. But how does the microservices architectural pattern affect software testing and testability? How can you ensure microservice-based applications have an adequate level of test coverage at each level? Does this paradigm change the test automation pyramid, and if so what does that look like? Join Tariq King as he walks...Read more

Tutorial MJ Test Design for Fully Automated Build Architecture
Melissa Benua
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

Tutorial MK Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization
Adam Auerbach
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

Tutorial ML Automation Framework Essentials
Chris Loder
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

Tutorial MM Become Your Company's Quality Consultant NEW
Péter Földházi
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

Companies of all sizes are facing difficulties in achieving higher quality standards within their organization. As quality engineering includes a variety of different roles and activities, it is also challenging to find the right people to analyse the current state from a wide perspective and to provide the recommendations that will allow these organizations to mature their teams, improving their testing culture in the process. Join Péter Földházi as he illustrates the knowledge and skills necessary to become your company's quality consultant. Péter's goal is to involve testers from...Read more

Registration Desk Closes — 5:00pm
5:00 pm
Speed Networking — 5:15pm - 6:00pm
5:15 pm to 6:00 pm

Tuesday, October 4

Continental Breakfast — 7:30am - 8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Registration — 7:30am - 5:30pm
7:30 am to 5:30 pm
Full & Half-Day Tutorials — 8:30am - 12:00pm
8:30 am to 12:00 pm
Multi-day Training Classes Continue — 8:30am - 5:00pm
8:30 am to 5:00 pm
Tutorial TA A Quality Engineering Introduction to AI and Machine Learning NEW
Tariq King
8:30 am to 4:30 pm

Although there are several controversies and misunderstandings surrounding AI and machine learning, one thing is apparent — people have quality concerns about the safety, reliability, and trustworthiness of these types of systems. Not only are ML-based systems shrouded in mystery due to their largely black-box nature, they also tend to be unpredictable since they can adapt and learn new things at runtime. Validating ML systems is challenging and requires a cross-section of knowledge, skills, and experience from areas such as mathematics, data science, software engineering, cyber-security...Read more

Tutorial TB Testing in the Cloud From All Four Corners of the World! NEW
Kristoffer Nordström
8:30 am to 4:30 pm

This is a workshop for those of you that have done some sort of scripting or automation before. It’s a workshop where we’ll write a simple test agent using Python for sending traffic to a centralized REST API. You’ll follow up by creating 10,000 items of random test objects for offline test data. You’ll spin up server instances in the AWS cloud using Python. And finally, to top it all off, you’ll deploy your test agent and test data in cloud instances spread out over the four corners of the world, all of them generating simultaneous test traffic toward a single REST API where you’ll all...Read more

Tutorial TC Building Your Own Automation Framework NEW
Chris Loder
8:30 am to 4:30 pm

Let’s face it, building an automation framework is hard. That’s why there are so many commercial ones available on the market. But what if you wanted to build your own? One that you could customize to suit your needs, as opposed to you having to work within the confines of a tool or other framework. Where do you start? What does it need to have to be successful? Chris Loder will walk you through building your own automation framework based on his successful framework architecture. You will start with a basic test case runner and then build on it by adding new modules, such as UI...Read more

Tutorial TD Techniques for Testers to Thrive in Agile Contexts NEW
Bob Galen, Mary Thorn
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

Let’s face it – agile testing is different. First of all, there are challenges integrating successfully within the teams themselves. Scrummer-fall is still running rampant. Then there is the dichotomy of testing vs. quality and balancing your and the teams focus. Finally, delivering value is also an imperative, but a challenge. In this dynamic workshop, join agile coaches Mary Thorn and Bob Galen as they show you the tools, techniques, and mindset you have to bring to the table in order to successfully test in agile contexts. We’ll examine risk-based testing, iterative test planning,...Read more

Tutorial TE Getting Smart on API Testing & Automation
Jeffery Payne
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

API testing has become more and more popular as service-oriented architectures have become common. In addition, testing at the API level can be effectively automated to provide maintainable regression tests that work well in a DevOps process. In this tutorial, Jeffery Payne discusses what API testing is all about and how it is effectively done. Techniques and tools are discussed that highlight where in the testing process API testing makes the most sense to perform. Various open source and commercial tools will be demonstrated and the pros and cons of various solutions discussed. Effective...Read more

Tutorial TF Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics
Jeff Pierce
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

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...Read more

Tutorial TG Web Security Testing: The Basics and More
Tom Stiehm
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

