STARWEST 2023 - Test Management
Customize your STARWEST 2023 experience with sessions covering test management.
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,...
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...
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...
Web Security Testing: The Basics and More
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...
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...
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...