STARWEST 2024 - Test Management

Many organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems as their product matures and changes over time. As a leader, how can you ensure that your new automation efforts will get off to a good start? What can you do to ensure that your automation work provides continuing added value? Chris Loder will explain the critical issues you need to know to get a good start, and he will share his extensive experience in building great automation. He covers the most important management issues you should address for test automation success,...

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...

Automation is critical in today’s software delivery lifecycle, and yet many organizations struggle to keep their automation running. How can we mitigate difficulties and get consistent automation runs and results we can trust? The secret is implementing a solid automation framework, but that isn’t as easy as it seems. Chris Loder has built several automation frameworks over his career and has learned what works—and, more importantly, what doesn’t. This tutorial will cover what an automation framework is, the benefits of having one, and the keys to a successful framework, including...

Web applications are often security critical or serve as front-ends for security critical applications, making web testing for vulnerabilities an essential part of software testing. Unfortunately, most software testers have not been taught how to identify web security issues while testing applications. Join Tom Stiehm as he shares what you need to know to security test web-based applications as part of your overall testing process. Learn about the most common web security vulnerabilities and how they are introduced into web code and exploited by hackers. Explore test techniques for...

When it comes to software quality, data and metrics are essential for making informed decisions. However, not all KPI metrics are created equal. In fact, many common KPI metrics can become myths that do more harm than good. In this tutorial, Lisette draws on her experience to debunk the QA KPI myths and share practical strategies for making KPI metrics great again. She will discuss how to determine the purpose of QA KPIs for your organization's needs and how to adapt KPI metrics to your organization's culture—exploring practical QA KPI metrics that bring value to everyone in the...

With the advent of frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue, the landscape of application performance has changed significantly in terms of testing and measurement. Gone are the days of measuring response time as a single value based on back-end performance. In modern web and mobile applications, additional layers need to be peeled apart at the front end to truly understand its performance characteristics. Traditional approaches to performance testing are no longer sufficient to provide a delightfully responsive user experience. Join Kaushal Dalvi as he details new developments in the...

Jun-young Kwak (Sr. Director, Engineering), and Priyanka Halder (Sr. Leadership, QA & Release) will delve into the fascinating journey of Tinder’s quality engineering over the past decade, highlighting the dynamic evolution and innovative strategies that have underpinned the platform’s success in connecting millions worldwide. 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 at Tinder. A significant milestone in this journey...

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...

We have all seen it. The word AI is appearing next to every test tool, and the promises are coming thick and fast. AI seems like the perfect addition to increase the quality of the tests we run, but what if the opposite is true, and it’s the death of quality engineering as we know it? There has been no greater transformation in test quality than test automation in the last decade. We have gone through the horrible years of record and replay automation that never provided the ROI that was promised, and we finally settled on automation engineering, where we treat our automation code with the...

Delivering performance applications is a multi-layered challenge these days. Teams must assure that the application performs on multiple fronts. Each new function must have quick responses and be as slim as possible from the coding moment. It must be quick and light for a single request, handle concurrency, and coexist with multiple other processes even in micro-serviced applications spread all over the place. Not to mention, it must handle lots of loads once in production. It must stay performant and available within the agreed thresholds. The impressive amount of tasks to tackle and co-...

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...

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...

Everyone involved in the SDLC knows quality is important. Absolutely. After all, who wants to push out (let alone use) software that doesn't work well? But, does your organization really embrace QA in all its glory? Do they see QA as more than ‘just’ testing? Do you see QA as more than ‘just’ testing? If your answer is 'No' to any of these questions, then this talk is for you. Yes, we test and log defects, but we also have to be diplomatic champions of quality assurance. We have to work to make sure our organizations see QA as a proactive function that spans the Software Development Life...

Join Vinod Kashid as he walks through his experience building end-to-end automation for performance testing and engineering. His team was tasked to do daily performance testing activities for a critical application and business executives were expecting detailed application performance outcomes on a daily basis. Manual performance test execution and analysis were time consuming processes and were delaying the overall run time for final report. Business stakeholders wanted to implement zero touch automation from performance test execution to analysis and reporting (including deep-dive...

As the lone tester amongst a sea of developers, Sylvia Solorzano struggled to scale reactive efforts into a cohesive program. Haphazard bug reports strained relationships and failed to provide direction. By installing a phased methodology based on industry best practices first, quality became her north star. Sylvia enshrined requirements traceability and manually executed test cases for each function delivered. Then she evaluated integrations between components and expanding to validate full system behavior as users would experience. Finally, leveraging test standards, she layered on...

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,...

Without training in software testing that includes formal methods such as equivalence class partitioning, boundary value analysis, decision tables, state diagrams, and others, an engineer, in good faith, will test the code intuitively until reaching “qualitative confidence” that testing is sufficient. The team at Trimble, Inc. provided training to engineers in a wide variety of formal testing methods so they could gain “quantitative confidence” that code has been tested sufficiently, by using methods known to achieve concrete coverage in requirements and code. Subsequently, Trimble...