STAREAST 2024 - Test Management | TechWell

STAREAST 2024 - Test Management

Customize your STAREAST 2024 experience with sessions covering test management.

Monday, April 29

Chris Loder
Rogue Automator
MD

Test Automation: How to Start and Succeed

Monday, April 29, 2024 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Many organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems as their product matures and changes over time. As a leader, how can you ensure that your new automation efforts will get off to a good start? What can you do to ensure that your automation work provides continuing added value? Chris Loder will explain the critical issues you need to know to get a good start, and he will share his extensive experience in building great automation. He covers the most important management issues you should address for test automation success,...

EPAM Systems
ME

The How and When of Communication

Monday, April 29, 2024 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Grafana k6
MF

Ramping Up Modern Performance

Monday, April 29, 2024 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Lisette Zounon
Zsquare Solutions Inc.
MG

Debunking the QA KPI Myths and Make KPI Great Again

Monday, April 29, 2024 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Janna_Loeffler
mParticle
MH

Test Automation Strategies: Navigating DevOps, Agile, and Complex Technologies

New
Monday, April 29, 2024 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Adam Satterfield
Qualifacts
Janna_Loeffler
mParticle
MI

Test Strategies for a Modern World

Monday, April 29, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

With the advent of DevOps, Agile, and ever-increasing complex technologies under test, the classic, the bloated test strategy document has quickly become outdated. Many testers struggle to understand how to convey complex testing tasks concisely. However, there is hope! There is a way to create a concise, actionable, and useful test strategy for Agile, DevOps, and even the dreaded Waterfall! Janna and Adam will leverage real-world test strategies that they have used and will break down the critical components and detail out how to create a test strategy, no matter what development style...

Adam_Auerbach
EPAM Systems
ML

Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization

Monday, April 29, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Chris Loder
Rogue Automator
MM

Automation Framework Essentials

Monday, April 29, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Tuesday, April 30

Jeff Pierce
Coveros
TE

Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics

Tuesday, April 30, 2024 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Tom-Stiehm
Coveros
TF

Web Security Testing: The Basics and More

Tuesday, April 30, 2024 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Web applications are often security critical or serve as front-ends for security critical applications, making web testing for vulnerabilities an essential part of software testing. Unfortunately, most software testers have not been taught how to identify web security issues while testing applications. Join Tom Stiehm as he shares what you need to know to security test web-based applications as part of your overall testing process. Learn about the most common web security vulnerabilities and how they are introduced into web code and exploited by hackers. Explore test techniques for...

Realtor.com
TH

Confident Communication Drives Powerful Quality Leadership

Preview
Tuesday, April 30, 2024 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Driving 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...

Mike_Sowers
Coveros
TK

Agile Test & Transformation Leadership in Action

Tuesday, April 30, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
TL

Integrating Automated Testing into DevOps

Tuesday, April 30, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

In many organizations, agile development processes are driving the pursuit of faster software releases, which has spawned a set of new practices—DevOps. DevOps stresses communications and integration between development and operations, including rapid deployment, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. Because DevOps practices require confidence that changes made to the code base will function as expected, automated testing is essential. Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the unique challenges associated with integrating automated testing into continuous integration/continuous...

TM

Holistic Performance Testing for Modern Applications

Tuesday, April 30, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.Com, Inc.
TN

The Influential Tester in Agile Development

Tuesday, April 30, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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-...

Melissa Benua
mParticle
TO

Test Smarter, Not Harder: How to Design Test Suites for Continuous Delivery

Tuesday, April 30, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Imagine: as soon as any developed functionality is submitted into the code repository, it is automatically subjected to the appropriate battery of tests and then released straight into the wild. Setting up the pipeline to do just that has become commonplace, but most organizations hit the same stumbling block: just what IS the appropriate battery of tests? Automated build pipelines don't always lend themselves well to the traditional stages of testing. In this hands-on tutorial, Melissa will introduce testers to the key principles of test case and test suite design that apply to...

