STARWEST 2023 - 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.
Wednesday, October 4
What Can ChatGPT Do for Your Testing Organization?
PreviewChatGPT can assist a testing organization by automating repetitive and mundane tasks, such as answering FAQs, generating test cases, and providing relevant information on testing processes. Additionally, it can provide quick and accurate responses to inquiries, freeing up time for human testers to focus on more complex tasks. ChatGPT can also be integrated into an organization's testing tools to improve efficiency and reduce errors in testing processes. How? Through test case generation, ChatGPT can be used to generate test cases automatically by analyzing the language patterns and...
From Defects to Dollars: Unveiling the Hidden Quality Costs Impacting Your Business
Do you find it difficult to showcase the value of quality engineering initiatives to your business and C-suite? Are you curious about how to measure the true cost of defects on productivity, customer satisfaction, and profitability? Quality engineering contributes to multiple IT processes by identifying overlooked requirements, assessing code quality and deployment issues, and ensuring adequate test coverage prior to a release. However, knowing how to quantify, coalesce, manage, and report on defects is critical for success. Join Siva Kopparapu on a journey to discover how to shift the...
Test Architecture for API First Platforms
API First Platforms adopt rapid application development lifecycle and high velocity deployments. Quality assurance teams are stressed to reduce the automation backlog and have a limited window to catch up with speed of deployments. This session will discuss how Venkatesh's team at Oracle adopted a creative approach to accelerate test automation by adopting an innovative “Automate First” model. The core pillar of this test architecture is creation of acceptance driven component tests leveraging virtualized services by developers. This laid a solid foundation which assured validation of...
Exploratory Testing As Code
What if testing followed the lead of revolutions in infrastructure and configuration management. What if testers treated exploratory testing like developers do code? Exploratory testing is a powerful and effective technique. However, its acceptance is inhibited because there isn’t a common structured process that enables the traceability and transparency to make it a standard across the software industry. In this session, Brendan Connolly will introduce the tooling and process needed to implement a light-weight, scalable, transparent, and traceable approach to managing exploratory testing...
Riding the Hybrid Car—Our Continuous Test Automation Journey
This talk will provide a glimpse into how continuous test pipelines co-exist and integrate with strategic low code test automation tools. Multiple testing teams, each owning distinct applications, are faced with the task of testing their own product as well as the interactions and behaviors with each other. Tight schedules and the challenge of finding the right skill set can be solved with the use of low code SAAS test automation tools. In this talk, Shai Srinivasan will share some of the challenges she and her team faced—how do these tools integrate with the enterprise's testing process...
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 tools can...
An AI-Partnered Testing Future—It’s Here!
Let’s be real, we are quite a ways out from AI taking over the world. AI doomsday apologists stay home! On the other hand, AI is changing everything about software creation. In this presentation, Kevin Pyles will take you on a walk down memory lane through waterfall, agile and DevOps practices, and will then introduce you to the future of software creation known as AI-Partnered Development. Let’s get practical with real-world examples of AI assisting designers, solving coding challenges and testing software right next to human testers. We will explore how AI is also involved today in...
Leave It Better Than You Found It: The Key to Foster and Mature Culture of Quality in Your Organization and Win Customers' Trust
Quality engineering and assurance is not merely testing and test automation. The ultimate goal is to enable product engineering teams to continuously deliver high-quality, reliable, and secure products and services to win customers' trust and bring them joy. Successful organizations have a strong quality culture where everyone, from new hires to senior executives, collectively work to build in quality. Building and maintaining a culture of quality requires explicit intent, incentives, and enablement throughout the organization. How do we create a culture of quality and mature it year after...
Creating a Comprehensive API Testing Ecosystem
Maintaining API test cases across multiple environments, for different load levels, and types of tests (eg. smoke, functional, regression) traditionally required separate tests be written and maintained. Test maintenance is expensive. If you have three lower environments that tests are run for, then you usually have at least three different tests you are trying to keep in sync. If you have a new API added for a microservice, then you have to modify and validate across all three tests at a minimum. If you are running different load levels for build tests verses load tests, for example, that...
