test automation

Conference Presentations

Better Software West 2018, Agile Dev West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Five Core Values to Focus Your Regression Testing Efforts
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In an agile world where having dedicated testers can be a controversial idea, manual testing is a tough sell. Not all contexts have their testing automated, so what is a manual tester to do when it comes time to release? Your team starts asking about regression testing, requests estimates, and expects justifications for the time being spent. Intuition isn't the answer, and retesting everything is not an option. In this session, seasoned tester Brendan Connolly will share his five core values for focusing your regression testing efforts: consistency over correctness, behaviors over bugs, intent over implementation, conformity over complexity, and common over complete. These values not only help with decision-making, but also serve as a heuristic foundation for understanding and communicating about regression testing, as well as define a clear intent and context for all your future regression tests.

Brendan Connolly
DevOps West 2018, Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018 You Only Have to Change One Thing to Make DevOps Work: Everything
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We’re told that adopting DevOps can have all sorts of benefits, but many organizations are not getting the results they hoped for. The term “DevOps” has been co-opted to mean anything from tools to a job title. Without an understanding of what DevOps is really all about, success is elusive. In this session, Ken Mugrage presents DevOps as an overhaul to existing software development organizations and processes. He talks about organizational structures that enable team members to take full advantage of the automation and visibility gained with a DevOps-enabled culture. Ken will then discuss evolutionary software architectures and platforms to enable continuous delivery, as well as how to make your CD pipeline available to all parts of your organization. You will leave with an understanding of what DevOps really means and how to begin your journey.

Ken Mugrage
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 Automated Testing for New-Gen Digital Interactions: Chatbots, Alexa, and Siri
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Today’s IT systems communicate with customers through multiple points of engagement and various interfaces, ranging from web, mobile, and voice to BOTs and apps like Alexa and Siri. Sanil Pillai says these systems need to provide seamless handoffs between different points of interaction—while at the same time providing relevant and contextual information quickly. To accomplish this, a team must be able to successfully pair device hardware capabilities and intelligent software technologies such as location intelligence, biometric sensing, and Bluetooth. Testing these systems and interfaces is becoming an increasingly more complex task, and traditional testing and automation processes simply don’t apply to new-generation digital interaction services. Join Sanil as he discusses the testing and automation challenges in new-generation digital interactions using hyperconnected BOTs.

Sanil Pillai
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
STAREAST 2018 AR and VR for Mobile Apps: Are You Ready to Test?
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Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) mobile apps are going to dominate the technical landscape for the next few years. Compared to current mobile apps, testing this new AR and VR technology will require more preparation, more effort, and new tools. BJ Aberle breaks down the methods and tools he uses to test AR and VR applications. Explore test environment requirements and discover the types of test data you’ll need to prepare for AR and VR testing. Learn about Google’s Tango AR platform and BJ’s experiences testing AR apps, including the Tango-based Cydalion app for the visually impaired. BJ shares the pitfalls he discovered—so you can avoid these when starting your AR or VR testing endeavors. Take back a set of new techniques you may be able to apply to streamline your virtual and augmented reality testing efforts.

BJ Aberle
STAREAST 2018 Embedding Performance Engineering into the CI/CD Pipeline
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A difficult challenge organizations face when adopting continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) is ensuring that every build has been evaluated for performance. Although most organizations do performance testing, how they do it and when they do it define their readiness for deploying in fast-paced environments. Anjeneya Dubey’s team faced similar challenges and found ways to embed performance engineering as part of their CD pipeline. To achieve this objective, they made changes to processes, technologies, and culture. They added non-functional requirements to “normal” requirements and built a performance engineering platform for each API. This platform automates the performance tests, provides a centralized database for metrics, and automatically analyzes pass/fail on builds, based on dynamic thresholds.

Anjeneya Dubey
STAREAST 2018 Manual Testers Can Thrive in a Test Automation World
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Jeanne Schmidt
STAREAST 2018 Not Your Parents’ Test Automation: Application of Non-Traditional Automation
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Most software organizations have a test automation initiative—some just beginning and others humming right along. Typically, these initiatives focus on traditional automation—using a software package to automate test cases or user stories. However, if you use only the traditional approaches to automation, you will miss opportunities to exploit the complete powers of automation. Paul Grizzaffi shares real-world examples where non-traditional automation or “automation assist” approaches, including high volume automated testing, have provided high business value testing in his company. He highlights instances where traditional methods could not have provided the same level of testing. Paul shares thoughts to keep in mind when implementing automation assists and demonstrates examples of helpers he’s created from tools not traditionally used for test automation.

Paul Grizzaffi
STAREAST 2018 Automated Testing: Beyond the Basics
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Jim Holmes

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