Wednesday, May 1

Stacy Kirk
QualityWorks Consulting
K1

Fast Not Furious: The Next Era of Test Productivity

Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - 8:30am to 9:45am

The next era of testing is here, and it's crazy fast. So fast, it would no doubt infuriate those who are not ready for it. In this talk, Stacy will discuss how testing professionals should build a responsive culture without sacrificing quality or customer experience to speed. She will detail how automation and AI must be incorporated into the new industry standard. Stacy will address how expanding our impact to areas like Data Quality, FinOps, and Ethics will usher in faster advances for business value. She will define how productivity has been and should be measured so that teams...

Péter Földházi
EPAM Systems
K2

Bridging Gaps, Building Connections: A Hungarian Testing Story

Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

Northwestern Mutual
W2

Great Products Come from Engineering Teams Who Value Quality and User Empathy

Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Perficient Inc
W3

API Testing Automation and CI/CD Integration

Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Ashraya Iyer
BOK Financial
W4

The Dark Side of Agile Metrics: Unmasking Hidden Dangers

Preview
Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

In 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...

W5

Enabling Reliable Test Automation Though Isolation: Mocking HTTP Services Using Mountebank

Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Have you ever found yourself at a time when you have no control over an internal or external service and while your automation was running it failed due to instability in that service? Well, to automate tests in a safe and reliable way, you need to have control of the environment. When not available, one option is to isolate your application by creating mocks of the services. In this talk, Júlio will go through a use case scenario using Mountebank (mbtest.org), an open-source tool that enables us to create HTTP mocks, to remove the dependencies related to an external HTTP service in order...

PwC LLP
Courtney Six
PwC LLP
W8

Brick by Brick: Constructing the Ultimate User Testing Team

Preview
Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

The 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...

julia-pottinger
QualityWorks Consulting Group
W9

Next Level API Automation: Testing the Boundaries

Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

APIs are an essential part of an increasingly large number of applications that we use daily. APIs enable applications to exchange data and functionality easily and securely. As testers, we want to ensure that our APIs do not break and provide the expected functionality. In this workshop, Julia Pottinger will get you started with automating APIs, creating a checklist of things needed to automate an API, automating workflows and negative tests for your API as well as checking that your APIs handle errors appropriately, follow the specified schema, and don't reveal data that it shouldn’t or...

Technical Systems Integrators
W10

AgileWARE Test Automation for DoD Network Testing

Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

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...

Platform Science
W14

Treating Your Test Tools like a Real Product

Preview
Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Have 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...

W15

Automated Mobile App Testing on Various Physical and Virtual Devices

Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Many organizations face the issue today whereby their customers have a wide range of mobile devices upon which their application runs making it challenging to find all potential defects. To accomplish testing of various devices would require an organization to purchase many physical devices and maintain them. Join Alanzo as he walks you through how his team validated the functionality and compatibility of their mobile app in various environments and on various mobile devices through use of a robust test environment. He will outline how developing automated scripts, implementing a...

Quality Works Consulting Group LLC
W16

Agile Testing: Ensuring Quality in Fast-Paced Development Environments

Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

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...

TechWell Corp.
K3

Lightning Strikes the Keynotes

Wednesday, May 1, 2024 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

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

K4

The Art of Testing Cars and Delighting Drivers

Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 8:30am to 9:30am

Welcome to the era of rolling autonomous death machines, also known as the era of the software-defined autonomous vehicle. As companies like Tesla have proven, modern car buyers value software driven experiences at a growing rate. No longer are cars just about horsepower but are now really about personalization, entertainment, and comfort. They are also all becoming at least semi-autonomous with level 4 autonomy coming within the decade. In this new world, continuous deployment and deep learning AI will change the user's experience with the modern vehicle. Even today, all modern cars...

Auction Edge
T2

Small QA Team Survival Strategies

Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 9:45am to 10:45am

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...

Tariq King
Test IO
T6

AI in Testing: A Moderated Panel Discussion

Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 9:45am to 10:45am

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.

