STAREAST 2025 - Performance Testing & Monitoring
Monday, April 28
Ramping Up Modern Performance
Modern software is developed in a continuous manner, with several backend services frequently being deployed and scaled in the cloud. Furthermore, as organizations move toward agile, DevOps, and continuous delivery, it is vital for them to move away from traditional approaches to evaluate performance. Are you interested in ramping up or polishing your skills on performance testing? Leandro Melendez will introduce attendees to modern, agile, and continuous performance testing. You’ll learn performance assurance principles and everything from fundamental performance concepts like correlation...
Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization
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 Framework Essentials
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...
Towards Healthier Apps Through Observability
Observability has exploded onto the software engineering zeitgeist over the last five years, and for a good reason. However, it suffers from being misunderstood and sometimes equated with a closely related subject—monitoring. This confusion is compounded by the fact that some of the existing tools and frameworks just adopted a lot of the observability terminology in just the letter of the word, not the intent. Not having a solid grasp on the basics of observability is becoming unacceptable in the world of effective software quality engineering. Kaushal Dalvi shares his experiences in the...
Tuesday, April 29
Holistic Performance Testing for Modern Applications
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...
Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics
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...
Wednesday, April 30
SQL Server Indexing Strategies Using Query Store for Improved Performance in Retrieving Data
In the realm of database management, optimizing query performance is crucial, especially for SQL Server environments dealing with large datasets. The challenge lies in identifying and implementing effective indexing strategies that can significantly enhance data retrieval performance. During her talk, Navya will address the common issues of slow query performance and inefficient indexing, often exacerbated by the complexity of modern data systems and the dynamic nature of query patterns. To tackle this problem, she leveraged SQL Server's Query Store feature, which provides a powerful tool...
Performance Assurance and SRE - Panel
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-...
Revolutionizing Load Testing: Our 5-Year Journey with PewPew
In Paul Burnside's organization, there was a need for a new load testing approach in the age of microservices a few years ago and the decision was made to develop a new free open-sourced tool. Join Paul, as he discusses why "virtual users" are outdated for modern service testing and how endpoint testing is the solution. The session will cover the decision to open-source and the key features and benefits including cost savings on AWS, access to raw data, customizable reports for monitoring and analysis, built with Rust for performance and a user-friendly design. Paul will demonstrate a...
Thursday, May 1
Why Testing Needs to Be Part of Your Brand Loyalty Strategy
Every experience counts – In a recent Sauce Labs study, 57% of consumers said they’d consider switching to a competitor after just 3-4 negative interactions with a company’s website, software, or mobile app. With all the options available, consumers are growing less forgiving, putting a bigger emphasis on the need for a clear brand loyalty strategy that takes the execution of the digital experience into bigger consideration. Design and engineering are key to the equation and the culmination of that is implementing a testing strategy – one that makes the rollout and updating of new features...