STARWEST 2017 - Big Data, Analytics, AI/Machine Learning for Testing
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Monday, October 2
Better Test Design for Great Test Automation
When we discover—often late in an automation effort—that the automated tests are cumbersome and costly to maintain, we often view this as a technical problem for the automator to solve. However, an often-overlooked cause is the role that testers who designed these tests play in making automation scalable and maintainable. In this interactive tutorial for both testers and automation engineers, Hans Buwalda explores how better test designs not only will result in much improved test automation but also can make the difference between automation success and failure. See why successful...
Tuesday, October 3
Fundamentals of Software Test Design
As testers, we know that we can define many more test cases than we will ever have time to design, execute, and report. The key problem in testing is choosing a small, “smart” subset—from the almost infinite number of tests available—that will find a large percentage of the defects. Join Lee Copeland to discover how to design test cases using formal black-box techniques, including equivalence class testing, boundary value testing, decision tables, and state-transition diagrams. Explore examples of each of these techniques in action. Don’t just pick test cases randomly. Learn to selectively...
The Impact of IoT on Testing: What’s in Store
No longer just a futuristic concept, the Internet of Things (IoT) has a strong presence in our world even today. If your business is not prepared for it, you’re already behind. With the proliferation of connected “things”—devices, appliances, cars, and even clothes—Jennifer Bonine says that the stage is set. IoT apps are here to stay. Testing, product management, and development teams must address developing and testing in this paradigm. Testers, accustomed to traditional platforms, are now asked to test on more complex devices and more advanced platforms. Testers must keep up with the...
Wednesday, October 4
Rise of the Machines: Can Artificial Intelligence Terminate Manual Testing?
The state of the art in automated software testing is far from being a replacement for human-guided testing. There is more to testing than setting up preconditions, applying inputs, verifying outputs, and logging the results. Testing requires significant planning, exploring, learning, modeling, inferencing, experimenting, and more. Therefore, before we can truly automate testing, we must bridge the gap between the testing capabilities of humans and machines. Tariq King says that breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are challenging our thinking about the...
The Lean Startup Method: Its Value for Testers
A startup is an organization created to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Approximately 40 percent of all startups will cease operation with investors losing everything; 95 percent will fall short of their financial projections. And the number one cause of startup failure? No one wants to buy their product. Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, learned that under conditions of extreme uncertainty, classical management methods do not bring success. Based on his and others’ experiences, he formulated the Lean Startup methodology consisting of five...
The Software Testing Pyramid: A Concrete Example
PreviewMike Cohn’s Test Pyramid describes a test automation strategy consisting of a wide base of unit tests, service-oriented acceptance tests for business logic, and a thin layer of tests exercising the user interface. Tests that provide the quickest feedback and fault precision serve as the testing foundation. So, how does this work in practice? How does a team achieve this level of test automation and maintain it over time? How can the team avoid redundancy in the various test layers? Jim Weaver demonstrates the different types of tests for a real feature—enforcing business rules for...
Mind Maps for Testers
Do you ever sit in test strategy or test plan review sessions and get little or no participation from others? Are you looking for a better way to communicate important information around the test plan or strategy? Do you want your stakeholders to understand and engage in providing feedback and suggestions? Jennifer Bonine and Karen Schaefer have a solution for you—a mind mapping tool that can help you address these questions. A Mind Map is a visual approach used to help organize information rather than a text outline or list. Jennifer and Karen will help you download a free mind mapping...
Transform Your Team from QA to Test Engineering
PreviewAre you being asked to shorten your testing timelines? Do you feel pressured to increase your test automation coverage but don’t have the time, staff, or budget? How do you as a leader upgrade your existing teams’ programming skills and technical abilities without bringing in external resources—and still meet your daily release deliverables? Join Jennifer Scandariato as she shares her journey in transforming the QA department at iCIMS into a Test Engineering Center of Excellence, where manual testers are now automation engineers who apply appropriate automation technologies to...
Automate Your API Testing Process
PreviewCreating automated tests for your team stories, integration, or regression test cycles within agile sprints is almost every tester’s top challenge. Usually it consumes many hours and requires a great deal of effort to achieve, especially in complex and large agile projects. Teams need to deliver software as quickly as they can while producing the best possible product quality. Talal Ibdah shows how you can achieve these goals and automate your API functional and performance tests; define test environments and configuration files; make chaining requests; continuously deliver your...
A Shift in Mindset: From Finding Defects to Preventing Them
PreviewAlthough most software companies have adopted agile development, many still treat quality assurance as something that gets handled when coding is finished and ready for test. However, practicing this reactive approach to quality costs teams in rework, context switching, slower code release cycles, growing bug queues, and the release of defects into production. Join Oscar Gracia and Todd Albers as they share techniques you can use to help change this “ready for test” mindset. Learn how to focus on testing and quality from the start by using a pre-grooming approach to ensure stories...
Test Automation for Data-Centric Applications
Test automation, one of several key technical enablement practices, allows teams to be more successful in their agile journeys. Although there are many test practices and automation tools available for software development teams to leverage, few data-centric testing tools are targeted to data-related development and testing, leaving data warehousing and business intelligence teams thinking they can't possibly automate their tests. Cher Fox explores why test automation is important to agile data teams, discusses why they aren’t automating their tests today, and investigates the path to test...
What Does Continuous Testing Really Mean?
