Fall OnlineTestConf 2020 - Program
Speakers
December 1st
12:00 – 13:30
Workshop with Rob Lambert
Building diverse, inclusive and effective teams by focusing on behaviours
Rob Lambert is the owner of Cultivated Management, a management training and consulting business for those new to the challenging world of management in the technology industry.
Find him on Twitter: @Rob_Lambert
14:00 – 14:45
Session with Paul Gerrard –
What Testers Need from ML/AI
Abstract:
Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are all the rage now – but how much of it is hype? Of course, great strides are being made in business applications in every domain. But what about testing? Most vendors are including ML/AI in their marketing collateral and a few are actually building intelligent features into their tools. The problem for the practitioner is everyone is doing it differently.
There’s no common definition of ML/AI, there’s no common definition of ML/AI applications in testing and there’s no common terminology. So it’s hard to separate the hype from the hard fact. In this talk, Paul sets out a workable definition of ML/AI and identifies the tool features that a) would be most valuable to testers and b) amenable to ML/AI support. There are some limited constraints to what ML/AI can do – for example:
– They need data from production logging test definition and execution
– Models of system functionality mapped to data and covering tests
- Imagination
Right now, the low hanging fruit is in the packaged applications domain, but the future is bright if we can match ML/AI and data to our testing thought processes to build intelligent test assistants
Take-aways:
– What is a useful definition of ML/AI in the context of testing?
– What features do testers need, that can be supported by ML/AI
– What is the future for ML/AI in testing?
Paul Gerrard
Paul Gerrard is a consultant, teacher, author, webmaster, programmer, tester, conference speaker, rowing coach and publisher. He has conducted consulting assignments in all aspects of software testing and quality assurance, specialising in test assurance. He has presented keynote talks and tutorials at testing conferences across Europe, the USA, Australia, South Africa and occasionally won awards for them.
Educated at the universities of Oxford and Imperial College London, he is a Principal of Gerrard Consulting Limited and the host of the Technology Leadership Forum. He was the Programme Chair for the 2014 EuroSTAR conference in Dublin and for several other conferences in the last decade.
In 2010 he won the EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award and in 2013 he won the inaugural TESTA Lifetime Achievement Award. He won the ISTQB Testing Excellence Award in 2018.
He’s currently working with an Irish government agency to create a future skills framework for software testers.
Web: www.gerrardconsulting.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/paulgerrard
15:00 – 15:45
Session with Mike Lyles –
Discussions Testers Should No Longer Be Having
How many times have you heard statements like, “How did we miss this in test”, “This defect doesn’t happen on my machine”, “We do not need automation”, or “We are waiting on testing to give us the green light”?
Many years ago, Stephen Covey made the statement “Nothing Fails Like Success”. He spoke on how that the things we do to be successful today may not be enough for success tomorrow. This powerful statement can be directly applied to how that the changing landscape of IT is affecting the roles of our project teams. Processes, tools, and approaches that were once successful years ago may not be enough today, tomorrow, and beyond.
This concept relates heavily with the role of test teams today. Discussions we used to have years ago are no longer as relevant now. Waterfall teams have migrated to Agile & DevOps, and there is a need for strategic changes in how we operate within a project and how we communicate across teams.
In this presentation, we will discuss many of the well-known phrases, philosophies, and theories around testing of years past, and how that we must overcome the obstacles and be successful today. We will discuss how the dynamics within the teams must change, and most importantly, how you, as a tester, can influence across the organization.
Key Takeaways:
- Evaluate successes in testing and project teams in the past that have become outdated
- An understanding of the changes we face today within our SDLC processes
- How to identify and address project teams that are stuck in the past
- Tips and guidelines for how to best influence across the team and organization
About Mike Lyles
Mike Lyles is a Director of QA and Project Management with over 25 years of IT experience in multiple organizations, including Fortune 50 companies. He has exposure in various IT leadership roles: software development, program management office, and software testing. He has led various teams within testing organizations: functional testing, test environments, SCM, TDM, performance testing, test automation, and service virtualization.
Mike has been successful in career development, team building, coaching, and mentoring of IT & QA professionals. Mike has been an international keynote speaker at multiple conferences and events, and is regularly published in testing publications and magazines. His first published motivational book, “The Drive-Thru is Not Always Faster”, was released in 2019.
You can learn more about Mike at www.MikeWLyles.com where you can also find his social media links and connect with him there also. His book site is at www.TheDriveThruBook.com
16:00 – 16:45
Session with Jana Gierloff –
Taming the Quality Dragon
What is a quality mindset?
Using fire fighting as an example, the typical response to a fire is to fight it until it is extinguished. Afterwards being ready to fight the next fire when it happens. Having a quality mindset also means responding to a fire by fighting it until it is extinguished.
