STAREAST 2025 - DevOps
Customize your STAREAST 2025 experience with sessions covering DevOps.
Sunday, April 27
Fundamentals of AI—ICAgile Certification (ICP-FAI)
Monday, April 28
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...
Tuesday, April 29
A Quality Engineering Introduction to AI and Machine Learning
Although there are several controversies and misunderstandings surrounding AI and machine learning, one thing is apparent — people have quality concerns about the safety, reliability, and trustworthiness of these types of systems. Not only are ML-based systems shrouded in mystery due to their largely black-box nature, they also tend to be unpredictable since they can adapt and learn new things at runtime. Validating ML systems is challenging and requires a cross-section of knowledge, skills, and experience from areas such as mathematics, data science, software engineering, cyber-security,...
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
Revolutionizing API Quality Assurance with Contract Testing and Error Code Analysis
In today’s microservices-driven landscape, ensuring seamless communication between services is critical. Traditional testing methods often fall short when it comes to detecting integration issues early in the development cycle, leading to unexpected failures in production. Contract testing is emerging as a powerful solution to this challenge, providing a way to verify that services meet agreed-upon expectations without relying on full end-to-end testing. This session will delve into the fundamentals of contract testing and how it enhances API quality assurance by detecting inconsistencies...
Expanding Your Testing Scope: Thinking Beyond System Health
A big part of testing is ensuring that you're anticipating and proactively detecting problems before they appear. This means thinking beyond bugs and errors and considering tests that assess your system's ability to meet the needs of the business and customers. For example, most businesses and architectures are designed to deliver operational and cost efficiency. The challenge is, many organizations don't actively test/measure their efficiency. Customers also have expectations about their experience. What testing do you do to evaluate how the system is meeting its experience goals? This...
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. However, adapting these principles to the realm of embedded systems presents distinct challenges and opportunities. The discussion will...
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...
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...
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...