STAREAST 2024 - Test Leadership
Monday, April 29
The How and When of Communication
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...
Debunking the QA KPI Myths and Make KPI Great Again
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...
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...
Become Your Company's Quality Consultant
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...
Tuesday, April 30
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 Jeff Pierce as he...
Confident Communication Drives Powerful Quality Leadership
PreviewDriving a culture of quality starts with effective communication. Join Stacy Kirk and Erika Chestnut to unlock your communication superpowers! Imagine a cheat code that helps us boost productivity and team vibes by 10x. We will leverage behavior self-assessments to help discover your unique strengths, communication styles, and reactions to challenges. Stacy and Erika will help you learn to communicate effectively with your team, management, and cross-functional teams to build a culture of quality. You will learn to assess how others best receive and process information and how to...
Agile Test & Transformation Leadership in Action
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...
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...
Wednesday, May 1
Bridging Gaps, Building Connections: A Hungarian Testing Story
The beautiful Hungarian city of Budapest seems to be characterized by bridging gaps and building connections. Two diverse parts of the city, Buda and Pest, are separated by the Danube river, which gave them the opportunity to be connected by the iconic Chain Bridge. Budapest is also the birthplace of one of the most brilliant and influential scientists of the 20th century, John von Neumann. Neumann made significant contributions that “bridged” multiple areas including mathematics, physics, economics and computer science. In the software world, you may have already heard the name “Földházi...
Great Products Come from Engineering Teams Who Value Quality and User Empathy
Christina Thalayasingam often stumbles upon memes that show testers celebrating when they find a bug. Painting a picture that testers thrive on “proving developers wrong”. This is upsetting. The mindset that the quality of the product is owned by someone with a testing-specific role and user empathy is only something related to product and design, still prevails. She manages an engineering team and comes from a background that strongly values function and non-functional testing. However, she is a developer. Her team believes in quality and that there is no segregation on who owns the...
API Testing Automation and CI/CD Integration
API Testing is a critical component of modern software development, ensuring the reliability and functionality of applications programing interfaces. However, integrating API testing into a robust CI/CD pipeline poses unique challenges with maintaining consistency and accuracy in test results across various environments and versions of the API. Changes in API endpoints, data formats, or authentication methods often result in test failures that will be difficult to trace and troubleshoot. To address these challenges, API versioning and automated API testing needs to be implemented. This...
The Dark Side of Agile Metrics: Unmasking Hidden Dangers
PreviewIn the ever-evolving landscape of agile software development, metrics have emerged as crucial navigational tools, guiding teams towards their goals. However, amid the brilliance of metrics lies a hidden, often misunderstood, and potentially perilous side. As we explore the uncharted side of metrics, we will unveil the misconceptions, pitfalls, and clandestine dangers lurking behind agile metrics. Delve into real-world scenarios where the relentless pursuit of vanity metrics led to the accrual of technical debt, an increase in defect density, and the demoralization of once-thriving...
Brick by Brick: Constructing the Ultimate User Testing Team
PreviewThe testing profession assembles its own team of 'master testers' with technical, automation, performance, and security roles. However, placing the end user as the final building block in your testing team can unlock valuable insights about your product's design and usability, helping to transform it into a true masterpiece. Constraints like time, access to end users, or user testing experience often prevent organizations from tapping directly into the end user's perspectives. Join Kris and Courtney to learn how they created a specialized user testing team in a multinational...
AgileWARE Test Automation for DoD Network Testing
Join Charles Reynolds as he walks you through the experience of delivering test automation to the DoD (DISA) to facilitate rapid deployment of new releases of software and firmware for networking devices used to provide DoD networks. Additionally, the goal was to provide rapid infrastructure deployment for tier 3 support engineering to address new issues as they arose. At one point the DoD was several revisions behind in deploying to the field allowing for significant vulnerabilities in our nation’s networks. See how AgileWARE (a custom Agile Workflow And Resource Enablement COTS tool) was...
Treating Your Test Tools like a Real Product
PreviewHave you ever had a QA tool fail to gain momentum? Ever had a splintered array of test automation frameworks that does the exact same thing across your quality engineering organization? Ever have a hard time getting leadership to sign off for tools that you know could easily boost testing productivity? If you answered yes to any of these, come join Albrecht in this crash course in building your quality engineering roadmap. In this session, Albrecht will go over how to build a product roadmap that aligns with your organization's goals and identify key milestones, to ensure your...