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...Read more

Tutorial TH Exploratory Testing in the Heat of the Sprint NEW
Robert Sabourin
8:30 am to 12:00 pm
Agile teams are burdened with the challenge of delivering working product increments after short iterations of development. Getting software from an ambiguous terse, incomplete requirement–to a done, working, solid, valuable, high-quality code requires testers to continuously adapt to change in a turbulent context and deliver actionable results. Rob Sabourin will illustrate how charter-driven session-based exploratory testing techniques can empower agile teams and help them learn quickly and adapt based on what really matters. Testers can design and execute tests on the fly as they explore...Read more
Lunch — 12:00pm - 1:00pm
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Full & Half-Day Tutorials Continue — 1:00pm - 4:30pm
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm
Tutorial TI Leading Agile Testers— Successfully Making the Leap NEW
Bob Galen, Mary Thorn
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm
Based on the learning objectives from the iCAgile, Leading with Agility workshop, this ½ day version will explore the craft of agile leadership in guiding your journey to becoming a catalyst leader in testing and quality contexts. Along the way, we'll explore the why of leading with agility, how to develop and grow your personal agility, tactics for developing and deepening your organizational relationships, and approaches for leading cultural and organizational transformation. Critical topics include your responsibility in shaping an organizational testing, and quality culture that is...Read more
Tutorial TJ Automating Visual Tests with Cypress NEW
Andrew Knight
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

In this workshop, we learn what "visual testing" is and how it's different from traditional functional testing. Essentially, a picture is worth a thousand assertions. We can take visual snapshots of our apps during automated tests and compare them over time. Any changes detected are flagged for testers to inspect. Good visual testing uses AI to flag significant things like missing elements instead of insignificant things like a 1-pixel shift. To demonstrate this, we will automate a test for an example web app using Cypress and JavaScript without and then with visual snapshots. For visual...Read more

Tutorial TK Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps
Jeffery Payne
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

Tutorial TL Holistic Performance Testing for Modern Applications
Kaushal Dalvi
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

Tutorial TM Test Estimation in the Face of Uncertainty
Robert Sabourin
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

Welcome Reception — 5:00pm - 6:00pm
5:00 pm to 6:00 pm
Test Lab Kick-Off — 5:30pm - 7:30pm
5:30 pm to 7:30 pm

Wednesday, October 5

Morning Yoga — 6:45am - 7:30am
6:45 am to 7:30 am
Registration — 7:00am - 5:30pm
7:00 am to 5:30 pm
Networking Events—Test Lab (All Day) | Genius Testing Bar (All Day)
7:30 am to 5:30 pm
Continental Breakfast — 7:30am - 8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Keynote K1 Harry Potter and the Performance Store
Kaushal Dalvi, UKG
8:45 am to 9:45 am

After defeating the Evil Lord Voldemort, Harry Potter thought he was destined for a long career as an Auror with the Ministry of Magic, spending his time catching dark witches and wizards. However, Harry's career as an Auror was short-lived. With all the dark wizards coming over to the good side after the fall of Lord Voldemort, Harry had little to do. So, he started along the path of a software engineer. On his learning path, some of the things Harry discovered about improving the performance characteristics of applications felt downright magical. He became so...Read more

Keynote K2 Agile Leadership:Thru the Looking Glass
Mary Thorn, S&P Global Ratings, Bob Galen, Zenergy Technologies
10:00 am to 11:00 am

What is leadership? And more to the point, what is modern-day leadership in today’s VUCA world? Certainly it’s not the same as it was. And certainly today’s economic, diversity, and Covid contexts have added to the complexity and challenge of becoming a great leader. Oh, and before you say that—you’re not a leader—hold on. We contend that we’re ALL leaders. Mary Thorn and Bob Galen will share their lifelong journeys in becoming agile leaders in contexts of software development, testing, and product delivery. They’ll explore the power of self-reflection and how...Read more

Visit the Expo — 10:30am - 2:00pm
10:30 am to 2:00 pm
Networking Break in the Expo — 11:00am - 11:30am
11:00 am to 11:30 am
Concurrent Sessions — 11:30am - 12:30pm
11:30 am to 12:30 pm
Industry Technical Presentation ITP1 Artificial Intelligence, DevOps, and Software Quality: Are we there yet?
Clint Sprauve, Tricentis
11:30 am to 12:15 pm
For the past decade, artificial intelligence and machine learning have seen tremendous growth and influence on software development. We are also starting to see AI and ML's impact on the software testing industry. But who benefits from artificial intelligence and machine learning today?

The challenge for the software quality and testing community is understanding what is real today and if artificial intelligence can truly deliver value for test automation.

