Conference Presentations

STARCANADA Gaining Consciousness
Slideshow

Testers make difficult decisions with minimal information in turbulent times on critical projects.  Independent consultant, Fiona Charles, suggests that testers must learn to draw a line in the decision-making process between trained intuition and careless assumption.  In this...

Fiona Charles
Fighting Test Flakiness: A Disease that Artificial Intelligence Will Cure
Slideshow

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making it possible for computers to diagnose some medical diseases more accurately than doctors. Such systems analyze millions of patient records, recognize underlying data patterns, and generalize them for diagnosing previously unseen patients. A key challenge is determining whether a patient's symptoms and history are attributed to a known disease or other factors. Software testers face a similar problem when triaging automation failures. They investigate questions like, Is the failure due to a defect, environmental issue, or nondeterministic test script? Is there current or historical evidence to support one belief over another? Join Tariq King as he describes how test failures and flakiness can be modeled for machine learning (ML) as causal disease-symptom relations.

Tariq King
Engineering for Compatibility
Slideshow

Modern software development has brought us an incredibly powerful tool: continuous integration and deployment. However, taking advantage of this new system isn’t always straightforward. With powerful new tools come powerful new ways of making mistakes that can take your product down in a heartbeat. Melissa Benua has years of experience making CI and CD work for her, with lots of insights—both good and not so good. Come and learn from her as she shares key tips and tricks for coding and testing for both forward and backward compatibility in software releases. Useful for both traditional testers as well as combined engineers, Melissa provides technical and actionable advice to enable your team to make the right trade-offs and the right time investments, allowing your product to release to your customers safely and successfully.

Melissa Benua
STARWEST 2018 Help! I am Drowning In 2 Week Sprints....Please Tell Me What NOT to Test!
Slideshow

Sometimes we allow ourselves to drown in work… Mary Thorn hears it all the time: testers complaining at retrospectives to their teams that they do not have enough time to test everything. She often sees testers work overtime the last week of a sprint to ensure the definition of done is accomplished. Why do they do this? Why do we, as testers, enable the bad behaviors of “Scrummerfall” or a lack of whole-team ownership of quality? Mary aims to arm testers with techniques that allow them to test smarter, not harder, and enable the testers and the team to have better conversations that make it clear what they are testing in the sprint. Most importantly, she wants you to come out of her session being able to answer the question, “What are you not going to test this sprint?” Take home some approaches that allow you to swim, not sink, by focusing your own and your team’s efforts.

Mary Thorn
STARWEST 2018 7 Proven Ways to Ruin Your Test Automation
Slideshow

Test automation projects fail, but why? Could you stop it from happening? In this tongue-in-cheek talk, Seretta Gamba will share seven proven methods to disrupt or utterly ruin a test automation project, including letting a lone champion keep important knowledge to himself, ignoring good programming practices, setting impossible goals, and feigning support. Seretta’s humorous recommendations will provide managers, testers, and automators alike with the early signs of an automation project in danger. By “warning” that the most effective defenses are found using the test automation patterns, Seretta will provide the tools needed to counter and resolve issues that lead to project failure. You will receive access to an online resource, the test automation patterns wiki, that leads you through test automation success patterns and offers ways to avoid failures.

Seretta Gamba
STARWEST 2018 Frontend Testing: Stepping in and Collaborating with Developers
Slideshow

Testing is shifting left, moving closer to testing the code itself before the full product is ready for release. While the backend world already has established methodologies for testing, frontend developers and testers are still trying to figure out how to work together to effectively test the code. Gil Tayar suggests testers need to communicate with the frontend developers to understand the framework by which frontend code is tested, the various kinds of testing that can be performed on frontend code, and which tools can be used. During this session, Gil helps ease your fear of the unknown by teaching you how to test developer code. He discusses various test methodologies you can use and how they fit together in a coherent way. Gil also includes sample code that you can use as a template in your own project. If time permits, we'll get hands on and do a bit of live coding.

Gil Tayar
The Unspoken Truth about IoT Test Automation The Unspoken Truth about IoT Test Automation

The internet of things (IoT) continues to proliferate as connected smart devices become critical for individuals and businesses. Even with test automation, performing comprehensive testing can be quite a challenge.

Rama Anem's picture Rama Anem
STARCANADA From a Testing Team to an Organization Quality Chain
Slideshow

Is testing a bottleneck in your company? Do you uncomfortably squeeze testing into projects? Can you show stakeholders how testing adds value? Sophie Benjamin has spent the last fifteen years answering these questions, transforming testing into add...

Sophie Benjamin
Geoff Meyer How Machines Will Impact the Way You Test Software: An Interview with Geoff Meyer

In this interview, Geoff Meyer, a test architect in the Dell EMC infrastructure solutions group, discusses whether or not testers should be nervous about artificial intelligence, what testers can do right now to keep up with the times, and when AI is most useful for software teams.

Josiah Renaudin's picture Josiah Renaudin
Hand drawing automation gears For Sustainable Test Automation, Look beyond the Surface

When it comes to achieving sustainable test automation, having an appropriate test automation team structure in place is the most important first step to take. This article has some proven practices for a few different test automation adoption scenarios—led by an automation team or a regression team, and with agile adaptations—that have helped organizations enjoy long-term test automation success.

Maximilian Bauer's picture Maximilian Bauer

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