STARWEST 2018
PRESENTATIONS
Help! I am Drowning In 2 Week Sprints....Please Tell Me What NOT to Test!
Sometimes we allow ourselves to drown in work… Mary Thorn hears it all the time: testers complaining at retrospectives to their teams that they do not have enough time to test everything. She often sees testers work overtime the last week of a sprint to ensure the definition of done is accomplished. Why do they do this? Why do we, as testers, enable the bad behaviors of “Scrummerfall” or a lack of whole-team ownership of quality? |
Mary Thorn |
How to Automate Testing for Next-Generation Interfaces (BOTs, Alexa, Mobile)
Today’s IT systems communicate with customers through multiple points of engagement and various interfaces, ranging from web, mobile, and voice to BOTs and apps like Alexa and Siri. Sanil Pillai says these systems need to provide seamless handoffs between different points of interaction—while at the same time providing relevant and contextual information quickly. |
Sanil Pillai |
Improve Planning Estimates by Reducing Your Human Biases
Are you puzzled about why your estimate turned out wrong, or stressed from working to meet an impossible deadline? Some teams on inaccurately estimated projects suffer stress, burnout, and poor quality as pressure is applied to stick to an unrealistic schedule. Such project teams also descend into irrational decision-making—with potentially catastrophic consequences. Frustratingly, even when teams perform well, they are often judged by their failure to meet impossible deadlines. |
Andrew Brown |
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. |
Robert Sabourin |
Managing BDD Automation Test Cases inside Test Management Systems
Behavior-driven development (BDD) has been around for a while and is here to stay. However, the added abstraction levels pose a technical problem for writing and managing tests. While BDD does a great job of marrying the nontechnical aspect of test writing to the technical flow of an application under test, keeping this information under source control becomes problematic. |
Max Saperstone |
Marrying Artificial Intelligence with Software Testing: Challenges & Opportunities
Emerging technologies such as the internet of things (IoT) and cloud computing have introduced a significant software variety and complexity. Wendy Siew Wen Chin and Heng Kar Lau explain that testers are challenged to support a wide product portfolio within harsh time, resource and budget constraints. More test automation may seem to be a solution to test efficiency, however there are many inefficient hot spots throughout the test automation life cycle. Join Wendy and Heng Kar as they share their experiences from the Intel IoT team. |
Wendy Siew Wen Chin |
Measuring and Maximizing Crowdsourced Vulnerability Discovery
There are many crowdsourcing vulnerability discovery techniques available today, making it difficult for testers to choose an approach that finds important vulnerabilities while offering the best bang for the buck. Join Mike Shema as he shares several years of real-world data that will help you understand the different discovery techniques, such as bug bounty programs and scanners, and the best time to use each technique. |
Mike Shema |
Mission Critical Automation Testing
When critical subsystems fail, the resulting losses can be catastrophic. In the insurance industry, if premiums are miscalculated, defect costs can reach well over a million dollars. In this session, Mike Keith and Dom Nunley draw on their practical experience with insurance systems testing to provide an overview of combinatorial automation testing for high-risk backend system areas—i.e., features that absolutely must work correctly. |
Mike Keith |
No More Shelfware—Let’s Drive
When Isabel Evans learned to drive a car, she also learned how to check, clean, and change spark plugs, mend the fan belt with a stocking, and indicate speed and direction changes with arm and hand signals. Now, we don’t expect to have to do any of those things; we just drive the car. That’s how test tools and automation could be. Just drive and concentrate on the journey of delivering software continuously—concentrate on engineering the solutions, not on the automation. |
Isabel Evans |
Rediscover Exploratory Testing
The testing community is caught between a rock and a hard place when it comes to exploratory testing. Although exploratory testing has been around for ages, it often leads to more confusion than clarity. Is exploratory testing an activity-something that you do? Or is it an approach-a way or a style of doing something? Isn't all testing exploratory? When do you do it? How do you do it properly? How does it relate to the entire software lifecycle? |
Ingo Philipp |