|
|
Building a Successful Test Automation Strategy You have been told repeatedly that test automation is a good thing and that you need to automate your testing. So, how do you know where to start? If you have started and your efforts don’t seem to be paying back your investment, what should you do? Although you believe automation is a good thing, how can you convince your management? Karen Rosengren takes you through a set of practical and proven steps to build a customized test automation strategy based on your organization’s needs. She focuses on the real problem you are trying to solve-repetitive manual test effort that can be significantly reduced through automation. Using concrete examples, Karen shows you how to develop a strategy for automation that addresses real-not theoretical-savings. She shares how she has demonstrated the business value of automation to executives and gained both buy-in and the necessary budget to be successful.
|
Karen Rosengren, IBM Global Services
|
|
|
Take a Chance-Testing Lessons Learned from the Game of MONOPOLY® For years, MONOPOLY® has entertained countless people with the fictional thrill of what it might be like to make a killing in real estate-or to lose your shirt. As Rob Sabourin explains, the board game is similar to the real-world experience of running a software test project. Rob guides you through some of MONOPOLY's powerful lessons and strategies relating to test planning, risk management, technical debt, context-driven test strategies, contingencies, and decision making. In MONOPOLY, winning players consistently select, adapt, and apply strategies. Skilled testers adapt on the fly to their discoveries, applying heuristics and risk models to consistently deliver value. Winning at MONOPOLY, just like successful testing, is all about people: relationships, negotiation, and communication. To succeed in testing or MONOPOLY, you've got to be ready for whatever drawbacks or opportunities Chance happens to throw your way.
|
Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
|
|
|
The Human Side of Testing Software testing is a unique profession. We're engaged in critiquing highly complex systems that typically are poorly understood-even by those developing them-and usually forged in an environment of high stakes, enormous pressure, and competing priorities. Every day we deal with delicate egos, defensive reactions, shrinking timeframes, and diminishing resources, all within the context of an uncertain world economic situation. Join Thomas McCoy as he takes a sometimes-irreverent look at the human issues that beleaguer our profession. Learn about our socio-political context, the “fear factor” within many IT projects, the blame game, rewards and punishments, impression management, keeping our energy level and optimism high, identifying whom we are really serving, the testing vocation, and having our contributions valued.
|
Thomas McCoy, Department of FaHCSIA
|
|
|
Becoming a Great Tester: Inspiration, Perspiration, and Renewal Three recent and contrasting trends in software development and IT-agile methods, increasing infrastructure complexity, and the requirement to align more closely with business stakeholders-are reshaping testing’s role. As a test manager or tester, you need to develop new knowledge and skills to remain relevant-and employed. In this eye-opening session, Isabel Evans describes the new expertise you must acquire and explores the aptitude, self-motivation, and hard work required to constantly renew your knowledge and skills. With a little inspiration, a bit of luck, and perseverance, you can grow to become a great tester and remain a vital part of your test and development team. The challenges of our changing world demand a renewal of technical expertise and continuous attention to your social, communication, and business skills.
|
Isabel Evans, Testing Solutions Group Ltd
|
|
|
STARWEST 2010 Keynote: Lightening Strikes the Keynotes Lightning Talks have been a very popular part of many STAR conferences throughout the years. If you’re not familiar with the concept, a Lightning Talk session consists of a series of five-minute talks by different presenters within one presentation period. For the speakers, Lightning Talks are the opportunity to deliver their single biggest-bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. For the first time, lightning has struck the STAR keynote presentations. Some of the experts in testing-James Bach, Jon Bach, Julie Gardiner, Dorothy Graham, Jonathan Kohl, Randy Rice, Lloyd Roden, and Rob Sabourin-will each step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning. With no time to dither or vacillate-and hemming and hawing forbidden-you’ll get eight keynote presentations for the price of one and have some fun at the same time.
|
Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
|
|
|
Test Team Leadership-Yes, There's a Place for It in Agile One of the gravest misconceptions about the agile methodologies isn’t about documentation, teamwork, quality, or productivity. It’s about the role of leadership and management in the adoption and sustained operation of agile practices. In no place is this more visible than in statements such as “We don’t need no stinking test managers … we’re agile.” Bob Galen explores this common misconception and shares his experiences of the proper role of leadership and management within agile test teams. He explains the concept of “servant leadership” and illustrates its practice with healthy and unhealthy examples he’s observed in the real world. Bob examines the relationship among the whole-team quality focus of agile, the test practices that agility demands, and the role of a test leader-whether as a manager or an individual contributor.
|
Bob Galen, iContact
|
|
|
You're Either On the Train or On the Tracks: Radical Realities Shaping Our Future Because the number of applications and environments are exploding, the rate of change is increasing exponentially, and the scope of risk has never been wider or deeper. Collectively, these forces are creating a flood of transformations within software development that will not stop or slow down for testing. Test practices as we know them today must evolve quickly-or die. Linda Hayes describes how-rather than struggling against radical changes and becoming a relic of bygone days-we can ride this momentum by leveraging new technologies, tools, and market dynamics to make testing vital in this radical new reality. Learn how to integrate cloud computing, virtualization, SOA, and mobile devices into your test strategy. Convert your concerns about risk into a compelling business case for renewed commitment and resources for testing.
|
Linda Hayes, Worksoft, Inc.
|
|
|
Agile Test Automation Development We can apply agile development practices to test automation like any other software development project. The good news is … using agile practices for test automation projects addresses some of the classic problems of test automation: when and what to build, increasing automation execution to achieve extended return-on-investment, and test automation teams “going dark” for long periods of time. Sharing a case study, Monica Luke demonstrates how adopting agile principles increases the test automation team’s visibility and productivity while providing higher value automation. She addresses the special challenges of building automation in real-time while the product is also under development and explores GUI test automation issues. Learn how to incorporate stakeholder feedback, time-boxed iterations, demos, and other agile concepts into your test automation initiatives.
|
Monica Luke, IBM Rational
|
|
|
Better Software Conference West 2010: Concurrent Testing Games: Developers and Testers Working Together The best software development teams find ways for programmers and testers to work closely together to build quality into their software. These teams recognize that programmers and testers each bring their own unique strengths and perspectives to the table. Only by building upon this combination can we reach our full potential to consistently deliver quality. To do this, we first have to unlearn the anti-patterns that traditional development taught us. In this interactive workshop, learn how to use Concurrent Testing to overcome these common "testing smells" by having programmers and testers working together, rather than against each other, throughout development iterations. Play games to demonstrate just how powerfully dysfunctional systems can act against your best efforts and how agile techniques can help you escape the cycle of poor quality and late delivery.
|
Abby Fichtner, Microsoft
|
|
|
Performance and Security Testing in Agile Development While most organizations are starting to come to terms with the process aspects of agile, they still face challenges when identifying how to modify their testing practices to be more flexible. This is particularly true for security and performance testing where many organizations hold on to a waterfall-style approach, leaving these critical aspects to the end of the release and often leaving the application open to vulnerabilities. Based on her many customer experiences, Tracy DeDore shares the practices she recommends for nonfunctional testing: writing testable user stories, planning for testing beginning at sprint 0, and introducing "hardening" sprints that help users and developers incorporate security and performance testing into agile processes.
|
Tracy DeDore, Hewlett-Packard
|