The Theatre of Exploratory Testing: Going Off Script
PreviewAsk a handful of testers to define exploratory testing. Some will respond that it’s simply poking around—try something, see what breaks, and then try something else. Many will identify it as an iterative process of learning and experimentation. But ask about what makes exploratory testing hard, and you find that practitioners are challenged in knowing where to start, what to test, when to stop, and how to know if they’ve found a bug. What makes for good exploratory testing? Join Philip as he examines the techniques of the actors of the Commedia dell'Arte, the 16th century approach...
JavaScript Mutation Testing: Improving Confidence in Your Tests
PreviewJavaScript code requires effective testing strategies to avoid bugs in production. Code coverage metrics alone can be misleading and don't necessarily indicate that the code is actually working as intended. It can be easy to get high code coverage metrics, but not actually test anything meaningfully. To address this problem, this session will explore the concept of JavaScript mutation testing. Mutation testing introduces small changes or "mutations" to the code and then expects tests to fail. This technique helps identify areas of the code that may need improvement and strengthens...
Performance Assurance and SRE - Panel
Delivering performance applications is a multi-layered 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, it must handle lots of loads once in production. It must stay performant and available within the agreed thresholds. The impressive amount of tasks to tackle and co-...
How AI Like ChatGPT & Bard Will Change Testing & DevOps
AI can now generate an automation script as good as humans in seconds. It can teach you about an API or write documentation for your code. What is really going on at the forefront of building AI systems for test automation? Working at companies like test.ai and Google, Chris Navrides has explored the intricacies of building a robot to assist a manual QA team. Through large data systems, he has dealt with training machines to determine a bug versus a feature. Chris will show how to best leverage this new wave of AI to be competitive in the work force, and increase your efficiency. As well...
Building a QA Department With a New Vendor in a New Management Role
According to a recent study, only about 40% of new tech leaders receive formal training when they become a boss for the first time. The rest are forced to get scrappy to quickly equip themselves with new skills, techniques, and mindsets to effectively transition into their new roles. About seven years ago, Neeta Sonnakul elected to start at CAQH and was the only QA automation staff member, and eventually built a vast QA team and currently heads the department. The organization had taken delivery of several poor-quality software releases of our flagship product from our development partner...
Drive Down Defects With Service Virtualization & Metrics That Matter
If you can't measure your software quality, you can't manage it. Cox Automotive implemented service virtualization for their Dealertrack product development to more effectively diagnose and address issues in the application. This addition to their test automation has improved the overall quality of their product lines by significantly reducing the escaped defects. Visibility into key metrics, like escaped defects, can provide insights into potential risk areas so teams can make smart choices about what tests to run to achieve the desired code and test coverage. Join this session as Roya...
Advocating Quality When Collaboration Becomes Groupthink
PreviewDoes your agile team overestimate its velocity and capacity? Is the team consistently in agreement with little discussion during daily standups, iteration planning, or review meetings? Is silence perceived as acceptance? If so, collaboration may have become groupthink. Advocating for quality can be challenging for testers in this situation. Aspects of the agile team that are meant to foster collaboration including self-organization and physical insulation may also set the stage for groupthink. Groupthink is the tendency of groups to minimize conflict and reach consensus without...
Lady on the Block: A Tester’s Perspective on Blockchain Technology
How do you go about testing the immutability of deployed code? What control does one have over a decentralized test environment? How does one overcome the complexity of smart contracts and associated potential vulnerabilities? What can be done to ensure seamless integration and interoperability between the blockchain application and external components? As a tester of blockchain applications, Gomathi Ramalingam has encountered and faced many of these challenges, which are inherently due to the unique nature of blockchain technology. She believes that having a good understanding of these...
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 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...
