Sessions Line-up
November 29th
05:00-05:15 AM EST
11:00-11:15 AM CET
Introduction – Welcome to Fall OTC
05:15-6:00 AM EST
11:15-12:00 AM CET
Who Tests The Tests? Mutation Testing for UI Automation
Automated tests provide an additional safety net, alerting us to any unintended failures introduced because of a recent change. If a test fails when it should pass, then time is wasted investigating an issue that doesn’t exist and the organization loses faith in them. If a test passes when it should fail, then a critical bug might get released and the team.
As Testers, we would never let a new feature get released without first testing it. Automated tests are software applications in their own right and should be treated that way. This means that all new tests should be rigorously tested the same way a new feature might be rigorously tested.
Mutation testing is typically used for verifying the feedback of unit tests. It involves making changes to the source code, which should cause the unit tests to fail. Similar methods can be used to assess the quality of UI Automated tests.
In this talk, I will discuss methods for testing UI Automated tests that help reduce the risk of false positives, test flakiness, and wasted time in test runs.
Louise is a Senior Automation Tester at PebblePad. Her main job is to review and maintain the automated tests that are run overnight and investigate the causes of any failures. She has also worked for companies in the e-commerce, scientific research, and automotive industries, and runs a personal blog at louisegibbstest.wordpress.com, where she talks about her experiences as a software tester. She enjoys improving her testing skills and her main method for achieving this is by speaking to other Testers and discussing ideas.
6:15-7:00 AM EST
12:15-13:00 PM CET
Get Your Test Strategy Set
Session with Varuna Srivastava
In this session, Varuna will share a specific case study of how an effective test strategy can get away from Push and Pray deployment to Continuous and Confident deployment to production.
Participate in this talk to learn:
1. How to form a core team to define the external and internal strategy?
2. How to apply recursive feedback and updated the strategy when and required after a production release?
3. Internal Test Strategy: A strategy within a Team of the same vertical as checkout API and UI
4. External Test Strategy: An end-to-end test strategy of a product
5. How does it help in getting away from Push and Pray deployment to Continuous and Confident deployment to production?
Varuna is a technical tester who’s worked on award-winning projects across a wide variety of technology sectors, including retail, travel, financial, and the public sector, and worked with various web, mobile, and IoT technologies. Varuna is a passionate advocate of shipping quality code to production using agile practices. When not working, Varuna likes to get her hands dirty experimenting with her culinary skills. Most of her weekends are spent in “cook-ography”—cooking plus photography!
7:15-8:00 AM EST
13:15-14:00 PM CET
A test management tool for everyone
Session with Gagandeep (Gagan) Sharma
The test management tools we were using were giving us troubles. Especially when it came to catering to all the stakeholders. It was also difficult to scale up and down, when needed.
We then moved to PractiTest which is full Saas and supports Agile/waterfall and integrated with Jira and Automation well and have never looked back. This session will focus on how we made the shift and upscaled to an ene-to-end test management tool, the benefits, the challenges and the successful results.
My name is Gagan, I live in Utrecht, Netherlands, with my beautiful wife and a 4 years old daughter. Currently working for a coffee and tea giant, my role is Global IT Quality and Automation manager, I cover a wide portfolio of Testing practices, Test management Tooling, Automation testing, Test factory, Performance testing, security testing, CICD, and RPA. Working with onsite and offshore teams, based in Netherlands, India and the Philippines. Support projects and teams spread across the globe in 39 countries. On the way, learning new things every day which keeps me active and updated.
8:15-9:00 AM EST
14:15-15:00 PM CET
Try not to laugh – a testers fail compilation
Session with Anssi Lehtelä
During my almost 20 years of career in software development, I have seen and committed a lot of failures. Actually, my whole career started from one 🙂
In this session, I will share the worst, most embarrassing, and most educational fails I have done or seen during my career, from areas like working hands dirty in production, missing and creating bugs, failing in project work – and more.
Welcome to my very own fail compilation.
Anssi has been failing in software development as a QA and way of working specialist for nearly 20 years. Outside he likes to fail in playing football, and when spending time with his family and friends.