Join Clint Sprauve, Enterprise Strategists for Tricentis, and learn:

What does a true AI & ML implementation look like...Read more
Industry Technical Presentation ITP2 The Last Mile in Testing: How Far Can We Go with Headless?
Ramiro Millan, Progress
11:30 am to 12:15 pm

UI testing is often treated as the final stretch of software development as it makes sure that no surprises occur in production. Running a set of UI tests before every sprint ends, however, doesn’t mean that we know what's underneath the surface. Only by employing a combination of good testing stack, tools and strategy adapted to our setup, environments and application can we turn UI testing into a critical instrument to support the last mile of our testing sprint. The tactical use of headless testing helps achieve 90% of the results with 10% of the overall testing efforts.

...Read more

Industry Technical Presentation ITP3 test.allTheThings() - How to Manage Risk with a Comprehensive Test Strategy
Tom Peelen, Sauce Labs
11:30 am to 12:15 pm

Daily or even hourly deployments are becoming the new normal, as companies strive to deliver the delightful digital experiences their customers have come to expect. To deliver reliable apps fast, while reducing risk, teams need a comprehensive testing strategy that provides visibility across the software development lifecycle.

While functional testing provides a good baseline, it misses bugs in other areas. To mitigate the risk of releasing bugs into production and ensure a high level of quality in your web and mobile apps, you’ll need additional tools in your testing toolkit....Read more

Industry Technical Presentation ITP4 ZAPTEST: The Ultimate Software Automation Solution
David Chernyak, ZAPTEST
11:30 am to 12:15 pm
VIRTUAL ONLY

ZAPTEST is a full stack cross platform test and RPA solution for Windows, Linux, Mac, and Mobile, which offers unlimited software licenses for clients. With over 20 years of industry experience implementing test automation processes, ZAP also offers professional help to allow enterprises with testing best practices. ZAPTEST allows the testing of any GUI based software. ZAPTEST’s 1SCRIPT technology allows users to script test procedures once and execute them on any correspondent application on any platform and environment. M-RUN (Multi Run) technology offers execution of the same test...Read more

Concurrent Session W1 How to Build and Implement Your Salesforce Test Automation Strategy
Mala Punyani, CrowdStrike
11:30 am to 12:30 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session W2 Testing Machine Learning Models
Carlos Kidman, Stealth Startup
11:30 am to 12:30 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session W3 Software Testing from Individual Contributor to Management
Dilruba Malik, Palo Alto Networks
11:30 am to 12:30 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session W4 A Realistic Approach to Scalable and Cost-effective Cross-browser and Device Solution
Ambighananthan Ragavan, Expedia Group
11:30 am to 12:30 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session W5 A Testing Teams Journey to The Great Unknown — Oops, I Mean DevOps
Robert Foster, Coveros
11:30 am to 12:30 pm
Concurrent Session W6 Automation Face-Off
Chris Loder, Upland InGenius
11:30 am to 12:30 pm
Lunch in the Expo — 12:30pm - 1:30pm
12:30 pm to 1:30 pm
Industry Technical Presentation ITP5 The Role of Deep Learning in Software Testing
Tamas Cser, Functionize
12:30 pm to 1:15 pm

The increasing adoption of AI is profoundly changing the way enterprises work. Recognizing that automation has become a critical need, Functionize is pioneering AI’s application to testing. Functionize AI leverages massive data sets for its deep learning models after years of data collection from real life applications. In this session, Tamas will explain how neural networks work, the criticality of cloud integrations, and how deep learning is pushing the boundaries of software testing today.

Learning Objectives

Understand the difference between software and actual AI Identify...Read more
Industry Technical Presentation ITP6 In a digital world everything is in multiples, but testing budgets are singular! How do you win this challenge?
Vikas Mittal, Xebia
12:30 pm to 1:15 pm

Covid accelerated the need for companies to adopt & adapt to an omni-channel digital world. It was no longer for growth but rather for their survival. In an omni-channel digitial landscape, customers use the devices available to them in that moment to complete a transaction for business. For a 'consumer-centric' business, every transaction counts and for a customer, user experience is what differentiates one business from another.

How do you ensure a seamless experience for customers both internal and external when there are multiple devises, operating systems, network speeds...Read more

Concurrent Sessions — 1:30pm - 2:30pm
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm
Industry Technical Presentation ITP7 Shift Right into the Metaverse with Digital Twin Testing
Jonathon Wright, Keysight
1:30 pm to 2:15 pm

The Metaverse blurs the boundaries between technology and the real world. The matrix of digital experiences (DX) from companies like Meta (Facebook) workspaces and Microsoft HoloLens 2.0 introduce fully immersive digital workforce collaborations within Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality (VR/AR/MR) worlds. This leads to complex situations such as “how do you test next generation technologies like NFTs containing digital artefacts that span across crypto wallets of testing merchandise rendered onto your 3D avatar representation of your digital twin self on your daily-standup on Microsoft...Read more

Industry Technical Presentation ITP8 How to Tackle Quality-Driven Testing for Salesforce and Beyond
Stephen Lockard, Copado
1:30 pm to 2:15 pm

Test automation is table stakes in today’s enterprise application landscape. But the testing marketplace is full of solutions that are tough for business testers to learn and require too much upfront work to automate on a consistent basis. That’s why we rolled out Copado Robotic Testing — to empower teams of all skill levels and drive smarter digital experiences.

