STARWEST 2024 - Tester

Ever struggled to communicate test progress or persuade a stakeholder on the quality improvement initiative you have? Do you struggle getting developers to appreciate the need to build testing into the lifecycle? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then this session is for you. Julie Gardiner shares key ingredients for getting your message across more effectively. She shares a communication model she has used for nearly 20 years in her career to get her message across and, more recently, how the science of timing can play a major part of how communication is received. Through...

Software development is trending toward building systems using small, autonomous, independently deployable microservices. Leveraging microservices makes it easier to release software early, more frequently, and even continuously, which aligns well with Agile and DevOps. But how does the microservices architectural pattern affect software testing and testability? How can you ensure microservice-based applications have an adequate level of test coverage at each level? Does this paradigm change the test automation pyramid, and if so what does that look like? Join Tariq King as he walks...

Companies of all sizes face difficulties in achieving higher quality standards within their organization. As quality engineering includes various roles and activities, it is also challenging to find the right people to analyze the current state from a wide perspective and provide the recommendations that will allow these organizations to mature their teams, improving their DevOps culture in the process. Join Péter Földházi as he illustrates the knowledge and skills necessary to become your company's quality consultant. Péter's goal is to involve engineers from beginner to advanced levels...

API testing has become more and more popular as service-oriented architectures have become common. In addition, testing at the API level can be effectively automated to provide maintainable regression tests that work well in a DevOps process. In this tutorial, Jeffery Payne discusses what API testing is all about and how AI is being leveraged today to make it easier to perform. Techniques and tools are discussed that highlight where in the testing process API testing makes the most sense. Various open-source and commercial tools will be demonstrated and the pros and cons of various...

Everybody gets frustrated when web apps are broken, but testing them thoroughly doesn’t need to be a chore. Playwright, a new open-source browser automation tool from Microsoft, makes testing web apps fun! Playwright offers a slew of nifty features like automatic waiting, mobile emulation, and network interception. Plus, with isolated browser contexts, Playwright tests can set up much faster than traditional Web UI tests. In this session, we will automate concise yet robust web app tests for a Kanban board web app with Playwright in TypeScript. You'll learn to test modern web apps of any...

With the sudden rise of ChatGPT and large language models (LLMs), professionals have been attempting to use these types of tools to improve productivity. Building off prior momentum in AI for testing, software quality professionals are leveraging LLMs for creating tests, generating test scripts, automatically analyzing test results, and more. However, if LLM's are not fed good prompts describing the task that the AI is supposed to perform, their responses can be inaccurate and unreliable, thereby diminishing productivity gains. Join Tariq King as he teaches you how to craft high-quality AI...

Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s so easy for agile teams to fall into the rut of testers only doing traditional testing activities and programmers strictly doing their time-worn coding activities. But there are actually many places testers can be influential and contribute value on cross-functional teams. Robert Sabourin will share several examples of how testing skills can be applied to a wide variety of activities in an agile project. For instance, testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Risk analysis in self-...

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...

What do you think about when you hear the words "test automation"? Are you considering developing your own tools to help you probe the product deeply, or will you apply a commercial tool for automated checking? Are you excited by new, powerful, enabling technologies, or do you worry that a robot will replace you? One thing is for sure: when we apply tools, we fundamentally change the context and the nature of the work we do.Our panelists are software testing experts who will discuss all this and more with you! Together, we'll probe what people mean by automation, the power that tools can...

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...

Artificial intelligence is the newest trend in software testing. But what is it, and how will it impact the tester's role, both today and in the future? What do you need to do to embrace this emerging technology? Tariq King will moderate this panel discussion to give you an opportunity to hear the opinions of industry leaders about AI in testing. You will have a chance to drive the debate, so come prepared with all your AI questions.

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,...

It has been a commonly held belief that an ever growing list of manual test cases, kept and maintained by the QA team is the best way to provide training, metrics and a roadmap for future automation efforts. But what if this base assumption is wrong? What if instead of having just a number of passing or failing test cases, we could better speak to factors like risk and quality before our products go live and have a little extra time to be creative with our testing? Rebecca Peterson wants to teach you the steps she and her coworkers have made to move towards living documentation that can...

As you research the latest in generative AI technology, you will see that the development and availability of multi-modal GPT engines are fundamentally changing the way applications are tested and described. These new GPT models can generate and interpret voice, text, and images seamlessly. For example, you can ask them to navigate an application to accomplish a business task and comment on their actions. This means that we’re for the first time entering the world of AI-assisted/performed exploratory testing. When you couple this with the capabilities of GPT models to identify UI elements...

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...