Thursday, October 5
Leveraging Machine Learning to Uncover the Value of Automated Tests with Machine Learning in Test Log Analysis
In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, companies must keep pace with the speed of development and delivery. Agile, CI, and CD practices have revolutionized the way teams approach software development, but testing must also be done at a faster and continuous rate. With thousands of tests being conducted across hundreds of runs, tracking test results can be overwhelming. That's where the power of Machine Learning comes in. This session will showcase ReportPortal.io, an open-source AI-powered test automation dashboard. Discover how Machine Learning is being used to extract valuable...
The QA Unicorn
PreviewAs a QA Manager, Stephanie McSwain has been on the lookout several times for automation engineers with a strong background in manual testing. But as it turns out, finding someone who fits that description is pretty difficult. There are plenty of people with coding skills, and that is awesome! However, manual software testing is like an art, and someone who is great at it is an incredibly valuable asset to any team. Even though manual testing requires a very different state of mind and skillset than writing automation code, manual testers are incredibly smart—and most of them are...
Metrics That Matter!
PreviewIn this exhaustive testing world, it can be daunting to measure multiple metrics to achieve the end goal of higher product quality. Measuring metrics can quickly become a daunting task that can pose several challenges on the time and efficiency front. What are these two simple metrics that can get you to your finish line? How can teams use these metrics to bring about a process change to set high quality standards? In this session, attendees will take away simple, but effective, ideas that can help their teams to clearly define their product quality goals, and attach a quantifiable...
A Realistic Approach to Scalable Testing for Cross-Team Distributed Systems
Let’s face it. Building tests tends to take more time than developing new features themselves. It is tedious to build sufficient coverage and cumbersome to maintain long-term. However, on an enterprise systems-level, tests are crucial in ensuring bugs or defects are caught before they reach clients. As engineers, we pour our hearts and souls into trying to identify defects before we release our code to clients. But when rolling out big features, it is rare to successfully complete a software deployment process without some errors popping up along the way. This challenge becomes...
Coded Automation Isn't Dead—A Deep Dive on the Page Object Pattern with Some Super Cool New Twists
Software Development Engineers in Test know that page objects have long been used to make test automation more resilient. This talk evolves the page object pattern in ways that provide some really strong advantages over the traditional approach. Timothy Heck will demonstrate how to make page objects isolated from the browser automation technology, making it possible to switch from Selenium to Playwright (or the next big thing) without changing the page objects. This talk will also look at how to make self-narrating automation scripts where the simple act of interacting with a page object...
AI in Testing: A Moderated Panel Discussion
Artificial intelligence is the newest trend in software testing. But what is it, and how will it impact the tester's role, both today and in the future? What do you need to do to embrace this emerging technology? Tariq King will moderate this panel discussion to give you an opportunity to hear the opinions of industry leaders about AI in testing. You will have a chance to drive the debate, so come prepared with all your AI questions.
Harnessing the Power of Ephemeral Environments
Integration testing in the staging environment is a pain. One bad commit from a dependency, and all your automated integration tests start failing. Consequently, developers rightly don't want to gate their code pushes on successful integration tests, and integration test results are quickly dismissed as unreliable, and ignored completely. Ephemeral environments change all of that. By using ephemeral environments as a key part of test strategies, not only has John Jenkins succeeded in moving staging dependent integration tests into the build pipeline, but he has also caught and prevented...
Test Architecture—Quality Collaboration in a Distributed Environment
Technical implementations often span across multiple companies. How can a test architect drive better results in quality and continuous integration in their own organization while working through challenging, complex, multi-company implementations? By creating a holistic test strategy, including evaluating major areas of testing early in the process, a test architect can enable not only their own organization, but all of the organizations involved in the program. Learn specific techniques at every stage including identifying commonalities in test environments, understanding implications of...