Teaching Strategies
T8

Was I Supposed to Use a Teaspoon or a Tablespoon? Creating Your Leadership Recipe

Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

Wouldn't it be great if leadership was an easy recipe with clear and concise instructions? 1-part hard work, 1-part knowledge, a dash of self-confidence, sprinkle with humility and grace, and bake for the duration of your career. Perfection! Unfortunately, leadership is a complex recipe, and the measurements can be extremely tricky to get right. Even worse, if the ingredients in your recipe are slightly altered, it might seem like the recipe wasn't a success. But cooking is an artistic endeavor; recipes can be adapted and so can your leadership journey. Join Christine as she helps you...

T11

Integration Testing with Cypress

Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

Running tests on a live environment (as opposed to a mocked one) is generally an anti-pattern within the Cypress community. You won’t find many (if any!) articles explaining how to do so, or how to do so successfully. However, live app testing can sometimes be critical when it comes to integration testing; as it helps you find bugs your mocked tests just won’t find. These bugs are usually critical and can make or break your production deployments. Stephanie McSwain has seen it work first hand and it’s been eye opening. Join this session and Stephanie will show you how, when, and why to...

Slalom, Inc.
T12

Managing Test Data in Enterprise Environments

Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

Managing test data is hard. Managing test data in complex, distributed, poorly documented, and organization-spanning enterprise software is substantially harder. In enterprise systems test data is convoluted, hidden, and hard to synthesize, the test environments it flows through are shared and unstable, and the test scenarios dependent on it are long and complex. These challenges combine to cripple many test automation efforts in enterprise software. In this talk Blake Norrish will describe what an optimal test data management strategy looks like, how the nature of enterprise software...

Deepika Kale
Guardant Health
T17

Kafka and Kafka Testing: Streamlining Real-time Data Processing

Preview
Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

In today's data-driven landscape, real-time data processing is the backbone of modern applications. Kafka, a distributed event streaming platform, has emerged as a critical component in building data-intensive systems. This presentation provides an in-depth exploration of Kafka and the essential practice of Kafka testing, offering attendees valuable insights into harnessing the power of real-time data streams while ensuring robust system reliability. You will be introduced to Kafka and to understanding Kafka's architecture and core components, as well as the importance of Kafka...

Vijay Lathia
Bose Corporation
T19

Elevating Software Quality: Strategies for Qualifying Products Used by Millions

Preview
Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

In 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...

Dorothea Bozicolona-Volpe
Social Espionage
T20

How To Become A QA Influencer—6 Steps Toward Building A Stronger Digital You!

Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Today IT leadership & QA executives of the world’s top brands all have strong, significant & differentiating personal brands to differentiate them in their industry. Whether you are an associate, executive, sales person, business leader, or human resources professional in an organization, who you are matters as much as how you communicate it. Now more than ever it is important to get your voice heard and establish your reputation on and off line. Learn the tips and tricks for building your personal brand from the expert that taught several IT & C-Suite executives, business...

Discover Financial Services
T22

From Raw Data to Actionable Insights: Mastering Testing Metrics for Effective Decision Making

Preview
Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

In today's rapidly evolving engineering landscape, metrics play a crucial role in assessing performance, making data-driven decisions, and driving successful project outcomes. Engineers who can effectively create, interpret, and present impactful data metrics have a distinct advantage in driving innovation and driving organizational success. This presentation dives deep into the essential skills and techniques necessary for engineers to excel in the realm of testing metrics. Join Cholette to delve into the different types of testing metrics. Explore how engineers can set clear...

Testlio
T23

Embracing Accessibility: Adapting to the Human Side of WCAG 2.2 Testing

Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

The slow adoption of accessibility guidelines, particularly Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.2, remains a consistent challenge within the software development community. Companies often struggled to integrate accessibility into their DevOps cycles, as compliance necessitated substantial changes in development practices and KPIs. Many auditors tend to test websites reactively, hindering the evolution of understanding and accessibility testing techniques. Recognizing that viewing accessibility guidelines as a growth opportunity can lead to improved products and happier...

Lisette Zounon
Zsquare Solutions Inc.
K5

Supercharge Your Confidence As a Tester in the DevOps and AI Era

Thursday, May 2, 2024 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

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...