Copado Robotic Testing lives in the cloud. It’s powered by AI. And it’s outfitted from top to bottom with enterprise-grade functionality: CI/CD integration, self-healing AI, low-code UI, pro-code capabilities, quality...Read more

Industry Technical Presentation ITP9 How Ascensus Unlocked a New Mindset for Dynamics Test Automation with Leapwork
Sune Engsig, Leapwork, Dan Madden, Ascensus
1:30 pm to 2:15 pm

Join Dan Madden, Ascensus Director of CRM, as he gives a candid look into the testing challenges they faced in Dynamics. You'll see how they moved from mountains of technical debt, to faster, easier, scalable test automation.

Sune Engsig, Leapwork's Chief Evangelist will show you exactly what it took to achieve these results using Leapwork - a unique visual test automation solution.Read more

Industry Technical Presentation ITP10 Orchestrate Tests with LambdaTest
Harshit Paul, LambdaTest
1:30 pm to 2:15 pm
VIRTUAL ONLY

One of the biggest challenges developers/testers face is the speed of test execution but they are stuck with just two options—depending on legacy cloud infrastructure or painstakingly building a local setup. Legacy cloud infrastructure isn’t as fast as a local setup. But, on the other hand, local setups don’t have the features that can be offered on the cloud. This is exactly where a cloud-based next-gen smart test orchestration platform comes in. It brings intelligence to a rather mundane and tedious task, thereby ensuring both time and cost savings for businesses.

Attend this...Read more

Concurrent Session W7 The Quest of a Performance Engineer. A Tale of the Adventures of This Mythical Creature.
Leandro Melendez, K6-Grafana
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm
Concurrent Session W8 Are You Ready for AI to Take Over Your Automation Testing?
Lisette Zounon, Zsquare Solutions Inc
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

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 tool...Read more

Concurrent Session W9 Engineering Productivity via Metrics Preview
Nagesh Chetan, mParticle
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

Even 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 these...Read more

Concurrent Session W10 The Rise and Benefits of Robotic Process Automation
Thomas Haver, Red Green Refactor
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session W11 DevSecOps by Default: What Have, Can and Must We Learn from Log4Shell? Preview
Andreas Grabner, Dynatrace
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

End 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...Read more

Concurrent Session W12 Metamorphosis from Manual to Automated Testing
Cheryl Raya, NIPR, Daniel Jiregna, NIPR, Shay Hibler, NIPR, Latha Vatti, NIPR
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm
Concurrent Sessions — 2:45pm - 3:45pm
2:45 pm to 3:45 pm
Industry Technical Presentation ITP11 Ready Tester One! Unlock Your Continuous Quality Quest
Jeff Peeples, Parasoft, Adam Attanasio, Parasoft
2:45 pm to 3:30 pm

Solve the puzzle of software testing with AI-powered test automation. Instead of manually creating, executing, and maintaining your API tests, level up with the keys to complete your quest smarter and faster. Parasoft can power you through your software quality challenges to reach the finish line.

Use these keys to unlock your DevOps workflow:

Automatically build your test suite using AI to generate low-code / no-code API tests. Easily reuse functional test scenarios for penetration and load testing. Create a test environment with simulated backend services. Optimize test...Read more
Industry Technical Presentation ITP12 Let’s Go Codeless - How Manual Testers and Business Users Can Build Test Automation
Kunjal Deliwala, QMetry
2:45 pm to 3:30 pm

Test automation has been a key enabler of continuous testing and has contributed immensely to improving the delivery outcomes of the agile teams. The speed, efficiency, and scalability it offers has helped enterprises to digitally transform and continuously improving the customer experience resulting in improved revenues.

Although, software QA teams face key challenges while dealing with test automation:

The coding skills required to write and maintain the test cases Inability to use the skills of manual testers and business users to automate Bridging the manual to automation...Read more
Industry Technical Presentation ITP13 The Future of Automation Testing
Joe Colantonio , TestGuild
2:45 pm to 3:30 pm

Since the first version of Karate was released five years ago, we have become a top choice for developers, QA teams, and enterprise customers. As we continue to keep our focus on users, we decided to bring together cross-industry experts, and futurists, to deliberate on some of the key trends and challenges and the ‘Future of Automation Testing’.