However, instead of waiting for the next fire, a quality mindset means finding the root cause of the first fire and working to prevent any other fires stemming from that cause.
Based on this our QA Vision consists of 3 statements:
– The whole team is responsible for the quality of the product.
– Every team member who contributes to the product is responsible for the entire feature development life cycle.
– QA is responsible for assisting the whole team in providing high quality.
This talk is about the 5 steps we took to implement this QA Vision, how we built a QA Philosophy and how this approach is being adopted by all teams and members of the QA department.
– A powerful QA Vision and Philosophy
– 5 Steps to Build a Quality Mindset
– How to go from being the bottleneck to become a champion of quality
About Jana
Jana Gierloff is a Senior Quality Assistance Engineer at InnoGames who was introducing and leading the transition to Quality Assistance at Forge of Empires. With 10+ years of experience in the games industry, Jana empowers the team to confidently test by providing trainings, tools, and environments. She has a very good track-record of inspiring testers to take their testing to new levels and to find unexpected bugs in unexpected ways, as well as providing help with all automation matters. Curious and passionate about testing she also speaks at software conferences all over the world.
17:00 – 17:45
Session with Maaret Pyhäjärvi –
A Case of Failure: Pinpointing a problem for correction
In working with many new people, I have come to appreciate the skill of diagnosis. Watching people – test engineers and managers in particular – jump to conclusions a little too early or way too late helped me identify that there is a skill to knowing where the problem lies.
In this session, we look at examples of diagnosing bugs in our test tools, in our software under test, and in our processes. To move from just reporting a problem to reporting a problem in a useful way to being part of solving the problem enables more significant impact from each of us.
We’ll conclude the session with thinking of our role as reporters of information to create change. What kind of information truly moves our colleagues and organizations, and makes a difference, and when should we turn from information providers to full contributors on solutions?
Maaret Pyhäjärvi
Maaret Pyhäjärvi is an exploratory tester extraordinaire with a day-job at Vaisala as Principal Test Engineer. She is a tester, (polyglot) programmer, speaker, author, conference designer and a community facilitator. She is Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person 2016 and Top-100 Most Influential in ICT in Finland 2019.
She blogs at http://visible-quality.blogspot.fi, and is the author of three LeanPub books: Mob Programming Guidebook, Exploratory Testing and Strong-Style Pair Programming. Her web page is http://maaretp.com.
December 2nd
Joel Montvelisky
In addition to serving as PractiTest Architect Joel is also its QA Manager, and he has been working as a tester, QA manager, consultant, trainer and speaker for the last 20 years of his career.
During this time Joel managed QA teams and processes in companies such as Mercury Interactive (currently HP Enterprise), Cahoots, NewChanel, and more.
Originally from Costa Rica, Joel currently resides in Israel, and you can read more about Joel’s views on testing from his professional QABlog – http://qablog.practitest.com/
Find him on Twitter: @joelmonte
14:00 – 14:45
Session with Anne-Marie Charrett-
Job Losses, Pandemics and Fires, Oh My!
Abstract:
Dorothy in the wizard of oz, faced a foreign land with no compass to get home. Her travelling partners weren’t in that good shape either! The tin man lacked a heart, the lion, courage and the scarecrow lacked brains.
In these times, I can relate to Dorothy and her friends very well. With high job losses, a pandemic that seems to have no end, and environmental disasters happening all around the globe, it’s hard to know what the future will look like.
Will this winter ever end? Take heart. There is hope. And that hope is inside us and with us today.
Each of us has a testing brilliance, each of us something unique to share. By focusing on our strengths and on each other, we can become stronger, more adaptable and more confident about facing an uncertain future.
Join me along the yellow brick road, as we look at ways to become resilient and adaptable to change.
Anne-Marie Charrett
Anne-Marie excels at creating spaces where quality thrives. As co-founder of Testing Times and its principle quality engineer, Anne-Marie is the lead advocate on quality engineering and how to navigate change and keep quality in the minds of all. Standing her in good stead is her years of experience as Head of Engineering at Tyro Payment, Quality Engineering Consultant and Test Automation Engineer. Anne-Marie’s technical background as an Electronic Engineer has enabled her to speak to both technical and product expertise. Anne-Marie is an international keynoter having spoken at multiple international conferences.
You can read more about her ideas on her blog https://mavericktester.com and/or catch some of her thoughts on twitter at @charrett.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/testingtimes/
15:00 – 15:45
Session with Tim O’Brien –
Taking the guesswork out of testing
In this talk I will walk through our templatised test mindmap that we have developed over many years, and show you how you can use it to guide through the testing processes of Requirements and Risk Analysis, Planning, Modelling, Testing and Reporting that makes up the test process.
With this template, you will be able to test any application effectively and thoroughly, and at the end of it all, you will have a complete and modern test artefact as evidence of your testing.
* Refresher on good practice test processes
* Templatised mindmap for guided testing of software
* A modern and effortless test artefact tool
Tim O’Brien
Tim began his career in games late in life, returning to school and studying Games Design after finally deciding its time to pursue something he was passionate about. Working in Design for a while, he took up the Quality torch and wielded it with passion.
Tim has been working in the games testing space for 9 years, helping to ship quality products for Wargaming Sydney (World of Tanks, World of Ships), Tru Blu games (Rugby League Live series, Don Bradman Cricket) and others. He is super passionate about using modern testing practices in the gaming space and discovering new and more effective practices to drive testing in an industry with unique challenges.
16:00 – 16:45
Session with Nikhil Bhandari –
From shift left to shift right and beyond
In today’s world, which is fast-changing in terms of technology, digitization and interconnected, you can not just rely on certifying the quality of the product based on customer requirements. There are other key factors which need to be considered which will make your product/solution more robust.
As a new-age QA, you need to think like an engineer, you need to know each and every aspect of the code, architecture, technologies, platform, infrastructure, environment, alerting, monitoring, data science. Shift left gives you an advantage to build the Quality in from the beginning of the cycle and Shift right gives you an opportunity to look into how the product is being used and behaving in the real world.
In this talk, we will cover a real-world scenario on how transformation of Quality Engineering helped deliver an awesome experience to customers. This includes the use of open-source tools and automation of testing/deployment/monitoring.
Key learning 1: Understand Quality Engineering and how it plays an important role in entire SDLC
Key learning 2: Bringing in Quality validations at each and every steps of software development and deployment
Key learning 3: Quality practices in Infrastructure and Monitoring to get best customer experience
Key learning 4: How to get single line of code change deployed to production with best Quality
Key learning 5: Tools … which will help you sail through your journey
Nikhil Bhandari
Nikhil Bhandari has more than 18+ yrs of experience in the Test Engineering and Tools Development area. He is currently working as Group Development Manager at Gibraltar India (Prudential Financial, Inc) where he is heading the Dev Ops, Performance and Tools organization.
Previously, he worked with TiVo where we headed the Quality organization for the Service Engineering team. Earlier, at VISA, Nikhil led tools/framework team for Digital & Mobile group. His team built a unified test automation framework for the dev & test engineers to simplify the automation of business flows, increase productivity and define quality gates.
Prior to that, Nikhil had multiple roles at Intuit over 9+ years leading QA teams for TurboTax, Mint and QuickBooks Online. Nikhil has a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Computer Science and has completed Executive Management program from Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.
17:00 – 17:45
Session with Joel Montvelisky –
Introducing the new role of the Software Testing Architect
Joel Montvelisky
In addition to serving as PractiTest Architect Joel is also its QA Manager, and he has been working as a tester, QA manager, consultant, trainer and speaker for the last 20 years of his career.
During this time Joel managed QA teams and processes in companies such as Mercury Interactive (currently HP Enterprise), Cahoots, NewChanel, and more.
Originally from Costa Rica, Joel currently resides in Israel, and you can read more about Joel’s views on testing from his professional QABlog – http://qablog.practitest.com/
Find him on Twitter: @joelmonte
December 3rd
10:00 – 11:30
Workshop with Raj Subrameyer
Career Advancement for Tech Professionals
When I started my career in IT, I faced several obstacles. Some of them include lack of motivation and guidance, high self-doubt, and low self-esteem, and having to apply for 1293 jobs during the 2008 recession.
Yes, I said that right. Since then, I have discovered different strategies that have transformed my life from having an entry-level job to building a six-figure business. I have helped numerous people get a job and be successful under any circumstances. So how did an average software tester like me make this dramatic transformation?
Come join this workshop where I reveal all my secrets to help you discover your dream job, and become hugely successful. I will share various tips, tricks, and tools related to finding your dream job, cracking interviews, exponentially increasing your salary, becoming a rockstar at work, and building your personal brand. In the new era we live in, success is all about how you differentiate yourself from your competition and impact your lives and others. So, if you are at the forking point of your career, feel stuck, and want practical strategies to become the leader you want to be, this is your chance. Join my workshop and get inspired.
Session Takeaways
= Different ways to identify your dream career and work towards it.
=How to be successful at work. Strategies to set us miles apart from our competition and get the career growth we deserve.
About Raj
Raj Subrameyer is an international keynote speaker, author, and tech career coach who helps people to land their dream job and become successful leaders. He has helped countless individuals discover their zone of genius and leverage it to live a life that they love.
He is a sought-after speaker at various conferences and has been featured in numerous podcast and publications, including Authority Magazine, Thrive Global, Addicted2Success and The Good Men Project. He is also the author of the new book – Skyrocket Your Career.
In his spare time, he loves traveling with his family and discovering new experiences which includes craft beer.
You can connect with him on twitter @epsilon11, or his website www.rajsubra.com.
12:00 – 12:45
Session with Pete Walen –
Evolve or Die: Testing Must Change
Abstract:
In 2011, Alberto Savoia proclaimed “Test Is Dead”; at GTAC. His presentation was, “controversial”; Many
people involved in software testing denounced it. The problems he pointed out still exist at many companies.
There are practices that make testing slow, expensive, inefficient and ineffective. Companies and people cling to them as being the “right way to test” even when there is evidence showing otherwise.
Why are so many companies still doing them?
Pete Walen
Peter G. Walen has over 25 years of experience in software development, quality, testing, and agile practices. He works hard to help teams understand how their software works and interacts with other software and the people using it. He is a member of the Agile Alliance, the Scrum Alliance and the American Society for Quality (ASQ) and an active participant in software meetups and frequent conference speaker.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/petergwalen/
13:00 – 13:45
Session with Mark Tomlinson –
Observability for Performance Testers
Abstract:
What’s all the buzz about #olly (observability) with all this “needle in the haystack” and “digging in” and “observing stuff” language?
Haven’t we been doing this with our monitoring and logging and diagnostics tools already?
And what does this have to do with pre-release performance engineering, testing and systems design?
Well, I recently had a wake-up call about observability and I’d like to share what I learned with you. How it IS different from what we do today.
How you can leverage ideas about observability in your performance work.
And how you’ll find you might already be doing these things without even knowing it!
About Mark Tomlinson
Mark Tomlinson is a performance engineering and software testing consultant. His career began in 1992 with a comprehensive two-year test for a life-critical transportation system, a project which captured his interest for software testing, quality assurance, and test automation. That first test project sought to prevent trains from running into each other — and Mark has metaphorically been preventing “train wrecks” for his customers for the past 24 years.
He has broad experience with real-world scenario testing of large and complex systems and is regarded as a leading expert in software testing automation with a specific emphasis on performance. For the majority of Mark’s career he has worked for companies as a testing practitioner and consultant using the leading products for performance testing, profiling and measurement.
Mark worked at Microsoft Corporation as a performance consultant and engineer in various labs. He worked as the LoadRunner Product Manager at HP Software, helping to deliver leading innovations for performance testing and engineering. He is the co-founder and host of the popular podcast PerfBytes.
14:00 – 14:45
Session with Lisette Zounon –
Debunking the QA KPI Myths and make KPI great again
Everyone is focused on data and metrics to make major decisions. When it comes to software quality, KPI metrics can become a myth. Sometimes it works, sometimes you miss it.
Attendees in this session will take away :
- Determine the purpose of the QA KPI for your needs
- Adapt the KPI Metrics to your organization culture
- Practical QA KPI metrics that bring value to everyone in the organization for the health of the project and the team’s health.
- Determine QA KPI Metrics for QA team only
- Define QA KPI metrics for your product quality health
Lisette Zounon
Lisette Zounon is a passionate quality engineering leader with over 15 years of experience helping people and companies improve the quality of their applications, with solid tools, a simple process, and a smart team. She strongly believes that industry best practices including implementing agile methodologies and DevOps practices are invaluable.
Lisette has worked extensively with Fortune 100 technology companies, startups, and not for profits in e-commerce, cloud services, telecommunications, finances, and oil and gas industries.
15:00 – 15:45
Session with Peter Varhol –
Talking to People: Changing Patterns in a Shelter-in-Place World
2. How to use distributed communications tools effectively to make sure all team members communicate accurately and honestly.
3. How to get the most out of distributed team communications to ensure that we remain collaborative and working toward common outcomes.
4. How to recognize and address concerns about in-person interactions and other personal circumstances that can have an impact on how we work together.
His areas of research and practice include team communications, machine learning, and DevOps, testing and test automation, and development tools. His efforts aim to use the latest and best technologies to address real world problems.
Peter speaks frequently at conferences, local meetups, and on webinars on software development, testing, machine learning, and DevOps topics. He also writes for popular technology publications such as Information Week and InfoWorld.
In other roles, Peter has been a tenure-track professor in computer science and mathematics, technology journalist and editor, software developer and tester, and software product manager.
Peter blogs at Cutting Edge Computing, http://pvarhol.wordpress.com, and tweets at http://twitter.com/pvarhol. He has masters degrees in computer science, applied mathematics, and psychology, along with doctoral work in information systems.
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