STAREAST 2025 - Testing in DevOps
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...
Testing from the Inside: Unit Testing Edition
Do you want to take your testing and/or development skills to the next level? Are you working in an agile team where you are trying to shift-left so that your organization can reap the full benefits of testing earlier? In software testing, you're generally taught to think outside the box, from a user's perspective. However, sometimes great ideas can be sparked from inside the box, by looking at the underlying code and using that knowledge to identify various ways to break the software. Join Tariq King as he walks through the fundamentals of program-based testing so that you can find bugs...
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...
Test Automation Strategies: Navigating DevOps, Agile, and Complex Technologies
In the era of DevOps, agile methodologies, and the ever-expanding landscape of intricate technologies, the traditional bulky test automation strategy document has rapidly lost its relevance. Testers are grappling with the challenge of succinctly communicating intricate testing objectives. Yet, a beacon of optimism shines through! A streamlined, actionable, and impactful test automation strategy tailored for agile, DevOps, and even the notorious waterfall approach is within reach. Join Janna as she draws upon real-world test strategies from her experience, deconstructing the essential...
Full Stack Testing for Microservices Architectures
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...
Tuesday, April 29
Crafting Metrics that Drive DevOps and QA Excellence
When delivering high-quality software at speed, metrics are pivotal in driving informed decisions and continuous improvement. However, not all metrics are created equal. Misguided Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) can lead to confusion inefficiency, and even undermine your DevOps and QA transformation efforts. In this session, we’ll combine the power of DORA metrics with practical strategies to craft metrics that redefine how your organization measures success. Drawing on real-world experience, we’ll discuss the purpose of metrics and learn how to determine the true purpose of QA and...
Wednesday, April 30
Test Automation Tune-Up with Cypress: Fixing Common Pitfalls and Boosting Efficiency
Sluggish tests, flakiness, and maintenance headaches can be signs of test automation anti-patterns creeping into your codebase. In this session, Anna Patterson will identify the most common pitfalls developers and testers encounter in Cypress—such as excessive reliance on UI interactions, hard-coded waits, unstable test data, and lack of isolation. She will break down how these issues impact your test reliability and offer actionable strategies to overcome them. By the end of the talk, you’ll be equipped with the knowledge to optimize your test suite for speed, stability, and long-term...
Elevating Test Leadership: Strategies for Effective Team Management and Career Growth
Mastering test leadership involves not only guiding your team through complex testing scenarios but also fostering their professional development and advancing your own career trajectory. In today’s fast-evolving tech landscape, test leaders face the challenge of balancing rigorous quality assurance with identifying the talent, development of team’s skills and career trajectories. During his tenure as Practice Head of Quality Engineering at a major tech firm, Srinivas Rao Labhani implemented a comprehensive strategy of implementing a sense of belongingness to the organization, learning...
Thursday, May 1
Redefining Quality: Empowering Autonomous Teams for SaaS Excellence
Traditional roles within software development teams are being redefined in today’s fast-paced world of cloud platforms and Software as a Service (SaaS). The rise of DevOps has blurred the boundaries between development and operations, emphasizing speed, agility, and continuous delivery. Amid this transformation, the debate about whether to have a separate QA team is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Instead, the focus should shift to building autonomous, cross-functional teams equipped with the skills and ownership required to deliver high-quality SaaS products efficiently. Ronit...
Harnessing the Power of Large Language Models: Automatically Generating High-Quality, Readable, and Maintainable Unit Test Cases for Java and Python
In this talk, Lisa Waugh will discuss the challenges in delivering high-quality software due to manual testing and the need for automated unit test generation. Despite the development of techniques and tools to automatically generate unit tests, the generated tests often suffer from poor readability and lack resemblance to developer-written tests. To address these issues, Lisa's team has investigated the use of large language models (LLMs) to improve the readability and usability of automatically generated tests. They have created a pipeline to guide LLMs in generating high-coverage,...
Starting Small: Piloting Automated Testing Capabilities for an Unemployment Insurance Service
In a complex, regulated legacy environment with minimal test automation and tight deadlines, technical and non-technical challenges can make it difficult to accelerate the QA process. This session uses Mighty Acorn Digital's experience launching an automated testing program for the New Jersey Unemployment Insurance Modernization initiative as a case study on introducing automation to ensure safety across thousands of test scenarios spanning multiple different technologies. Introducing test automation in this environment presented several challenges. There was skepticism about the...
Navigating the Intersection of Security Testing and Secured App Testing
In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, ensuring the security of applications has become paramount. However, the traditional manual approaches to security testing and functional testing of apps once they have been secured is time-consuming, error-prone, and often fails to keep pace with emerging threats. This session will explore the challenges and opportunities at the intersection of automating security testing and testing secured applications. Karen will delve into a real-world case study where her team faced the daunting task of securing a complex application. By using multiple...
Scaling Automated Tests to Infinity and Beyond
Testing is a risk-mitigating activity that takes time. Ideally, we want to cover as many behaviors as possible in the shortest amount of time for fast feedback. The only way to speed up is to scale up. But how? This talk outlines a playbook for the five most impactful ways to scale up tests. From improving infrastructure to arranging tests more efficiently down to refining the performance of particular steps, you will learn tried-and-true techniques for running more tests in less time. With this playbook, you could scale up to hundreds of tests running concurrently without crashing. Join...
Uncertainty of Change
Uncertainty and change are inevitable in our complex world, but how we each respond to it can vary from ignoring it to denying it or even trying to stop it. In this talk, Jitesh will examine why we react to uncertainty so poorly by sharing some case studies and then, through the psychology of uncertainty, help explain our responses. He will then discuss how software development is inherently uncertain and how some team's testing approaches can worsen this uncertainty. He will explain how we can reframe testing to reduce uncertainty and help engineering teams work more effectively in...