We decided to keep this technology agnostic and are grateful to have Joe Colantonio as the moderator. We get to discuss ideas and move it to a new level today with this discussion. This is in some ways our effort of trying to make the...Read more

Concurrent Session W13 Mastering Cross - Browser Testing with Selenium, Cypress, and Playwright
Eran Kinsbruner, Perforce
2:45 pm to 3:45 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session W14 How Testers Can Revolutionize AI and Machine Learning
Tariq King, EPAM Systems
2:45 pm to 3:45 pm
Concurrent Session W15 Dos Oruguitas: Software Testers...and Everyone Else
Noel Wurst, SmartBear
2:45 pm to 3:45 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session W16 Intelligent Test Automation for Agile Teams
Gregory Goldshteyn, Fox Corporation (aka 20th Century Fox)
2:45 pm to 3:45 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session W17 Speed Up Your Cloud Transformation by Giving Developers Back Control Over Their Dev & Test Environments
Gerta Sheganaku, LocalStack GmbH
2:45 pm to 3:45 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session W18 Modern Test Automation Strategies - A Panel
Melissa Benua, mParticle
2:45 pm to 3:45 pm

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 don't have to...Read more

Visit the Expo — 3:30pm - 6:30pm
3:30 pm to 6:30 pm
Networking Break in the Expo — 3:45pm - 4:15pm
3:45 pm to 4:15 pm
Keynote K3 Lightning Strikes the Keynotes
Alison Wade, TechWell Corp.
4:15 pm to 5:15 pm

Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR conferences. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consists of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. And now, lightning has struck the STAR keynotes. Some of the best-known experts in testing will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning. Get multiple keynote presentations...Read more

Expo Reception — 5:30pm - 6:30pm
5:30 pm to 6:30 pm

Thursday, October 6

Morning Yoga — 6:45am - 7:30am
6:45 am to 7:30 am
Continental Breakfast — 7:30am - 8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Networking Events—Test Lab (All Day) | Genius Testing Bar (All Day)
7:30 am to 5:30 pm
Bonus Session B2 Validation of Data Pipelines with Test Automation
Andrew Prueser, Tricentis
7:30 am to 8:15 am

Good data today does not equal good data tomorrow. In today’s dynamic digital environments, traditional data testing methods are not enough. Manual “stare and compare” data checks are painfully slow and can’t scale.

Tricentis Data Integrity brings the discipline of end-to-end, automated, and continuous testing to the world of data — enabling you to drive higher data quality and better business outcomes at scale.

Come learn how to add data integrity test automation in your ETL, ELT and data pipelines. The intended audience is devops/dataops engineers, quality engineers,...Read more

Registration — 8:00am - 3:00pm
8:00 am to 3:00 pm
Keynote K4 The Future of Software Testing
Talia Nassi, Akamai Technologies
8:30 am to 9:30 am

It’s become standard practice for test engineers to test their code in a staging environment, fix all inconsistencies there, and then deploy to production. In this waterfall process, testers have no visibility into what’s happening in production. What do you do if your test results in staging don't match production? The future of software testing has no staging environments - only production. Testing in production is a proactive approach to testing as you ensure your features work in the environment that your features will live in, not a dummy environment. In this...Read more

Concurrent Sessions — 9:45am - 10:45pm
9:45 am to 10:45 am
Industry Technical Presentation ITP14 Shift Happens: How Perfecto & BlazeMeter Help Organizations Cover the Entire Test Pyramid for Innovation at Speed
Bharath Vantari, Perforce
9:45 am to 10:30 am

To test earlier in the software development life cycle, testing teams need a scalable, on-demand continuous testing platform that covers web, mobile, and more. This platform must support a wide range of tests, as well as test environments as a service, including platforms, test data and data mocking, global coverage, and the option for infinite scale. In this session, Bharath Vantari will showcase how Perfecto and BlazeMeter offer a complete continuous testing platform that covers the entire testing pyramid in a way that is enterprise-grade and easy to use.

