testing

Conference Presentations

Fighting Test Flakiness: A Disease that Artificial Intelligence Will Cure
Slideshow

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is making it possible for computers to diagnose some medical diseases more accurately than doctors. Such systems analyze millions of patient records, recognize underlying data patterns, and generalize them for diagnosing previously unseen patients. A key challenge is determining whether a patient's symptoms and history are attributed to a known disease or other factors. Software testers face a similar problem when triaging automation failures. They investigate questions like, Is the failure due to a defect, environmental issue, or nondeterministic test script? Is there current or historical evidence to support one belief over another? Join Tariq King as he describes how test failures and flakiness can be modeled for machine learning (ML) as causal disease-symptom relations.

Tariq King
STARWEST 2018 Managing BDD Automation Test Cases inside Test Management Systems
Slideshow

Behavior-driven development (BDD) has been around for a while and is here to stay. However, the added abstraction levels pose a technical problem for writing and managing tests. While BDD does a great job of marrying the nontechnical aspect of test writing to the technical flow of an application under test, keeping this information under source control becomes problematic. Frameworks such as JBehave, Cucumber, or Robot give subject matter experts that additional ability to write tests, but they are often restricted access from them; because people treat test cases as code, they get stored in source control repositories. Additionally, these given-when-then steps soon can grow to an extent where they are difficult to manage without an IDE, and nontechnical people lose interest. Using management tools, Max Saperstone shows how to manage these nontechnical steps and keep them in sync with the automaton in tools such as Git.

Max Saperstone
STARWEST 2018 Risk Based Testing: Communicating WHY You Can't Test Everything
Slideshow

The idea of testing everything is a popular one—in fact many stakeholders think that’s exactly what their quality teams do. It usually isn’t and can’t be; but how can teams communicate this? Join Jenny Bramble as she helps to pave the way using the language of risk-based testing. By defining risk in two simple parts, the team and project have a tangible and usable metric. She shares how to apply this metric and use it to determine where the team should focus testing, making it more effective and efficient whilst communicating that effort through the creation of a risk matrix. As a result, risk becomes the right language for the team to communicate clearly and concisely with everyone involved in the project by using agreed-upon words and definitions. Take away a set of tools that can be used to facilitate both better testing and better communication though precise use of language and risk matrixes.

Jenny Bramble
STARWEST 2018 Automate Your Application Test Deployments with Docker
Slideshow

In a busy world, testing teams are asked to adopt new approaches to increase speed and flexibility of change. What methods and tools can help? Artem Golubev has seen many testing teams being told to use Docker. But for testers, this brings confusion. What it Docker and why is Docker useful to testers? How can Docker be used to increase confidence in our releases? To help you answer those questions, Artem shares his experience using this popular tool and approach. Starting with terminology Artem shares what is meant by Dockerfile, Docker Image, Docker Container, Compose, Kubernetes, and then explains the advantages and limitations of Docker. He shows how to build a Docker-based deployment in this session and gives Hands-on help. He shows how to add Docker to your own current project on your own machine and how-to setup Kubernetes on Google Compute Cloud.

Artem Golubev
Engineering for Compatibility
Slideshow

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 Why "Why...?" Can Be the Most Important Question for QA to Ask
Slideshow

To test a product, there are so many questions to ask, and so little time in which to ask them. More often than not, we get caught up in the who, what, when, and how, but Jane Jeffers from Riot Games explains that “why…?” questions can be the most important ones to ask when it comes to QA work. When missing the whys, we can wind up only focusing on specific details like who needs to do the work or when our deadlines are, and subsequently lose the bigger picture of why a project matters, and why we do what we do. Learn some of the key ways that you can ask why for product, for process, and for people, and how the answers you get will help you with everything from how to devise your overall test strategy to how you communicate with your teammates to get them thinking about quality.

 

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Jane Jeffers
STARWEST 2018 How to Automate Testing for Next-Generation Interfaces (BOTs, Alexa, Mobile)
Slideshow

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. Sanil shows that 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
STARWEST 2018 Marrying Artificial Intelligence with Software Testing: Challenges & Opportunities
Slideshow

Emerging technologies such as the internet of things (IoT) and cloud computing have introduced a significant software variety and complexity. Wendy Siew Wen Chin and Heng Kar Lau explain that testers are challenged to support a wide product portfolio within harsh time, resource and budget constraints. More test automation may seem to be a solution to test efficiency, however there are many inefficient hot spots throughout the test automation life cycle. Join Wendy and Heng Kar as they share their experiences from the Intel IoT team. They share how to make use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to leverage opportunities throughout a testing project. They show how to blend test data analytics, test automation, test coverage analytics and test case selection. Learn how software testing, AI and data analytics can be combined to transform your testing, by helping you focus your testing on what matters most.

Wendy Siew Wen Chin
STARWEST 2018 A Tale of Continuous Testing
Slideshow

When the atmosphere is hostile to QA, and yet the demands on the QA Team are increasing, how do you transform a team where everything is tested and deployed manually, to an organization that delivers great software multiple times a day? Where do you start and how do you create the strategy for implementing Continuous Testing? Join David Lumpkin as he shares his company's journey to answer these questions and the team's evolution along the way. Over a three-year period, Craftsy went from an environment hostile towards QA, to one that embraces automation and exploratory testing, achieving the right level of coverage for every use case, device and browser. It wasn’t easy though and David shares their experience through many experiments, failures and revisions that finally made Continuous Testing a reality.

David Lumpkin
STARWEST 2018 Delivering the Goods: Harmonizing Regulated and Agile Practices
Slideshow

Agile testing is hard. Testers contend with terse requirements, minimal process, little documentation, continually evolving business, technical and organizational factors. Auditors demand proof of compliance. Some teams have trouble conforming to regulations while preserving agile practices. Griffin Jones, a tenured regulated software testing consultant, says “not only can agile practices blend with regulatory compliance - they can be harmonized with them leading to high quality and more agility.” Griffin feels that regulators are project stakeholders, who join the product owner in defining value. Griffin shares examples, methods and techniques of implementing regulatory compliant testing as a graceful part of an agile workflow. Learn the five-part harmony binding regulated and agile practices.

Griffin Jones

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