STARWEST 2024 - Concurrent Sessions
Concurrent sessions offer attendees the flexibility to explore a variety of topics throughout the conference on Wednesday and Thursday in order to customize their learning experience. Learn both enterprise foundations and new methodologies to grow your skills, supercharge your knowledge, and re-energize your career growth.
Wednesday, September 25
The Rise of the Virtual QA Engineer: Harnessing GenAI
In this talk, Dmitriy will delve into the transformative journey of integrating GenAI, into the core of his team's testing and development processes. This integration has not only enhanced their productivity by 15% but also yielded a 20% time saving and a significant cost reduction per test case. Want to know how? The session will explore his team's strategic implementation of GenAI, overcoming security challenges, leveraging diverse (LLMs), and the meticulous design of prompts that culminated in a prompt library. See how tailored extensions for the code editors and corporate chats...
Building and Testing Serverless API Applications with AWS SAM
The primary draw for implementation of AWS serverless applications is the supposed simplicity. Anyone that has attempted to implement testing on a serverless application, however, knows that it is anything but simple. Serverless technologies allow for the faster construction of more complex applications with more complex integrations while also providing new technologies and execution environments, all of which pose a challenge to those used to testing in a more traditional way. This presentation looks at an API-based serverless application as an example and introduces how the application...
Flowstate, Automation, and LLMs: Don’t Let Tests Block Productivity
It is known that developers are most productive when they can stay in flow, but also that delaying or omitting tests can cause disruption, breakage, and security issues down the line. By properly leveraging background automation, team collaboration, and machine learning in your native DevOps workflow, you can get the best of both worlds: productive flowstate AND safe code. In this talk, Jon Peck will take a look at ways to take advantage of asynchronous test notifications, single-pane-of-glass reviews, and GPT-based tools for faster coding, test generation, and vulnerability remediation....
Delete Responsibly: A Guide to Managing Flaky Tests in iOS UI Automation
Flaky tests pose a significant challenge in maintaining the reliability and efficiency of UI test suites. This talk delves into practical approaches for handling flaky tests, emphasizing the importance of responsibly removing or rewriting tests that consistently demonstrate flakiness. Join Zhanat to explore strategies such as implementing retries judiciously, utilizing monitoring tools for better oversight, and engaging in collaborative problem-solving sessions with iOS teams to address ambiguous failures. Through real-world examples, attendees will learn how to avoid common pitfalls that...
Testing Retrospective: Lessons from the Past
We prepare for the future by learning from the lessons of the past. During this session, you will look back at some of the craziest bugs John Jenkins has run across during his career, and see what lessons can be gleaned from them to help tackle the problems of tomorrow. Bugs come in all shapes and sizes, and can exist in processes just as easily as they can exist in code. In this session, both types will be examined, including: the too much free space bug, the V1 bug, the too much test data bug, and more. The session will also explore some of the best practices John has developed in his...
API Automation Mastery: From Novice to Ninja
APIs are vital for modern software and tech. Why? Because apps are becoming more complex due to: rapid tech advancements, the need to integrate various components, and demand for sophisticated features. But more complexity means more risks of bugs, security flaws, and performance issues. To tackle these risks — API testing is crucial to ensure software reliability, security, and performance. Also, API testing helps developers save time. How? By finding issues early in development rather than fixing them in production. So…teams NEED to improve their API testing skills in today's fast tech...
Cautionary Tales in Integration Testing
Integration tests are often rife with pitfalls that can result in confusing, flaky, or otherwise completely unmaintainable tests. Those pitfalls can often be mitigated by testing in containers, as this usually provides the most straightforward path to creating ephemeral test environments. Containerized tests typically provide isolation and reproducibility, but they can be costly to initially set up, especially if the system under test is not built for a containerized environment. Nonetheless, there are many benefits to containerized testing, even if the system under test won’t ultimately...
Kafka and Kafka Testing: Streamlining Real-time Data Processing
In today's data-driven landscape, real-time data processing is the backbone of modern applications. Kafka, a distributed event streaming platform, has emerged as a critical component in building data-intensive systems. This presentation provides an in-depth exploration of Kafka and the essential practice of Kafka testing, offering attendees valuable insights into harnessing the power of real-time data streams while ensuring robust system reliability. Key topics to be covered are: an introduction to Kafka to understand Kafka's architecture and core components, importance of Kafka Testing,...