Learning Objectives:...Read more

Industry Technical Presentation ITP15 Don't Leave Quality to Chance
Diogo Rede, TestRail
9:45 am to 10:30 am

Quality assurance, and testing in particular, can have many shapes in the context of nowadays numerous software development methodologies and philosophies. While some people may still be doing ad-hoc testing or fully relying on testers to execute all test cases, others are much further ahead, adopting DevOps culture with a strong automation mindset. But are these exclusive? At TestRail we believe manual and automated testing serve different purposes and complement themselves. In this talk you will learn how to consistently use a test management tool to centralize both manual and automated...Read more

Industry Technical Presentation ITP16 App Test Automation with AI-Powered Tools: Things to Consider Before We Jump in
Jae Jun Hwang, Apptest.ai
9:45 am to 10:30 am

There are numerous AI-powered tools for testing software today, and the adaptation of AI in testing to enhance the QA process is no longer far-fetched. But what are key questions institutions should ask to embrace AI testing? At Apptest.ai, we helped our global clients face the technical, institutional, and HR challenges of migrating from traditional testing processes to “AI-powered” test architecture.

In this talk, we will share some of the challenges we collaborated with our customers (eg courtesy of LG U+), and you will learn to address these challenges to speed up successful...Read more

Concurrent Session T1 A Journey to Better Automation with the Screenplay Pattern
Sarah Watkins, Q2
9:45 am to 10:45 am

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...Read more

Concurrent Session T2 Better Test Coverage Through API Automation
Mustafa Pesh, Royal Cyber Inc.
9:45 am to 10:45 am

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...Read more

Concurrent Session T4 Open Sourced Tests: A Retrospective
John Hill, KBR, Inc.
9:45 am to 10:45 am
Concurrent Session T5 Tips and Tricks for Effective Agile Testing
Jeffery Payne, Coveros
9:45 am to 10:45 am
Concurrent Session T6 DevOps Fireside Chat with Adam Auerbach
Adam Auerbach, EPAM Systems
9:45 am to 10:45 am
Visit the Expo — 10:15am - 3:00pm
10:15 am to 3:00 pm
Networking Break in the Expo — 10:45am - 11:15am
10:45 am to 11:15 am
Concurrent Sessions — 11:15am - 12:15pm
11:15 am to 12:15 pm
Industry Technical Presentation ITP17 Testing as PaaS: Delivering on Speed, Quality, Collaboration, and Autonomy
Ameet Deshpande, Qyrus
11:15 am to 12:00 pm

In the world of testing, fragmentation is increasingly a real challenge. Testing teams are faced with the paradox of choice every step of the journey from test design, test building, test data, test infrastructure, and test reporting. As organizations grow and scale, complexity in its testing landscape often leads to substantial overhead, inefficiency, and higher cost.

The trends in testing move toward automation and more collaboration between different functions as he importance of “customer experience” increases. While companies are responding to these macro trends, the real...Read more

Industry Technical Presentation ITP18 Bringing Harmony to Continuous Testing and DevOps With SpiraPlan
Adam Sandman, Inflectra
11:15 am to 12:00 pm

In this session, we will demonstrate how the latest version of Inflectra’s award-winning platform SpiraPlan brings harmony to your DevOps pipelines. We will show how you can integrate SpiraPlan’s requirements and test management functionality with a variety of different CI platforms, including Jenkins, GitHub, GitLab, and CircleCI. We will discuss how you can enrich your pipeline and testing processes to cover both Shift-Left and Shift-Right functionality with examples of both functional (unit, API, UI) and non-functional (security, performance) testing.

Learning Objectives:...Read more

Industry Technical Presentation ITP19 How to Embed API Testing into your E2E Testing Strategy
Sarah Geisinger, mabl
11:15 am to 12:00 pm

In today’s API-First world, including API tests in your application testing strategy is critical to ensuring the quality from your user’s perspective. However, API testing commonly requires technical skills that limit who can create and manage automated tests.

In this session, Sarah will share how mabl’s low-code test automation solution democratizes API testing. Learn strategies to enable team members of all technical aptitudes to create API tests without writing code, and integrate UI and API functional tests to achieve more comprehensive test coverage.

Join this session...Read more

Concurrent Session T8 A Performance Testing Pyramid Preview
James Wood, Trimble PPM, Inc.
11:15 am to 12:15 pm
When we code a new class method, does its execution time fit within the product’s SLA for response time? When we provide an API for a real-time system, does it meet its performance budget? When we’re managing a data warehouse system, what is the latency between the ingestion component and the persistence server? When we’re planning to deploy a large-scale web application, how many servers do we need to support 1,000 requests per second and respond in 3 seconds? We’ve learned that the need for performance data spans from requirements engineering through system deployment: when code is written...Read more
Concurrent Session T10 From Quality Advocate to Quality as a Service - Transforming a Legacy Quality Practice
Aaron Haehn, T-Mobile
11:15 am to 12:15 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session T11 Stop Test Sprints! Develop a CLEAR Agile Product Roadmap
Robert Woods, Scrum Inc
11:15 am to 12:15 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session T12 AI in Testing: A Moderated Panel Discussion
Tariq King, EPAM Systems
11:15 am to 12:15 pm
Lunch in the Expo — 12:30pm - 1:30pm
12:30 pm to 1:30 pm
Industry Technical Presentation ITP20 The Democratization of Software Quality
Rob Cuddy, HCL
12:30 pm to 1:15 pm

Join the HCL OneTest team to learn how adding security testing to traditional DevOps pipelines provides testers with added insight to security problems. Reduce hand over problems with dedicated security testing specialists, see how this adds visibility to break down barriers, and demystifies security testing for the whole team. Make quality information visible to all.

