STARWEST 2024 - Test Leadership
Wednesday, September 25
Build Your Career and Your Worth, Not Just Your Relationship with Your Manager
Change in organizational structure, especially your direct manager, can be very stressful and life altering. After all, people leave managers, not companies right? Aprajita Mathur would disagree. Change is hard for all of us and sometimes losing the person with whom we were so closely aligned and working can be hard to successfully navigate. Aprajita has been blessed to have had over 15+ managers in her career, an average burn rate of 1.5 years or less. Though this was a challenging path at the start of her career, having this vast experience has taught her what really matters in the long...
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...
Enabling a DevOps Culture with Embedded Systems
In today's technology-driven landscape, where software and hardware intertwine seamlessly in embedded systems, adopting a DevOps culture becomes imperative. This talk delves into the dynamic world of embedded systems and explores how organizations can successfully implement and nurture a DevOps culture within this unique domain. DevOps, with its emphasis on collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement, has revolutionized software development. However, adapting these principles to the realm of embedded systems presents distinct challenges and opportunities. Our discussion will...
Quality Is More Than Testing—How to Build a Test Team with a Customer-Centric Mindset
Testers are not part of the process; they don’t have sufficient knowledge of the client’s business to understand the big picture. This failure to understand leads to unsatisfactory outcomes that leave the client with unanswered questions. For a client to feel testing is of value, the software must work seamlessly and exceed their expectations. The solution is to shift testing left towards discovery and include testers early in the process so they have a stake in end-to-end results. Testers must understand the subject matter, ask questions, and be a valued part of the core team. Testing is...
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
Bridging AI-Generated Acceptance Criteria with Comprehensive Test Scenarios
The generation of acceptance criteria through generative AI is an innovative approach to streamline the requirements gathering process. However, ensuring that the implemented code aligns with these criteria is crucial for delivering high-quality software. This talk explores the integration of generative AI generating acceptance criteria with test case scenarios, aiming to establish a seamless connection between the development and testing phases. By leveraging pull requests as a central hub, this approach facilitates the validation of whether the test case scenarios adequately cover the...
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...