We've all been there. You work incredibly hard to develop a feature and design tests based on written requirements. You build a detailed test plan that aligns the tests with the software and the documented business needs. When you put the tests to the software, it all falls apart because the requirements were updated without informing everyone. But help is at hand. Enter business-driven development and Cucumber, a tool for running automated acceptance tests. Join Mary Thorn as she explores the nuances of Cucumber and shows you how to implement specification-by-example, behavior-driven development, and agile acceptance testing. By fostering collaboration for implementing active requirements via a common language and format, Cucumber bridges the communication gap between business stakeholders and implementation teams.

Developers and testers are under constant pressure to operate more efficiently, cut costs, and deliver on time. Without access to scalable, flexible, and cost effective computing resources, these challenges are magnified. Brett Goodwin explains how to create scalable dev/test environments in the cloud, and shares best practices for reducing cycle time and decreasing project costs. Learn how scalable, cloud-based data centers can run software without complicated re-writes; enable rapid defect resolution with snapshots and clones; and provide global collaboration for multiple product and release teams. Brett presents a case study of Cushman and Wakefield, the world's largest privately held real estate services firm, which struggled with an on-premises development and testing environment.

If you have had your testing window reduced or you are being challenged to do more with less, this session is for you. Mari Kawaguchi shares how she and her team embraced these challenges to transform their testing operating model. Sharing her extensive experience, Mari details the road map that elevated her testing organization to a valued and strategic partner within the organization. Mari describes the strategic components of testing-people, process, and technology-and shares how to assess your team’s skills, build subject matter experts, and ensure the right mindset to drive innovation and change. From a process and technology perspective, she outlines early testing engagement and collaboration, risk based testing, root cause analysis of escaped defects, and performance scorecards. Take back a new toolkit of ways to transform your test team into strategic business partners.

Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a popular model that describes the stages of human psychological development. Anu Kak shares how Maslow's work can be applied to align the quality thinking of a software development organization through a “Hierarchy of Quality.” This builds a quality-centric culture and enhances the quality of products before they are released while quickly learning from mistakes. Anu describes a path beginning at the basic needs for high quality-test plans, defects, regression tests, etc.-and progresses to define what is needed to achieve high levels of sustainable customer satisfaction. Anu describes how “self actualization” in customer quality can be achieved through the process of moving up the hierarchy of needs while sustaining the lower tiers of the model.