Join this session to learn:

How to build security into your quality process Why including security earlier reduces delivery cycles times How to reduce risk to the business through improved quality practicesRead more
Concurrent Sessions — 1:30pm - 2:30pm
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm
Industry Technical Presentation ITP22 Mock, Stub, or Virtualize… let’s Shift Left
Matt Bonner, SmartBear
1:30 pm to 2:15 pm

Today, everybody is tasked with integrations. We must integrate our product with EVERY system, component, and operating system under the sun. Unfortunately, it might not be desirable or even possible to access those systems during development. There could be security, performance or maintenance issues that make them unavailable. We see teams having dependencies on services owned by other groups which are not accessible, which halts development.

This is when we mock, stub, or virtualize.

Learn how to shift left and start building realistic virtual services. Learn how to...Read more

Industry Technical Presentation ITP23 Fight Inconspicuousness
Cristiano Cunha, Xray
1:30 pm to 2:15 pm

How much inconspicuousness do you have in your organization, teams and processes? Are you even aware of those inconspicuous areas?

Do you have siloed teams? Do you need to check several tools to get the overall status of the project? These and more issues will get uncovered and addressed.

Join me in this talk to uncover what you may not be seeing that is impacting your efficiency and discover the importance of visibility in this fast paced world and how impactful it can be within a team.

Learning Objectives:

Understand the basic foundations needed to build a...Read more
Industry Technical Presentation ITP24 Autonomous Testing as Part of Modern Software Assurance and Engineering
Eddie Urenda, Hexaware
1:30 pm to 2:15 pm
Software quality assurance and engineering have traditionally focused on test automation for increased coverage, productivity, and acceleration. Today, we often hear buzzwords like artificial intelligence and machine learning in reference to recent technologies that may impact software testing, but we are often unaware of how these technologies can impact our day-to-day testing activities. Our objective in this session is to explain and define our viewpoint of autonomous testing (minimizing human intervention in software testing across the entire software lifecycle) and share real-world use...Read more
Concurrent Session T13 Cypress Holds the Belt. Is Selenium Still in the Fight? Preview
Michael Piciulo, World Wide Technology
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

Cypress is standing tall as the leader in today’s automated testing community. Does that mean Selenium has been knocked out? I thought so after first using Cypress to build my company’s corporate website automation suite. I loved the simplicity of the install, the stability of the test runs and the easier-to-read code, not to mention the size of the active community. Using cy.contains() made writing automated tests so easy. But all it took was one week on a client project to convince me that Selenium was not out of the fight. Cypress was not able to handle authentication with Azure...Read more
Concurrent Session T15 Software Architecture for Testers– Where the Bodies are Buried! Preview
Adam Sandman, Inflectra
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

This 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...Read more

Concurrent Session T16 The Wheels of the QA Process Go Round and Round.
Mark Minson, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session T17 Avoiding the Chaos of an Agile Transformation
Péter Földházi, EPAM Systems
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

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,...Read more

Concurrent Session T18 Performance Assurance and SRE - Panel
Leandro Melendez, K6-Grafana
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm
Networking Break in the Expo — 2:30pm - 3:00pm
2:30 pm to 3:00 pm
Expo and Registration Closes — 3:00pm
3:00 pm
Concurrent Sessions — 3:00pm - 4:00pm
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Industry Technical Presentation ITP25 No More Excuses - Overcoming Key Challenges to DevOps Test Automation
Jeffery Payne, Coveros
3:00 pm to 3:45 pm

When done correctly, test automation has the potential to improve the efficiency of the DevOps delivery pipeline. But, far too many organizations struggle to implement an automation strategy that works. In his decades of experience spearheading Agile and DevOps transformations, Coveros CEO Jeff Payne has heard just about every excuse for why test automation can’t work in DevOps. The truth is it can. You just need to know how to do it right.