9:15-10:00 AM EST
15:15-16:00 PM CET
9 out of 10 testers think onboarding at a new job sucks
A panel session with Sanne Visser, Chris Armstrong, Hanna Schlander, Shey Crompton and Veerle Verhagen
- Missing managers during onboarding
- Unorganized onboarding
- No access or accounts on day one
- No overlap/handover with the previous person in the role
- Too much information leading to overload.
10:15-11:00 AM EST
16:15-17:00 PM CET
How to not waste time
Session with Huib Schoots
Personal stories on how many testers waste a considerable amount of time!
I have seen testers waste a lot of time. In this interactive talk, I am sharing some stories and we’ll discuss how to not waste your valuable time!
Do you recognize the feeling that you could have tested more or you could have spent your time doing more valuable things? I do! This talk was inspired by my marvel and my frustration that we waste a lot of time on unimportant things in testing. I want to create insight into how testers often waste their valuable time. Organizations want to speed up their product delivery and they should stay ahead of the competition. So not wasting time is essential and will help the team tremendously. I’ll share my ideas on how we can reduce waste and spend our time on activities that add value.
I’m Huib Schoots, nice to meet you. My personal mission is shaping better people and software quality by connecting, innovating, facilitating, coaching, enabling, and teaching.
I’m fascinated by mindset, thinking, behavior, and collaboration. I’m active in many communities. I’m a humanist, servant leader, open, direct, creative, idea generator, result-driven, humor, problem solver, curious, confronting, critical thinker, passionate and energetic, lifelong learner, entrepreneurial, analytic, and continuous (world) improver.
I like hanging out with friends, trombone in a brass band, board & computer games, LEGO, photography, running, beer brewing, magic tricks, traveling, and reading.
I work as a Managing consultant & Quality Coach at www.qualityaccelerators.nl, Agile Test Expert at www.deagiletesters.nl, and organizer of www.frogsconf.nl
11:15-12:00 EST
17:15-18:00 PM CET
Test manager, orchestrator or quality coach?
Session with Gitte Ottosen
For some years we have been talking about the role of the tester, and how it should/might change in the light of new ways of delivering software – with agile, scaled agile, DevOps, etc. But the role of the test manager is changing too, and is being questioned in some situations – should the role exist anymore? For some, the traditional test management role is still 100% relevant (I have recently been in such a context myself), but for many of us, the test manager role is transitioning from the traditional test management role to a role focusing on orchestration and quality coaching.
So, if you haven’t done so already, maybe it’s time to consider questions such as:
Do I have the competencies to coach my team in tests?
How do I support the team in the focus on continuous quality assurance?
How do I ensure that we have the proper focus on value while testing?
Ask these questions while recognizing that a test strategy is still essential, and that especially in a scaled context, someone still needs to orchestrate tests for the solution end-to-end, and also focus on ensuring that dependencies across teams are addressed.
This presentation will take you through some of the competencies needed to be a good-quality orchestrator and quality coach, focusing on both the soft and hard skills which will help you be the best possible support
to your team/project/train.
Key Learnings
1. Discover how to draw skills from different aspects of testing
2. Learn how to be a Quality Coach
3. Understand the skills you need to succeed in test Management
Gitte Ottosen is a test manager and agile/quality coach with a strong focus on a value driven approach to software development. She has more than twenty years of experience in IT, primarily within test, along with test management and process improvement, in both traditional and agile contexts.
The last fifteen years she has primarily worked within an agile context, focusing on supporting a quality mindset across teams and organizations, and improving the processes for some of the largest international companies in Denmark.
As a self-confessed test and agile evangelist who preaches the need for a strong quality and value driven focus. Gitte is a dedicated trainer within the areas of agile and test, and is a regular speaker at international conferences.
12:15-13:00 PM EST
18:15-19:00 PM CET
Feature Flags – The Good, The Bad, and How to Prevent The Ugly
Session with Jeff Sing
More and more companies are using Feature Flags to get all types of changes – new features, configuration changes, bug fixes, and experiments – into production in a safer, faster, and most importantly, sustainable way.
Software companies that shift to deploying with Feature Flags benefit from low-risk releases, faster time to market, higher quality, and happier teams. Sounds great right? But what happens when your system isn’t implemented correctly, or worse, tested properly?
This talk takes you on a journey of why teams use Progressive Delivery and the path from basic to advanced feature flag usage.
Session Takeaways:
– Make sure you build the right product and build the product right!
– How to decide what testing strategies should be implemented (how to set up your unit test, end-to-end automation, etc)
– What tactics are most effective for keeping your implementation healthy and effective (feature flag governance!).
Jeff Sing is a Quality Leader who has been in the testing industry for over 15 years. During this time, he has built automation frameworks, test strategies, and executed quality initiatives for fields such as medical devices, infrastructure security, web identification, marketing tech, and experimentation and progressive delivery.
Jeff is currently the Sr Engineering Manager at Iterable where he is leading the Quality Engineering organization that orchestrates Iterable’s quality control plan utilizing a combination of automated testing, implementing QA procedures, and acting as Iterable’s customer experience champion to ensure Iterable remains the world’s leading customer engagement platform. He also has built and leads Iterable’s Engineering Operations Team which runs the services and programs to systematically improve effectiveness and productivity across the engineering organization as it scales.
13:15-14:00 PM EST
19:15-20:00 PM CET
The Aztec Automation Pyramid of Sacrifices – Why you may have been sacrificing your QA teams
Session with Leandro Melendez (Señor Performo)
The days of just one type of automations for all QA endeavors are gone.
Our applications have evolved from bulky monoliths to modern applications tiered in services, spread over the cloud, and even with the capacity to expand. On top of that, our teams are caught up in hyper-fast release cycles that require us to change how we do things. Especially those QA things called automation. In other words, we must rethink how, how much, and where we do those automation things.
In this fun presentation, Leandro will show the audience the principles of the automation pyramid with a set of fun analogies that will help the audience understand the importance of the pyramid.
At the same time, they will learn its principles to avoid wasteful behaviors that only bring tiredness, sweat, tears, and even blood.
Organizations may have been sacrificing their teams by not following the pyramid.
Takeaways:
Overall, the audience will have lots of fun learning from these examples taking away multiple great ideas on how, where, and how much to automate QA on their projects.
– Understand the importance of sticking to the pyramid when automating QA tests.
– Examples on automating at different levels of the pyramid
– List of tools per tier of the pyramid
– Fun ways to explain to your team and management
Leandro is a performance testing advocate with K6-Grafana helping everyone to ramp up on their performance practices.
He has over 20 years of experience in IT and over 10 in the performance testing practice where he served multiple S&P500 customers all over the USA, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, India, Austria, etc.
Author of the popular performance testing blog Señor Performo (www.srperf.com ) where he curates a diverse set of learning material for performance testers and engineers.
He is an international public speaker participating in multiple conferences, events and webinars, with keynotes, workshops and multiple talks on his belt.
And last, author of “The Hitchhikers Guide To Load Testing Projects”, a fun walkthrough that will guide you through the phases or levels of an IT load testing project.
14:15-15:00 PM EST
20:15-21:00 PM CET
Align Testing with Business by Shifting Left & Right
Session with Joel Montvelisky
Joel Montvelisky is a Co-Founder and Chief Solution Architect at PractiTest.
Joel has been in testing and QA since 1997, working as a tester, QA Manager and Director, and a Consultant for companies in Israel, the US and the EU. Joel is a Forbes council member, a blogger and is constantly imparting webinars on a number of testing and Quality Related topics.
In addition, Joel is the founder and Chair of the OnlineTestConf, the co-founder of the State of Testing survey and report and a Director at the Association of Software Testing.
Joel is a seasond conference speaker worldwide, among them the STAR Conferences, STPCon, JaSST, TestLeadership Conf, CAST, QA&Test, and more.
Follow us on Twitter!
For continuous updates and sneak peeks at what’s to come
