Conference Presentations

Test-driven Development: An On-stage Demonstration

Test-driven development (TDD) is a skill that takes patience to master-you can’t learn it reading a book. As with learning any new language, to gain fluency you need to practice TDD with competent coaching and lots of hard work. Many well-intentioned programmers try and finally give up on TDD because they never develop the fluency it requires. On stage, Llewellyn Falco leads a live TDD demonstration, talking through the process and microsteps of: (1) studying a feature, (2) creating an initial test, and (3) iteratively developing the related test code and feature code until the feature is completely programmed. Watch how to iteratively write a test, see it fail, and then write the feature code to make it pass. After explaining the theory behind the particular TDD technique used, Llewellyn leads participants in testing progressively more complex objects and scenarios.

Llewellyn Falco, DevelopMentor
Agile Development & Better Software West 2012: Agile Testing: Challenges Beyond the Easy Contexts

Don’t let anyone tell you differently: agile testing is hard! First, we have to get over the misconception that you don’t need testers within agile teams. Then, we have to integrate testers with the developers and engender a holistic quality approach. And those are only the challenges when the going is easy! In more difficult contexts, testing in agile environments is-well, even more difficult. Bob Galen explores how to handle testing in difficult contexts-lack of test automation capabilities, agile in highly regulated environments, testing when your team is spread globally and real-time interactions are nearly impossible, and more. He describes contexts and approaches for blending existing, traditional testing techniques with their agile counterparts. With real-world examples, Bob describes how teams have achieved a good working balance between the two-for example, in test planning and quality metrics reporting.

Bob Galen, Deutsche Bank
Automate to Accelerate: Planning Your Next Test Automation Steps

Is your organization implementing test automation and not achieving the expected success? Are you spending too much effort rewriting scripts that don't hold up over time? Do your test plans sometimes look like random acts of automation? Roi Carmel shares a pragmatic process he’s used for defining automation goals, addressing automation challenges, and assessing an organization’s readiness for automation. Learn how to achieve greater success with automation and significantly increase test coverage, shrink timelines, and support overall business goals. Although there is no magic bullet, no express lane to a perfect automation center of excellence, Roi explains how organizations can assess their maturity against an automation maturity model in the areas of people, processes, and technology.

Andrew Flick, Hewlett-Packard
The Mis-education of Software Testers: Rethinking and Relearning Software Quality

The role of the software tester is continuing to evolve, becoming more complex and more technical. As new methodologies, technologies, and platforms emerge, testers are bombarded with new, so-called "best practices" on how to do their jobs. The problem is that testers have heard the same songs with different lyrics for more than twenty years now. Clint Sprauve takes a contrarian’s view of testing and the quality assurance industry. He examines some of today’s typical testing "best practices"-keyword-driven testing, requirements traceability, the tester’s role in agile development, quality reporting, tool expertise, and quality certification programs-while providing alternative approaches for how to view each practice.

Clinton Sprauve, Micro Focus
The Paths to Innovation

There are many paths to innovation. At one extreme, many large companies create research labs, staff them with world-class Ph.D.s, and set them working for years to solve complex technical problems. At the other end is the proverbial "two entrepreneurs in the garage" working on a shoe-string budget. Between these extremes are all sorts of organizational structures, team sizes, budgets, and time horizons to encourage innovation. Patrick Copeland introduces basic models for innovation-top-down, democratic, and his personal favorite “eXtreme”-and describes how Google's core beliefs, culture, organization, and infrastructure have successfully encouraged and enabled democratic innovation throughout its growth. From the now famous “twenty-percent time” offer to engineers to its culture of trust, Google is famous for its innovation and out-of-box thinking and execution.

Patrick Copeland, Google, Inc.
The Blurred Boundaries Between Dev, Test, and Ops

It's like watching a chase scene in a major summer blockbuster movie. You're totally focused on the action when suddenly you realize the background is a blurry mess. Trees, buildings, street signs, and pedestrians on the sidewalk have become one mass of smeared colors. As we increase the rate of new software releases and rely more and more on running web services for both interfaces and apps, we are beginning to see the boundaries blur between development, test, and operations. Ken Johnston pokes some fun at the walls between our disciplines and then dives deep into working examples of organizations that are erasing the lines between Dev, Test, and Ops to create more fluid and innovative businesses. Using his experiences from the Bing search development team at Microsoft, Ken describes the impact of lean thinking, kanban, cloud computing, and continuous deployment on role definitions.

Ken Johnston, Microsoft Corporation
End-to-End Automation: Providing Stakeholders Feedback on Quality
Slideshow

Are you running automated tests during development yet not providing automated feedback to the project stakeholders? Vikas Bhupalam approached this problem by leveraging and integrating monitoring, logging, and defect tracking systems to provide automatic feedback to stakeholders.

Vikas Bhupalam, Intuit Inc.
Testing Application Security: The Hacker Psyche Exposed
Slideshow

Computer hacking isn’t a new thing, but the threat is real and growing even today. It is always the attacker’s advantage and the defender’s dilemma. How do you keep your secrets safe and your data protected? In today’s ever-changing technology landscape, the fundamentals of producing...

Mike Benkovich, Imagine Technologies, Inc.
STARWEST 2012: Lightning Strikes the Keynotes
Video

Lightning Talks have been a popular part of many STAR conferences. Lightning Talk session consists of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period and are an opportunity to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation.

Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
STARWEST 2012 Keynote: State-of-the-Art Cloud Testing: Experiences with Bing Search
Video

The cloud is penetrating every technology organization and almost every software product or service. The cloud affects everything inside development, bringing profound changes to how engineers build, test, release, and maintain software and systems.

Ken Johnston, Microsoft

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