STARWEST 2023 - Test Leadership
Monday, October 2
Debunking the QA KPI Myths and Make KPI Great Again
When it comes to software quality, data and metrics are essential for making informed decisions. However, not all KPI metrics are created equal. In fact, many common KPI metrics can become myths that do more harm than good. In this tutorial, Lisette draws on her experience to debunk the QA KPI myths and share practical strategies for making KPI metrics great again. She will discuss how to determine the purpose of QA KPIs for your organization's needs and how to adapt KPI metrics to your organization's culture—exploring practical QA KPI metrics that bring value to everyone in the...
Automation Framework Essentials
Automation is critical in today’s software delivery lifecycle, and yet many organizations struggle to keep their automation running. How can we mitigate difficulties and get consistent automation runs and results we can trust? The secret is implementing a solid automation framework, but that isn’t as easy as it seems. Chris Loder has built several automation frameworks over his career and has learned what works—and, more importantly, what doesn’t. This tutorial will cover what an automation framework is, the benefits of having one, and the keys to a successful framework, including...
Tuesday, October 3
Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics
To be most effective, leaders—including development and testing managers, ScrumMasters, product owners, and IT managers—need metrics to help direct their efforts and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important evaluation activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, the progress and results of both development and testing must be measured. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because developers and testers often are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Jeff Pierce as he...
Agile Test & Transformation Leadership in Action
Leading and driving change in our companies, organizations, and teams can be as difficult as pushing a wet rope uphill! Even with the best processes and tools, we may not achieve our business and customer satisfaction goals when our environment is stuck in the status quo. Ultimately, transforming an organization is about changing culture. Our values, beliefs, goals, assumptions, purpose, priorities, and other factors influence culture. Test managers and leaders are critical players in driving cultural change. Mike Sowers will explore the key attributes of being a Test Transformation Leader...
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...
Confident Communication Drives Powerful Quality Leadership
PreviewDriving a culture of quality starts with effective communication. Join Stacy Kirk and Erika Chestnut to unlock your communication superpowers! Imagine a cheat code that helps us boost productivity and team vibes by 10x. We will leverage behavior self-assessments to help discover your unique strengths, communication styles, and reactions to challenges. Stacy and Erika will help you learn to communicate effectively with your team, management, and cross-functional teams to build a culture of quality. You will learn to assess how others best receive and process information and how to...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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
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...
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...
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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...