Are We Done Testing? A Metrics Dashboard
In many cases, it takes multiple metrics to get a complete picture of the status of a process, product, or service. A metrics dashboard accumulates a set of metrics associated with a decision. A dashboard allows the metric's customer to see, in a single collection, the relevant information. In this session, Linda Westfall will use the question, "are we done testing?" to illustrate an example of a metrics dashboard. She will also discuss each individual metric that makes up the dashboard and how they contribute information to help answer this question. These metrics will include testing...
Simplify Agile Testing Using SPOCK
PreviewThis session will share how to simplify agile testing using SPOCK. If your team is being impacted by complexity in your testing, improve your design with self-contained, repeatable, and independent tests with consistent and expressive reports. Reduce cycle time and test more often. SPOCK also easily integrates with DevOps pipelines for a frictionless testing transformation. By applying these techniques, Pradynya Adwankar saw significant improvement in her development teams’ confidence in testing more often, an improved level of efficiency, and faster deployments. See how your non-...
How Building Accessibility Automated Testing in DevOps Helps Reduce Post-Deployment Overheads
#A11y, aka Accessibility is a hot topic nowadays. It is not only an important business priority for each digitally transformed company to increase user retention and sales revenue, but it also ensures that people with disabilities can use any digital product without any barriers. Many organizations started to focus on digital accessibility by investing tremendous amounts of budget in vendor or user testing post product deployment. However, quite a portion of this budget can be eliminated by educating their product teams, especially engineers to adopt accessibility automated test in their...
Software Test Case Selection Based on Comparative Cost and Risk-Based Value
PreviewThe testing challenge is being able to select an efficient and effective set of test cases within the limited resources available for testing. The term “efficient” refers to the realization that the number of test cases is inherently limited by the testing resources available. The term “effective” refers to the ability of the selected test cases to find code defects that exist. Mark Gillenson addressed this problem by interviewing a set of testing professionals in a corporate partner and applying qualitative research techniques to reach their conclusions. This work was conducted in...
Embracing Disruption: Adding a Bit of Chaos to Help You Grow!
As software systems have become more distributed and complex, the "shift-left" movement brings reliability testing to earlier stages of development. Ensuring reliability goes beyond simple end-to-end tests. To ensure the highest levels of reliability, you must perform a suite of testing types. Incorporate contract tests to validate APIs; load tests for scaling predictability. But how to test for those inevitable failures? Let's learn from Chaos Engineering principles by incorporating disruptive behavior into your system before production. Join Paul as we learn ways to incorporate a...
Chihuahua Load Tests!
Because, bigger isn't always better. Especially nowadays. Do your teams need help accommodating those humongous load tests in your agile & continuous projects? Do you need frozen environments? Or, stop (freeze) all new changes until you can execute your colossal test? Everything to find the limits of your cloud, elastic, and distributed application? All of that struggle to repeat it because the metrics you've got became invalid with the next release? You should reframe the perspective and stop focusing on generating a few massive load tests. Why not have Chihuahua-sized load tests? You...
How Mechanical Robots Are Transforming Mobile QA Testing
New approaches in robotics are changing the way companies build and test software as it becomes increasingly device dependent. Companies like Apple, Google, and T-Mobile already rely on in-house robotics fleets to automate manual testing of mobile apps on devices. And that is just the beginning. Robots can perform all of the expected actions that a human would make on a device, including finger swiping, switching between various apps, toggling the notification center, and more. Using computer vision, a field of AI that teaches computers how to parse digital images and videos, robots can...
Pipelines and Deployments and QA! Oh My!
PreviewAs software delivery has evolved from monolithic, periodically released applications to microservices that are continuously deployed, our testing and validation practices need to evolve to support the new delivery models. An essential piece in this puzzle is the build and deployment pipelines that deliver the software to be tested and beyond. In this session, Kathleen Naughton and attendees will journey down the (yellow brick?) road to learn enough about build pipelines and deployments to ask the right questions. The questions that guide the consistent delivery of high-quality...