You may have heard the term “continuous testing” and thought it was just the DevOps flavor of the month … or that it isn’t part of DevOps … or that it isn’t for cloud-based applications. Marianne Hollier says that continuous testing means adopting the right set of automated tests along with service virtualization, which allows the team to simulate missing dependencies and to start testing earlier and more frequently. She shares how the right combination of best practices and tools can help software development and testing teams adopt a continuous testing approach. Since you can’t test...
Machine Learning: Will It Take Over Testing?
PreviewMachine learning (ML), a branch of artificial intelligence, is gaining widespread adoption and interest on software development projects. Paul Merrill says that ML isn't typical programming. Algorithms can be changed and checked for accuracy at runtime to “learn” from data. Some companies are already generating and executing test cases using machine learning algorithms. It is projected that significant areas of the labor force—16 percent in transportation and 9 percent of healthcare—could see job cuts in the next few years. So it's time to start thinking: Might testing be on that...
Thursday, October 5
Elegant Dev and Test Processes for a More Civilized Age
Software engineering as a discipline has come a long way. For some teams, months-long cycles of dev-test-build-release have shrunk down to mere days—or even hours. In the fastest, leanest organizations, most testing happens in parallel with development as part of a slick, continuous integration pipeline. Come along with Melissa Benua as she explores just how quickly and safely a product can be released using ultramodern engineering technologies. All testers know how to file a bug, but more testers should know how to configure a continuous integration (CI) pipeline tool, how to wrest code...
Leverage Big Data and Analytics for Testing
PreviewSabermetrics turned the baseball world upside down by challenging decades-old measures of individual performance and their perceived linkage to team success. After cementing their legacy as the Lovable Losers for 108 years, the Chicago Cubs were able to leverage a data-driven approach to finally win a World Series. A high-school football coach, devoted to statistical analysis, has won three state championships—by never punting. Formula 1 racing teams collect staggering amounts of telemetry data from their race cars for the purpose of eking out seconds during the course of a race....
Shift Left Testing: Going Beyond Agile
The concept of “shifting testing left” in the software development lifecycle is not new. Shifting testing from manual to automated and then upstream into engineering is a driving factor in DevOps and agile software development. However, Michael Nauman wonders why test automation, DevOps, and agile software development still frequently fail to deliver on their promises? Aligning and hardening your DevOps and test automation—along with streamlining your agile processes—is critical to your project. Michael shares how AutoCAD’s shifting testing left enabled improvements within their...
Globalization Testing for Cloud Products
PreviewEvery year, VMware has hundreds of releases for its virtualization products that cover data centers, networking, storage, cloud management, and digital workspace. Testing many different products while adapting to their development lifecycle introduces some special challenges for the product globalization team. Vincent Truong describes the processes and testing techniques a large-size software company needs to correctly support the globalization of its products. Vincent examines the agile process of globalization—internationalization and localization—testing and how the test...
Testing in the Year 2020: The Erosion of Governance, Management, and Excellence
PreviewCompetition is driving our business and IT partners to be ever more nimble. And Byron Glick and Jithesh Ramachandran say that the growing agility is eroding the old foundations of testing—test management, project governance, and centers of excellence. An organization pursuing lean startup approaches may reduce or eliminate traditional planning cycles and the related test management and governance. But all is not lost. Understanding why those foundations were effective in their time points to new foundations that will carry us forward into the new world of testing, technology, and...
Testing in the IoT Era
PreviewThe age of the Internet of Things (IoT) has come. IoT devices enable a new realm of services and applications—medical devices, fitness and fashion, appliances, industrial, etc. The market is expected to exceed $1.7 trillion by 2020 with more than 200 billion connected devices—and 90 percent of automobiles. Join Amir Rozenberg as he describes the ingredients to ensure quality IoT applications: IoT-enabled lab, test tools and methodologies, and compliance and test evidence. Test professionals need to expand their perspective to include IoT; new IoT dev testers need to adopt proven...
Use Model-Based Testing to Navigate the Software Forest
PreviewEven seemingly simple software systems can be a dense forest of intersecting logical pathways which may leave you wondering if your testing was robust enough. Traditional test cases are flawed since they only execute the pathways the tester considered at the time the test case was written, and they will execute the same way—every time and without variation. Jon Fetrow shows how, using model-based testing, you can create a map of your software forest and answer the question “Did you test enough?” Jon discusses the use of models to catch defects in the requirements and design phase...
Get Ready for Cloud Testing
PreviewIn the past few years, deployment of applications in the cloud has become an industry standard. Meher Nori believes that it is very important for QA/testing organizations to understand the impact the cloud may have on them and prepare accordingly. The impact primarily involves a change in the testing strategy, and two items become very important. (1) Security testing and elasticity/scalability testing—new types of tests which previously were not so important—need to be created and executed once an application is hosted in the cloud. (2) Some traditional tests—availability testing...
On Becoming a Tester Who Codes
PreviewTo be a well-rounded and analytical tester, Adam Satterfield says you should learn to code. Learning to code empowers a tester to be more self-reliant and less dependent on someone else to write their test scripts, which can take valuable time from the critical and time-crunched testing process. Learning to code positions a tester for long-term career growth, opens up new professional opportunities, and gives them the perspective to be a better tester with a deeper understanding of what questions to ask and how to approach a meaningful testing plan to gain better insights. However...