Thursday, September 26
Breaking the Chain of Blame: True End-to-End Testing with Distributed Tracing
Debugging problems in a distributed system can be hard. Finding the root of the problem and assigning the work to a specific team after a user failure can be challenging and time-consuming. Often front-end and API tests are not enough. Imagine if you could see exactly what happened step-by-step during an end-to-end test, combining Cypress with distributed traces, to write test specs against every section of the distributed services as well. Now you can. Embed trace-based tests directly in Cypress to get insight into your distributed system, including both the front end and back end....
The Quality Assurance of Artificial Intelligence: How to Test the Tests!
Many companies are asking the question: "What can AI do to improve our QA practices?" But is this the right question? David believes that as QA practitioners the real question is "How should we be preparing to efficiently test emerging and complex ML an AI systems?" AI testing is different from traditional testing because AI systems are not static, but dynamic and adaptive. They learn from data and feedback, and change their behavior accordingly. This means that AI testing must account for the variability and unpredictability of AI systems, and ensure that they are not only functional, but...
AI-Assisted Exploratory Testing for Healthcare Software Based on STEEEP Domain of Healthcare Quality
In this presentation, the primary objective is to introduce an innovative AI-assisted self-generating exploratory test automation model designed specifically for healthcare software applications. The overarching goal of this platform is to elevate the quality assurance process within the realm of healthcare software by dynamically formulating, executing, and adapting test scenarios. These scenarios are meticulously crafted to align with the crucial STEEEP (Safe, Timely, Effective, Efficient, Equitable, and Patient-Centered) healthcare quality domain, thereby fostering an improvement in...
Cloud Testing of Cybersecurity Features in Mobile Apps
In CI/CD pipelines, automated testing services validate functionality of apps across hundreds of real-world mobile devices and OS versions. However, these same automated testing services can use methods and tools that violate security policies such as: emulators, virtualization, resigning, debugging, dual spaces, Magisk and more. Once security protections are added to a mobile app, the security features will trigger and may prevent automated testing. In this session, Karen will discuss how you can eliminate the need to test protected and unprotected builds separately. You will also...
The Art of Winning Leadership Support for Web Accessibility
Feeling unheard in your fight for web accessibility? What if you could turn this struggle into a success story? Join this candid conversation on navigating the nuanced journey of integrating accessibility, even when convincing leadership seems like an uphill battle. Together, we'll reflect on Renata's initial stumbles, identify common pitfalls, and strategize to avoid them. Anticipate leadership concerns by understanding deeper motivations behind their resistance. Master the art of speaking their language and tailor your message to resonate with decision-makers. Empower your champions,...
Effective Ways to Manage Offshore QA Teams
Were you recently promoted or are aspiring to lead or manage an overseas Quality Assurance team? Have you been asked to build/collaborate with a virtual QA team? Stressed about managing an offshore team with all the challenges and circadian rhythm being affected? Managing virtual teams can be challenging to say the least. No matter what the calling is, if your goal is to meet the company objectives and drive QA teams towards excellence at the same time, this session will guide you through the FSNP (Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing) stages for achieving a successful Quality...
Compile to Combat in 24 Hours—The Death of Regression Tests
As a Quality Engineering Director for a consulting firm delivering innovative data products to the US Department of Defense, Sufyan was faced with a new challenge. The US Government had directed all agencies delivering software solutions to the Department of Defense to provide the ultimate advantage to its warfighters. All software solutions must meet the Compile to Combat (C2C24) directive in that all requests for changes to software being used by the military must be delivered in 24 hours from the point of development to delivery. As a Quality Engineering team, this meant long and...
Not All Who Wander Are Lost—Exploratory Testing in Agile/DevOps
As we modernize and automate our tests in DevOps, or even adopt AI, we need to consider what we might be missing. In this presentation, Aaron will discuss the history of exploratory testing, how it gained popularity with agile and DevOps practices, and why we still need it as we move forward with AI-driven testing. We will briefly look at what a healthy test pyramid involves and discuss why we would want to use planned exploratory testing as part of the healthy pyramid. We will cover how exploratory testing is different than ad hoc testing, how to plan it, time box it, and use a charter....