Integrating Accessibility into Agile
PreviewMany times accessibility activities occur late in a project’s release when it takes longer to figure out problems and costs more to fix them. Typically all you can do at this point is patch the problems rather than fix them properly. CGI Federal approaches accessibility with an agile mindset, integrating it throughout the iterative design, user story creation, development, and testing efforts. During this session, Pavani Gonuguntla and Stephen Omojuyigbe will focus on case studies and recommended best practices from where they worked with management and cross-functional teams to get...
Inconceivable! How the Princess Bride Teaches Planning
PreviewOne of the most fantastic cult classics ever, the Princess Bride has many wonderful lessons to teach such as ‘never get involved in a land war in Asia’ and never lie to someone about the danger you know exists, or it might come and bite you on the shoulder. It also teaches a great lesson about planning by showing us a bad example and then a good example. The only difference in personnel is the leader. Planning is more of an art than a science. “Woo, hoo-hoo! Look who knows so much!” Mark Minson will contrast Vencini’s and Wesley’s plans, explaining why one failed and one succeeded...
Data Quality Engineering: Enabling Success of Data Driven Solutions
The success enabler tools supporting business organizations within an enterprise are primarily driven by the underlying AI/ML powered solutions, data & analytics platforms, and enterprise applications suite. In modern data driven economy, the dependability (quality and timeliness) of data powering these business enablers, directly influences the success or failure of the business offering and adoption. The major factors for constrained data dependability can be attributed to limiting capabilities for validation of data availability, usability, reliability, relevance, and presentability...
Smarter, RPA Based Testing of ERP and CRM Applications
When Sathish Rajamani asked clients what were the top challenges in managing their ERP and CRM programs, regression and automation testing was one of the top three concerns. Performing automated testing for ERP applications like Oracle Cloud or SAP S/4 HANA or Salesforce had always been a challenge across the lifecycle. This session is a demonstration of how SmartBOTS helps clients to configure and test the business process leveraging the RPA (Robotic Process Automation) based technology. UI, API Driven, unattended testing leveraging BOTS has helped in assuring the quality of the ERP and...
Testing Like Your Life Depends On It
The relentless pursuit of defects is critical to any industry, but how does that change when the software is being used on 300,000 lb steel machines in some of the most extreme environments on Earth? When the safety of both human life and enormous capital investments are on the line? What is it like to work with software developers who not only won't but actually can't use the end product as a user because the target is a rock drilling machine? We all know that "garbage in equals garbage out" and it is just as true when relying on sensor data to determine machine response. However, how do...
How I Spend More on Coffee Than DevOps
PreviewJacob Orshalick and focus.dev solutions are a development shop that provides Continuous Delivery for every client product they build. Even so, with the cloud solutions available today, they just don’t need a DevOps team. Maybe after this session you won’t need one either. Automating your infrastructure—you need an environment where your software product can be deployed for testing. Attendees will learn how to use AWS CloudFormation with AWS Serverless Access Model (SAM) to automate the creation of their deployment environment stack. They will see how they can then make changes to...
Distributed Load Testing in Kubernetes
In an increasingly interconnected digital world, consumers of online services have become more savvy with ever-increasing expectations. The performance and scalability of these online services are critical to their success, and load testing is an important tool to evaluate these capabilities. Traditional centralized load testing needs to catch up in replicating real-world scenarios. Organizations should replicate actual user behavior by distributing simulated user traffic across multiple geographically diverse locations, enabling a more realistic evaluation of system performance and...
Graceful Degradation—Failing with Style
We do a lot to reduce the chance that our application is down, forgetting that it will eventually happen. We should be focusing on not reducing the risk of failure, but reducing its impact – this is widely known as Graceful Degradation. Adopting a Graceful Degradation strategy suggests that it is possible to provide the service for your customers even if certain parts of your application do not behave as expected. Failure should not be an exception in software, it should be the rule. That is why Graceful Degradation is such a key concept in software delivery. Resiliency is about having the...