Join Jeff as he walks us through:

What DevOps is and how it can help your organization accelerate delivery. What the benefits of test...Read more
Industry Technical Presentation ITP26 Addressing Sore Spots within Web 3.0 with Synthetic Monitoring Web 3.0
Jason Haworth, Apica
3:00 pm to 3:45 pm

If you’ve ever left a toothache untreated for any length of time, you might get by for a little while, but eventually you end up having to have something worse than a filling, like a root canal. Unfortunately, a lot of businesses right now are in that early toothache stage when it comes to understanding the health and performance of their applications.

With the rise of cloud-native apps and APIs means they’re already starting to experience a lack of visibility as more discrete layers in the stack prevent them from seeing what is happening with the user experience. Web 3.0 promises...Read more

Industry Technical Presentation ITP27 Leveraging the Benefits of Artificial Intelligence for UI Automation
Mayank Bansal, Grazitti Interactive
3:00 pm to 3:45 pm

Testing the Herculean and ever-changing platform - Salesforce, is complex, and your team could be spending hours on modifying and updating tests at every run.

Therefore, maintaining Salesforce’s operational competence is a challenge. Testing Salesforce, especially, with traditional ways alone makes the task complicated, because of:

Frequent system upgrades Critical data in Salesforce Level of customization & integrations present Complex DOM structure Dynamic elements

To deliver quality software at velocity, test automation is key to reducing risk & costs, and...Read more

Concurrent Session T19 Building Resiliency in Test Automation
Yoosuf Maktoum, Sysco Corporation
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Test Automation tends to fail due to multiple aspects—especially UI test automation – which is more fragile than the Service and DB level test automation. The challenge is fixing the automation failures and using them in the same development iteration. Building resiliency in test automation is a must to make test automation robust. A resilient test automation framework will reduce failures and simplify the maintenance of test automation code. Resiliency can be enabled through automation tools, design, and architecture. During this session, Mr. Yoosuf Maktoum - Senior Manager, Quality...Read more
Concurrent Session T20 DevOps on Auto Pilot Preview
Prashant Patil, Dell Technologies, Marc Jimenez, Dell Technologies
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm

The worst kept secret to success in our industry is speed, resiliency, and security. The multitude of tools available to help master the techniques of producing best in class software can put us into a maintenance overdose. Luckily for us, most of these tools today are now packaged as Docker containers opening an opportunity for us to rapidly set up and orchestrate their setup using Kubernetes. Using a gitOps approach, we have found a way to neatly connect a CI/CD process for setting up, maintaining, upgrading and tearing down these applications using ArgoCD and Terraform. Follow us...Read more
Concurrent Session T22 Quality Assurance Legacy - 30 Years of Tips and Tricks to Make QA Easier
Lisa Anderson, ICE Mortgage Technology
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session T23 Upskilling Your Team for Agile Testing
Darrel Farris, mabl
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm

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...Read more

Keynote K5 A Journey to the Pyramids: Scaling Test Patterns in Microservices at Netflix
Helena Song, Netflix Inc., Budhaditya Das, Netflix Inc.
4:15 pm to 5:15 pm

Netflix launched its streaming services in the US with a simple pricing model. As our global reach expanded, the requirements became increasingly complex, and so did our testing needs. The membership lifecycle ecosystem at Netflix consists of multiple teams, more than one hundred internal microservices, and a similar number of external partners and payment processors. As we strive to improve the efficiency of our continuous integration and release processes, we are progressively moving towards a paradigm known as the "Test Pyramid''. This approach is based on the principle of grouping...Read more

Testing & Quality Leadership Summit Reception — 5:30pm - 6:30pm (Summit Registration Required)
5:30 pm to 6:30 pm

Friday, October 7

Continental Breakfast — 7:30am - 8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Registration — 7:30am - 3:00pm
7:30 am to 3:00 pm
Testing & Quality Leadership Summit
8:00 am to 3:30 pm
Leading Change in the New Normal Thursday, October 6 (evening) and Friday, October 7 (all day)

Leadership has never been more important. Navigating the ever-changing COVID waters, dealing with what some people are calling the Great Resignation, and addressing tough issues surrounding back-to- office policies, while keeping our teams focused on business results is a challenge. Join in the conversation with your peers as experienced technology leaders share ways to lead and make test organizations successful. Discover how seasoned leaders have grown their leadership...Read more

Women Who Test
8:30 am to 3:30 pm
Women Inspiring Women Friday, October 7, 8:30am - 3:30pm PT

Designed for women to network with other women who work in softare testing, Women Who Test is a unique way to learn from and be inspired by each other.

This program will cover testing topics, support women’s personal and career journeys, and include content like: reengineering your life, growing your personal brand, setting goals, discovering your career superpowers, and problem-solving when you are a female in the tech industry where your gender is outnumbered 7:3....Read more

Lunch — 12:00pm - 1:00pm
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm