Fall OnlineTestConf 2021 - Session Recordings
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OTC Sessions - Day 1
Quality Acceleration: delivering quality software at speed
Session with Huib Schoots
All companies want fast delivery of high quality software nowadays. Delivering quality software at speed is the new mantra for many. CIO’s are afraid of being behind the curve. Managers are afraid of losing money. So speed up and increase efficiency! But speeding up brings quite a lot of interesting challenges. Going faster without the proper “measures” will get an organisation in trouble pretty fast. It is like driving a formula 1 car without knowing how to drive… Bill Gates once said: “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”
Tools, robots, automation in testing, continuous integration/delivery promises remarkable acceleration in software development. The new kid on the block is AI and machine learning, that will definitely help speed things up or make some people redundant I hear people claim. What is really happening globally? How can you speed up without losing control?
Delivering successful (IT) products is much more than technology. In IT, skills in communication, collaboration and leadership define success. It requires human experience and technological integration. Before even thinking about technology, automation or building pipelines, some basics need to be in place to ensure success. This presentation brings you my lessons in how teams can accelerate and deliver quality software.
Quality Acceleration is dealing with risks effectively. It emerges from the sum of many things, among which are smooth processes, the right mindset, leadership, rapid learning and experimentation, fast feedback loops, diversity in thinking, people with excellent knowledge and skills, collaboration, common understanding and measuring if you are on the right track. Oh and of course the “right technology”.
Key takeaways:
1. How can we create quality software fast?
2. How can your team manage risks and value?
3. Learn about great collaboration in teams, new ways of working to create valuable software!
Making better people and software quality to accelerate by:
Connecting – Innovating – Facilitating – Coaching – Enabling – Teaching
With international experience in the field of software development. Huib is an expert in the field of software quality and testing and has in-depth knowledge of and experience with agile working methods, coaching, project and test management and change processes. He is one of the five Rapid Software Testing trainers in the world and is a welcome guest at conferences as an experienced presenter, workshop facilitator and trainer.
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Testers – the constant chameleon
Session with Hanna Schlander
As a tester, there are so many group dynamics that you can be part of. Like a chameleon, you need to be able to fit in. It could be that you’re part of a test team, surrounded by your peers. You could be the only tester in your team but have a testing team in the organization.
Or you can be all on your own, without any other testers.
In a project, there is almost always a group of developers, as a tester, the group dynamic is rarely the same. So how do you adjust to all these different situations? Like a chameleon, we need to adapt to our surroundings.
The chameleon role does not end there, we also need to talk to all of the different members of the team or perhaps even external parties. In that case, you also need to adapt your language and vocabulary depending on who your audience is. To a developer, the language is probably quite technical but with the solution owner, it’s more on a higher level. Adapting to your surroundings will gain you more respect and a better result in the end.
What I will share during my talk is my experience with different team setups:
– The pros and cons of the different structures as well as some advice for the different team compositions.
– An overview of how you would adapt your language depending on the audience you are addressing.
The session will end with a roundtable to hear about your experience as a chameleon!
Hanna Schlander is a Quality Catalyst at Jayway by Devoteam. In her current job she works in the retail industry with a DevOps project built with Microservices. Hanna started her testing career by getting some training in testing at her first job after university, it was love at first sight!
Throughout her 10 years in testing, she has worked in multiple fields such as MedTech and Telecom and in a lot of different stages of testing. Being a very curious person Hanna loves the ever-changing world of testing. When she’s not working you’ll most likely find her outside walking with her husband and dog or binge-watching some old tv-series.
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The Tester’s Role: Balancing Technical Acumen and User Advocacy
Session with Melissa Tondi
Many of us didn’t start our careers in testing. We generally moved from a different internal role or “happened upon “QA” via another career path. It was common for people who were product users to be hired to jump start their technical career.
Now, we see the growth of tester positions that require coding experience or a computer science degree with little emphasis on the testing profession. Melissa Tondi discusses the changing landscape of the role of testers, the challenges of hiring, and a way to shift the pendulum back to balance technical acumen with a user advocacy role.
Melissa will lead a thoughtful discussion on what makes a good tester, how test leaders can continue to promote our profession, and how to accentuate the value testers bring to organizations.
She will identify the factors that have caused the test/QA role to become mainstream and how it has shifted to become more technically focused. Melissa will help fill in the gaps with a test strategy that incorporates a solid automation strategy which allows for balance between supporting the development efforts while equally emphasizing user advocacy tests.
Over 15 years of experience in Software Quality Engineering, and Process Engineering and 10 years in management/leadership
Melissa is a Solutions driven and a strong advocate to effect change and a Practitioner of Management by Collaboration.
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Full-stack Testing in/is the New Normal
Session with Christina Thalayasingam
Many teams aim only in having a bug free system. How can you make your team believe in delivering the true quality of the end product? How can you drive your team to understand that skipping non functional testing like performance and security testing could lead to the breach of your product quality ? How can you make them understand the importance of CI/CD in the testing lifecycle? How can you pour the passion into them to move forward to make a change? Setting up a team that has these skills could make this possible, but do they believe in what they do? How can you make them actually feel the essence of quality being a culture that does not focus alone on reporting bugs? Let us discuss ways on making your team walk in the path of Full Stack Testing, so that the team knows their vision and the mission. Quality is key and the world is evolving into have Full-stack testing as the new normal.
Similar to the rise of full stack engineering that brought the end of specialized front-end and back-end developers, and brought about the age of engineers that can build a product end to end independently, the time for QA to follow suit is near. And let us discuss how this can be achieved.
This talk will cover how we can get our teams to explore this venture.
– Avoiding team communication gaps
– Deliver high quality products.
– Help to enhance the quality practices followed.
– Avoid major risks like resource constraints as all members will be jacks of all trades in testing aspects.
Christina Thalayasingam has more than 7 years of experience in both functional and non-functional testing and possesses quite a development background.
Christina is currently working as a Test Engineering Manager at NorthWestern Mutual a Fortune100 Financial services company, where she is managing the testing effort for their Customer Experience Web Applications, which comprises of micro services and micro apps. Also, she has been part of various prestigious conferences, technical meetups and webinars. She is a software testing evangelist.
Deming’s Management Philosophy
Session with Steve Hoeg
Deming is often known as the father of quality, pioneering many aspects of statistical process control. As strong as his contributions here were, he felt that the most important road to quality led through leadership practices.
This talk will walk through Deming’s 14 points and system of profound knowledge, and how much is still relevant for managing modern software teams.
* Deming’s 14 points
* Continuous improvement
* Modern applications
Steve Hoeg is VP of Engineering at Maxon, creating 2D & 3D creative tools. Prior to Maxon, he spent 15 years at Adobe, as Director of Engineering for Adobe’s audio and video products – Premiere Pro, Rush, After Effects and Audition. Personal big-screen Hollywood movie credits include Deadpool, Only the Brave, Hail Caesar and Gone Girl.
The Do’s and Don’t of Accessibility
Session with Michael Larsen
Accessibility is a large topic and one that often gets a variety of approaches to deal with. Often it is seen as having to focus on a large checklist (the WCAG standard) and make sure that everything complies. While this is a great goal and focus, often it is overwhelming and frustrating, putting people in the unfortunate role of having to read and understand an entire process before they feel they can be effective.
My goal is to help condense this a little and give some key areas to focus on and be effective in identifying Accessibility issues quickly and helping testers become effective advocates. We will look at ways to find issues, advocate for them and help make strides to greater understanding and focus moving forward. We can use a little to provide a lot of benefits.
Michael has worked on a broad array of technologies and industries including virtual machine software, capacitance touch devices, video game development, and distributed database and web applications. He currently works with PeopleFluent, located in Raleigh, NC, USA. He writes a software testing blog called TESTHEAD (http://mkltesthead.com/).
Michael served as a member of the Board of Directors for the Association for Software Testing from 2011-2015. He was their Treasurer and then their President. Currently, he helps teach their Black Box Software Testing classes. Michael is also the current producer and a regular commentator for The Testing Show, a podcast produced for QualiTest (available in Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify)
OTC Sessions - Day 2
How to Tame Bugs in Production: Successful Bug Managing Strategy in Five Steps
Session with Elena Bazina
“There is a bug in production” have been the scariest words for me as a tester and QA analyst. I was sweating, blushing, panicking. What made it worse is that these bugs were often brought by the 3rd parties SDKs, so I didn’t have full control over this part of the code myself.
My attitude towards bugs in production changed after I observed a team of firefighters at work. They were very quick, well organized but also very calm. I thought that we could learn from them. Of course, we should try to prevent fires and bugs as much as we can. But we also need to admit that sometimes there still will be some fires and well… bugs, and when it happens we need to have a great strategy in place how to handle these incidents.
1. What aspects need to be covered by the bugs managing strategy?
2. Is it necessary to loop your customers in?
3. Who should take the most important decisions?
4. How make bugs work for you?
Elena Bazina is a Senior QA Analyst at King, currently working with Candy Crush Saga. She has more than 5 years of experience in the QA field, mainly working in the mobile gaming industry. She coaches teams in terms of improving the quality of the games and features and incorporating agile testing into their development process.
Why Should we take things personally?
Session with Indranil Sinha
In present day work environment, we frequently hear why we should not take things personally. But in his IT career for the past 10 years, Indranil has learnt why we should take things personally and what is the benefit of it.
His presentation will dissect his career, identify the problems which he took personally and how the relevant solutions helped him and his team alleviate those problems and took them one step further each time.
Main takeaways:
o How to be your own boss at work
o Which things to take personally and how to act on them
o Interaction with the management and promote the importance of quality
o How the above actions can improve your personal career and empower you to build a team.
“In this presentation I want to share experiences and ideas which are 100% mine and developed “organically” over the years, only to improve our current work process. As a proof that all my ideas worked extremely well, just look at my career graph within IT.”
In 2011, I started my IT career as an IT technician in a Swedish consumer bank. And from September 2021, I will be heading a brand new QA department in the same organisation. I am proud of what I have accomplished within last 10 years and I want to share my exciting journey with a larger, international audience.
“Make it public!” And other things that annoy developers about testability
Session with Gil Zilberfeld
Everyone agrees testing is good for the quality. But to change the code just so you can test it? That would break up the developer’s perfect design! Just to make the tester’s life easier!
And if they expose inner data to the test, another not-so-smart developer will eventually call it and will blow up the world! Code doesn’t become testable by itself, we have to make it like that. And that conflicts with developer ideas of good design and how code should look.
In this session, Gil will be going to discuss the false beliefs about testability, and how testers can discuss them with developers. Then he’s going to break them down into dust with proper testable design principles. Gil will show examples, and explore testability scenarios.
In a perfect agile world, if developers want their code to work, it should be testable. Making those changes is not even a sacrifice for testability — they are good for everyone
• Testable design impacts the ability to test the application properly.
• Testers need to identify code patterns, so they can discuss testability with developers.
• Correcting the anti-patterns can improve testability immensely for both developers and testers.
Gil Zilberfeld (TestinGil) has been in software since childhood, writing BASIC programs on his trusty Sinclair ZX81. With more than 25 years of developing commercial software, he has vast experience in software methodology and practices.
Gil has been teaching and applying modern development and testing principles more than a decade. From automated testing to exploratory testing, testing methodology, unit and integration testing, clean code and testability – he’s done it all. He is still learning from his successes and failures.
Gil speaks frequently in international conferences about unit testing, TDD, testing in general and design practices. He is the author of “Everyday Unit Testing” and “Everyday Spring Testing”, blogs and post videos, co-organizer of the Agile Practitioners conference and in his spare time he shoots zombies, for fun.
Expect to Inspect – Performing Code Inspections on Your Automation
Breaking news! Automation development is software development. Even if we are using a drag-and-drop or record-and-playback interface to create that automation, somewhere, in the stack, under the hood, or behind the curtain, there is code sequenced by our actions. We must start treating our automation endeavors as software development endeavors, lest we end up in a quagmire of unsustainability and early project death.
One beneficial tactic used in software development is to have a different team member look for issues and risks in newly written or modified code; we call this a code inspection or code review. Much as a proofreader or editor will provide feedback on a book or article, code inspectors review and analyze areas of the code that may benefit from rework, such as supportability, readability, extensibility, and issues or risks of issues.
In this session, Paul Grizzaffi explains why we should do code inspections for our automation software, how these investigations for automation can differ from those for product software, and real-life issues found during these reviews.• Automation development is software development.
• Think of an inspection as a “second set of eyes”.
• Let business value drive how code is inspected.
• There are tools to help with inspection-related activities.
• Examples of what a code inspection finds.
As a Principal Automation Architect at Magenic Studio for Cognizant Softvision, Paul Grizzaffi is following his passion for providing technology solutions to testing, QE, and QA organizations, including automation assessments, implementations, and through activities benefiting the broader testing community.
An accomplished keynote speaker, international conference speaker, and writer, Paul has spoken at local and national conferences and meetings. He is an advisor to Software Test Professionals and STPCon, as well as a member of the Industry Advisory Board of the Advanced Research Center for Software Testing and Quality Assurance (STQA) at UT Dallas where he is a frequent guest lecturer. In addition to spending time with his twins, Paul enjoys sharing his experiences and learning from other testing professionals; his mostly cogent thoughts can be read on his blog at https://responsibleautomation.wordpress.com/.
Analytics Matter: What Are Your Users Really Doing?
Session with Amanda DeGroof
A good tester advocates for the user. A great tester knows what that user wants and why. Stop making assumptions about your users!
Learn how to use the analytics reports from tools like Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and CoreMetrics to inform all of your testing and development:
– Pay attention to the analytics that are generated for the site or app you’re working with
– The right analytics can inform your testing and shore up (or break!) any assumptions you may be making about your users
– Learn which paths users are really taking through your site, so you can change or update your regression and automation testing (users may not be doing what you and the devs expect them to do!)
Amanda DeGroof (she/they) started out in the digital marketing world, doing everything from analytics to programming. They found their calling in Quality Assurance, and switched careers in their mid-30s to become a QA Analyst. They worked their way up within digital agency WillowTree, and now manages an international QA team for inMotionNow. In their spare time they enjoy traveling and spending time with their spouse and a finicky calico.
About Human Issues and some possible solutions
Session with a Joel Montvelisky
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