STARWEST 2024 - Test Transformation

The DevOps movement is here. Companies across many industries are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, IT organizations have been staffed with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding to stay relevant and add greater value to the business. DevOps really...

To be most effective, leaders—including development and testing managers, ScrumMasters, product owners, and IT managers—need metrics to help direct their efforts and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important evaluation activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, the progress and results of both development and testing must be measured. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because developers and testers often are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he...

Leading and driving change in our companies, organizations, and teams can be as difficult as pushing a wet rope uphill! Even with the best processes and tools, we may not achieve our business and customer satisfaction goals when our environment is stuck in the status quo. Ultimately, transforming an organization is about changing culture. Our values, beliefs, goals, assumptions, purpose, priorities, and other factors influence culture. Test managers and leaders are critical players in driving cultural change. Mike Sowers will explore the key attributes of being a Test Transformation Leader...

Priyanka Halder, VP of QA, will delve into the fascinating journey of quality engineering over the past decade, highlighting the dynamic evolution and innovative strategies that have underpinned the success of billion-dollar health tech and media companies. The talk traces the early days of experimentation with various quality assurance models, both in-house and outsourced, reflecting on the lessons learned and the pivotal decisions that shaped the future of quality in the industry. A significant milestone in this journey was the strategic partnership with the developer experience team and...

This session explores the innovative ways to approach and revolutionize the art software testing by harnessing the full power of Google Cloud AI Platform. Utilizing AI-powered regression testing and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, developers can automate mundane and repetitive tests while also analyzing software functionality and usability. Predictive analytics and custom machine learning models can be used to anticipate and identify potential issues, improve testing efficiency, and provide actionable insights. Applying reinforcement learning algorithms for GUI...

In today's dynamic business landscape, organizations grapple with the challenge of innovating across multiple product developments simultaneously. This session explores the intricacies of concurrent development involving seven products, highlighting the pivotal roles of scrum teams, engineering approach, and collaborative testing strategies. Traditional independent product testing approaches prove insufficient in the context of interdependence and a unified platform. The discussion centers on the need for an evolved testing strategy that shifts left, meticulously addressing integration...

Several years ago, Dave was a seasoned QA Engineer starting a new job. As the new guy, he was initially tasked with the mind-numbing task of verifying that data in reports matched expected data in a spreadsheet. This task took three weeks to complete manually. He vowed he would never do that again, so the next time around, Dave automated the process in two weeks using an open source automation tool he had never used before, all while laying the foundation for an automation framework that now has over 90 contributors across 12 product lines. Session attendees will learn how to build,...

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...