ALM & SCM Tools

Conference Presentations

STAREAST 2018 Machine Learning Heralds the End of Selenium
Slideshow

Selenium has been the cure for free and low-cost browser testing for years, and—in the world of agile, mobile, DevOps, and browserless interfaces—it is showing its age. Comparing Selenium to what’s coming, Jason Arbon says that machine learning and data analytics will become the new standard for test automation. With Selenium, test engineers suffer from the pains of broken element identification; broken, buggy, and partially implemented mobiletest capabilities; exploding costs of building abstraction layers on their apps; brittle test code when the application under test changes; and absence of any context or test logic in the framework. Jason unwraps the work that several startups and projects initiated in the past twenty-four months are actively doing to fix these issues with new general-purpose, test frameworks that combine machine learning and data analytics.

Jason Arbon
STAREAST 2018 Mindmapping: A General Purpose (Test) Planning Tool
Slideshow

MindMapping is a general technique of organizing your thoughts, aligning your ideas, and breaking things down. It’s uses are, in fact, mind blowing. But in this session, join Bob Galen, as he takes you on a visual tour of mindmapping as applied in the software testing space. We’ll be using a free tool and be creating maps to illustrate test case design, test idea generation, sprint-level test planning, and release-level test planning using mindmaps. Along the way, you’ll also gain some new insights into risk-based testing with an agile twist, as we explore the 3-Amigos metaphor. You’ll leave this session with a rudimentary library of maps and another, quite powerful tool, to add to your toolbox. Bring your laptop or other device, as we’ll be using MindMup to create a few simple mindmaps.

Bob Galen
STAREAST 2018 Thirteen Patterns of Testers Thriving in Agile Teams
Slideshow

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Shaun Bradshaw
STAREAST 2018 Migrating from Test Cases to Real-World Telemetry Measures
Slideshow

Ken Johnston sees today’s software ecosystem in the light of Everything as a Service (EaaS). Operating systems like Windows, Android, and Chrome OS all ship regularly like a service. Browsers automatically update every few weeks, and apps are constantly updating through all the app stores. Although getting a test to pass once and signing off has gone by the wayside for software testing, still we run test cases over and over again. Ken shares how Microsoft took millions of test cases—yes, actually millions—and turned the important ones into measures based on real world telemetry. Massive amounts of data coming in from real devices and real users measure product quality and tie it to key customer satisfaction metrics.

Ken Johnston
STAREAST 2018 The Next Big Thing: Testing AI and Machine Learning Applications
Slideshow

Our world is changing. Artificial intelligence is being employed in many walks of life—from virtual assistants and robots to self-driving cars. How does this new way of life impact software testing? What is our role … and will we have one in the future? Of course! And it’s a very exciting time to be in testing because there’s not enough known about how to systematically test these AI- and ML-driven applications. Angie Jones gives an overview of why it’s extremely important that we comprehensively test these applications and how today’s tester can prepare and build the skillset for this new realm of software. While the future of artificial intelligence is mostly a mystery, one of testers’ strongest and most valuable assets is the ability to discover and report the unknown.

Angie Jones
Collocated East Logo Teamwork Tools: Movement Games for Collaboration and Creativity
Slideshow

Are you looking for new ways to invigorate your teams? Do retrospectives seem stale? Do story breakdown meetings feel flat? On the other hand, maybe your teams are humming and you’re looking for additional variety. The research is clear—movement matters, and play stimulates creativity. 

Andrew Smith
Collocated East Logo Them’s the Rules: Using a Rules Engine to Wrangle Complexity
Slideshow

When dealing with complicated and ever-growing program conditions brought on by new business requirements, it's easy for what was once a small conditional block of code to grow to evaluating hundreds of unique conditions. Unfortunately, much like kudzu, that bad practice begins to creep...

Micah Breedlove
STARCanada Logo Objects vs. Images: Choosing the Right GUI Test Tool Architecture
Slideshow

Most popular GUI test tools are based on an object recognition architecture. They recognize and manipulate screen objects by communicating with the underlying GUI subsystem. A new breed of tools has been introduced in the past few years that implements an image recognition architecture.

Chip Groder
Collocated West Logo A Simple Tool for Speaking Honestly and Constructively
Slideshow

Are you on a team where people avoid conflict or shy away from saying anything that might sound critical? Reluctance to speak up can block important challenges from being identified, and deny your team and organization the opportunity to learn and improve. According to Lorraine Aguilar...

Lorraine Aguilar
STAREast Logo Open Source Test Automation: Riding the Second Wave
Video

After the first wave of open source test automation tools like Fitnesse and Watir, we are now in a stronger, second wave led by Selenium-based frameworks. This powerful swell, fueled by a major shift toward web-based applications on desktops and mobile devices, is changing how corporations...

David Dang

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