STARWEST 2023 - Experienced Tester
Monday, October 2
Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization
The DevOps movement is here. Companies across many industries are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, IT organizations have been staffed with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding to stay relevant and add greater value to the business. DevOps really...
Test Design for Fully Automated Build Architecture
Imagine this…as soon as any developed functionality is submitted into the code repository, it is automatically subjected to the appropriate battery of tests and then released straight into production. Setting up the pipeline capable of doing just that is becoming more and more common and something you need to know about. But most organizations hit the same stumbling block—just what IS the appropriate battery of tests? Automated build architectures don't always lend themselves well to the traditional stages of testing. In this hands-on tutorial, Melissa Benua introduces you to key test...
Tuesday, October 3
Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps
In many organizations, agile development processes are driving the pursuit of faster software releases, which has spawned a set of new practices—DevOps. DevOps stresses communications and integration between development and operations, including rapid deployment, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Because DevOps practices require confidence that changes made to the code base will function as expected, automated testing is essential. Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the unique challenges associated with integrating automated testing into continuous integration/continuous...
Holistic Performance Testing for Modern Applications
With the advent of frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue, the landscape of application performance has changed significantly in terms of testing and measurement. Gone are the days of measuring response time as a single value based on back-end performance. In modern web and mobile applications, additional layers need to be peeled apart at the front end to truly understand its performance characteristics. Traditional approaches to performance testing are no longer sufficient to provide a delightfully responsive user experience. Join Kaushal Dalvi as he details new developments in the...
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Test Estimation in the Face of Uncertainty
Anyone who has ever attempted to estimate software testing effort realizes just how difficult the task can be. The number of factors that can affect the estimate is virtually unlimited. The keys to good estimates are understanding the primary variables, comparing them to known standards, and normalizing the estimates based on their differences. This is easy to say but difficult to accomplish because estimates are frequently required even when we know very little about the project—and what we do know is constantly changing. Throw in a healthy dose of politics and a bit of wishful thinking,...
Wednesday, October 4
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...
Thursday, October 5
How My Testing Skills Served My Personal Life
Kristoffer Nordström faced one of the most challenging and emotional times of his life when his daughter was diagnosed with a rare and life-threatening disease. As a caregiver, father, and primary project manager, he had to learn everything he could about her illness, treatment options, and potential outcomes. The skills he acquired as a tester helped him manage this overwhelming amount of information, make sense of it, and develop a plan of action while still being a loving and ever-present parent. He asked questions, researched, and analyzed data to make informed decisions about his...
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...
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...
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...