Agile Testing: Ensuring Quality in Fast-Paced Development Environments
Speed and quality are not mutually exclusive. Agile testing is essential to ensuring software quality while allowing for quick iterations. How can you strike the right balance between maintaining high-quality software and meeting aggressive development timelines? In this session, you will learn how to navigate the dynamic landscape of agile testing and uncover strategies for maintaining software quality in high-velocity development settings. Explore the interplay between agile methodologies and testing practices, discovering how to seamlessly integrate quality assurance without...
A Crash Course In Getting Started with Cypress
PreviewIn 2024, the amount of new technologies and practical applications to software testing principles can leave any software tester looking to advance their career in test automation feeling overwhelmed. In this interactive session, Anna will share the applied learning models that she has developed over her 10+ years of experience in the field to empower you on your test automation learning journey. You will gain a deeper understanding of Cypress, a user-friendly framework, to help you write your first automated test, as well learn practical tips and tricks on how to further develop...
Modern Test Automation Strategies - A Panel
Love it or hate it, test automation drives a large part of our day-to-day lives as testers. But writing and maintaining software automation doesn't HAVE to be painful! Learn from a panel of automation experts - including Janna Loeffler, Adam Auerbach, and more - about how their teams have built reliable automation tooling and infrastructure that can stand the test of time. Moderated by Melissa Benua, the panel will answer YOUR questions and help you address the challenges that we all face when scaling our test automation to match modern continuous delivery needs. You don't have to...
Lightning Strikes the Keynotes
Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR conferences. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consists of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. And now, lightning has struck the STAR keynotes. Some of the best-known experts in testing will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning. Get multiple keynote presentations for the price of one—and...
Thursday, May 2
Small QA Team Survival Strategies
Are you and your team having trouble managing your workload? Is your Dev to QA ratio completely out of whack? Do you need help convincing management that one or two extra hands would make a difference? Amanda will draw from her experience on teams of various sizes to provide examples of how to organize the QA workload into manageable pieces without losing your sanity. She will also give advice on how to outsource to other non-QA team members that can assist with getting stories to done and avoid potential bottlenecks. We’ll also discuss ways to get developer assistance with unit and...
How Green Is Your Testing?
The evolution of testing from manual to automated has created a stir around efficiency and savings. Today we are delivering the best products while exploring ways to save energy and money. At the enterprise level, delivery managers and executives are looking for ways to reduce their carbon footprint and save money in all areas of the DevOps lifecycle. As the world collaborates to meet the net zero carbon emissions by 2050, the DevOps team is at the center of sustainability. Sustainability is how we co-exist with the planet by making choices that will sustain the planet for generations...
Innovative Horizons: Exploring Creative Approaches in Test Automation
Discover how creativity and cutting-edge technology intersect to redefine testing practices. Through interactive sessions and real-world examples, uncover creative and engaging ways to encourage your team in test automation. Join Hajer to unlock new levels of efficiency, engagement, and innovation in test automation and stay ahead of the curve in today's rapidly evolving landscape. The journey will take you beyond traditional methodologies, embracing gamification, AI-driven testing, and test orchestration to shape the future of automation. This session will teach you to push the...
AI in Testing: A Moderated Panel Discussion
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.
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. Our discussion will navigate through these challenges and unveil strategies to harness the full potential of DevOps in the embedded systems...
Elevating Software Quality: Strategies for Qualifying Products Used by Millions
PreviewIn the dynamic world of software development, guaranteeing top-tier product quality for a broad user base is a formidable challenge. This talk confronts this challenge head-on with a strategy to enhance software quality. Vijay will cover how to decode Minimum Viable Product (MVP) requirements, forming the bedrock of your testing strategy. Then learn how to prioritize test plan coverage aligned with these requirements for precise testing. Ensure you smoothly onboard new QA team members with a comprehensive "Quick Start Guide." This accelerates their contributions to quality assurance...
Supercharge Your Confidence As a Tester in the DevOps and AI Era
In software development, particularly in the DevOps and AI era, the role of a tester is both crucial and challenging. WE need to aim to empower testers with strategies to excel in this environment, ensuring they deliver the highest quality applications. In this keynote, you will learn how to manage expectations and instill confidence in your team along the software delivery process. Join Lisette to explore effective communication techniques with stakeholders, establishing trust and demonstrating value from the project's inception. Discover how to continuously leverage key performance...