STAREAST 2018

For most of his career in test/QA, Jason Wick found the prevailing sentiment to be us vs. them—testers vs. developers or the project team vs. the business. And this mindset does not work on a cross-functional product team where everyone must share goals and be willing to put the team goals ahead of all other agendas. During his past year of leading a product delivery team, Jason Wick has discovered that establishing this team goals mindset is no easy task.

As more applications are hosted on servers, they produce immense quantities of logging data. Quality engineers should verify that apps are producing log data that is existent, correct, consumable, and complete. Otherwise, apps in production are not easily monitored, have issues that are difficult to detect, and cannot be corrected quickly. Tom Chavez presents the four steps that quality engineers should include in every test plan for apps that produce log output or other machine data. First, test that the data is being created.

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.

The key to creating high-performing teams is psychological safety—the ability to be vulnerable in front of others even when they hold diverse viewpoints, and the opportunity to take risks and trust that everything will be OK. However, creating this safety is easier said than done. Maaret Pyhäjärvi shares her story of working with software development and test teams to enable them to be awesome. She explains how to reinforce the positive while enabling great software product development by empowering others in your team.