STARWEST 2023 - Test Transformation
Monday, October 2
Test Automation: How to Start and Succeed
Many organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems as their product matures and changes over time. As a leader, how can you ensure that your new automation efforts will get off to a good start? What can you do to ensure that your automation work provides continuing added value? Chris Loder will explain the critical issues you need to know to get a good start, and he will share his extensive experience in building great automation. He covers the most important management issues you should address for test automation success,...
Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization
The DevOps movement is here. Companies across many industries are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, IT organizations have been staffed with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding to stay relevant and add greater value to the business. DevOps really...
Automation Framework Essentials
Automation is critical in today’s software delivery lifecycle, and yet many organizations struggle to keep their automation running. How can we mitigate difficulties and get consistent automation runs and results we can trust? The secret is implementing a solid automation framework, but that isn’t as easy as it seems. Chris Loder has built several automation frameworks over his career and has learned what works—and, more importantly, what doesn’t. This tutorial will cover what an automation framework is, the benefits of having one, and the keys to a successful framework, including...
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
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...
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...
Wednesday, October 4
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...