Conference Presentations

Engineering for Compatibility
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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!
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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
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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
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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
STARCANADA From a Testing Team to an Organization Quality Chain
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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
STAREAST 2018 Elegant Test Weapons for a More Civilized Age
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Software Engineering as a discipline is always evolving. The technologies and tools that were in vogue yesterday are passé today and gone altogether tomorrow. Despite this high churn, there are a number of skills that software testers, in particular, possess that are eternally useful. They cut across time and tools and even job titles. Melissa will help software testers look past technologies and titles to explore the skills that they may already possess that are in high demand. She will explain some of the hottest job titles and technologies in the market today, and go in-depth into what skills many software testers already hold that uniquely qualify them for these positions. In the most cutting-edge software companies – from startups to megacorps – traditional software testing functions have been encompassed in roles that might not be immediately obvious.

Melissa Benua
STAREAST 2018 Influencing Stakeholders Using Fact-based Information
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With all the open source tools available on the market it can be overwhelming as to which ones might meet your needs and which ones will work best in your environment to create a high performing team and metrics dashboard. Join Jennifer as she explains the relationship of data, your environment, and how a hub and spoke model can link all your different data sets and tools together. She identifies opportunities for applying test data analytics across the engineering and test landscape, ranging from high-value test cases to dynamically generated regression test suites. She will review ways to collaborate and show results in a way that clearly demonstrates progress and how to present a visual metrics dashboard to your leadership and stakeholders in the organization.

Jennifer Bonine
DevOps West 2018, Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018 Aligning Zero-Touch Nonfunctional Testing in DevOps Implementation
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When a host of applications and data centers get migrated from their traditional IT systems to a cloud-based data center using an automated DevOps model of deployment, effective testing is critical to success. True DevOps value is realized when all development, testing, and operations functions collaborate and operate on a zero-touch automation model. In this session, Subash Newton will review the prerequisites for creating an effective DevOps testing strategy that includes nonfunctional testing. He will share how to set up an effective test strategy using a zero-touch process automation framework that dramatically increases test automation efficiency.

Subash Newton
Better Software West 2018, Agile Dev West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Taking Your Automation Framework to the Next Level Using Machine Learning
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Automation fails frequently in companies due to a variety of reasons, including poor team communication, lack of skills, flaky tests, and inadequate understanding of test coverage. Even when things are going well, the automated tests sometimes grow to a size where the test suites take too long to execute for the run to be viable. James Farrier is a test automation architect who will show you ways to leverage machine learning to address these challenges. You'll learn how to determine which tests are valuable to run after each commit or build in order to cut down the suite run time, how to automatically close and open defects based on test run results, and how to separate a test into different test runs to keep track of tests in different states. Finally, he will show you how to create a results dashboard that allows for team collaboration and a better understanding of test coverage so that testing can be further streamlined.

James Farrier
STAREAST 2018 API Testing: How to Write Tests, Integrate into CI, and Track What You're Testing
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Some developers and testers think that APIs, whether internally developed or not, should just work. Unfortunately, without a significant amount of focus on testing API services, one little flaw can spell disaster for your application—especially security vulnerabilities where hackers will target your application. Elise Carmichael discusses the risks of not fully testing APIs, how to be sure that all services are tested fully, and the types of negative testing you need to do on APIs. She shows you a method to organize your tests using Postman, a tool for REST web services testing. During this session, Elise and the participants will write some Postman API tests with variables and then execute the tests with Newman, a command line application for running Postman tests that you can include in continuous integration scripts.

Elise Carmichael

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