Spring OnlineTestConf 2021 - Program
OTC Sessions - Day 1
May 11th
10:00-10:15 EDT
16:00-16:15 CEST
Introduction – Welcome to Spring OTC
10:15-11:00 EDT
16:15-17:00 CEST
Improving Your Quality and Testing Skills with Gamification
So many challenges, so little time.
As testers we need to sharpen the saw, but how? Gamification can be a way to look at how you’re doing and find out where to improve. It’s a great way to have everyone involved and get the best out of people.
In this presentation, Ben Linders will play games with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards to show how you can explore your current quality and testing practice and decide in your team on what to improve or experiment with.
Players can use the coaching cards to discuss quality and testing values, principles, and practices. In teams, people can use the cards to share their experiences and learnings.
Different game formats can be used to share experiences on testing and quality principles and practices and explore how they can be applied effectively. Show how to use gamification to self-assess your current way of working.
Play games with the Agile Testing Coaching Cards and Agile Quality Coaching Cards.
Explore how to facilitate games to enhance quality and testing in agile teams.
About Ben Linders
Ben Linders is an Independent Consultant in Agile, Lean, Quality, and Continuous Improvement.
Author of Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives, Waardevolle Agile Retrospectives, What Drives Quality, The Agile Self-assessment Game, Problem? What Problem?, and Continuous Improvement. Creator of many Agile Coaching Tools, for example, the Agile Self-assessment Game.
Ben is a well-known speaker and author; he’s much respected for sharing his experiences and helping others share theirs. His books and games have been translated into more than 12 languages and are used by professionals in teams and organizations all around the world.
As an adviser, trainer, and coach, he helps organizations with effectively deploying software development and management practices. He focuses on continuous improvement, collaboration and communication, and professional development, to deliver business value to customers.
Ben is an active member of networks on Agile, Lean, Kanban, and Quality. He shares his experiences in a bilingual blog (Dutch and English), as an editor for InfoQ, and as a practitioner in communities like Computable, Quora, DZone, Stackoverflow, and TechTarget. Follow him on Twitter: @BenLinders.
11:15-12:00 EDT
17:15-18:00 CEST
How to create a QA department
Session with Anna Ondrish
There are software development companies that are just starting out or have been in business for a long time that don’t have a Quality Assurance department. They might not even have anyone that formally does the testing. Critical bugs are being introduced into production and causing clients to lose confidence.
I will walk through the steps needed to start a Software Quality Assurance department from nothing. I’ll address the importance of keeping yourself organized with a Test Case Management tool and using the tool to help build metrics around the testing efforts.
Attendees will obtain information to help them start a QA department and/or ways to enhance their current department. There will be valuable information for everyone.Key lessons:
Getting organized and identifying when it’s time to hire
Implementing a Test Case Management tool
Hiring contractors, full time employees, or both
How to identify place the right person on the right project or task
Equip the team to work independently
About Anna Ondrish
Anna Ondrish has over 15 years of experience in the Quality Assurance field. She currently works at Orases in Frederick, MD as the Director of Quality Assurance. Twice in her career, she has been hired as the first Quality Assurance Lead for a company. Both times she has had the opportunity to structure a department that fully integrates with each step within the SDLC. Each experience opened doors to fully implement best practices company wide.
12:15-13:00 EDT
18:15-19:00 CEST
As testers, do we do more harm than good?
Session with Conor Fitzgerald
Today, there are several high profile companies who no longer hire traditional testers.
There is a wealth of evidence to show the detrimental impact of traditional testing, in particular, the separation of testing from the implementation of code.
As testers, we assume our work does good and it’s painful to realise that we can unwittingly do harm.
Much of what we do as testers is Context-based, harmful on one project may be good on another project.
This harm can become apparent through quality issues and reduced frequency of releases.
In this talk, I emphasise the importance of transitioning from traditional to modern testing, including my own painful lessons over the past 15 years.
My story involves moving from test executor, to test partner and influencer.
Traditional testers have really valuable skills but need to apply those skills in new ways.
At the heart of this talk, is the good we do as testers and ultimately our future is rooted in collaboration.
– Examples of the harm we can do as testers supported by data
– Practical examples of activities that you can try to move towards modern testing
– Questions to help guide you towards doing good as a tester, and future-proofing your career.
About Conor Fitzgerald
Conor Fitzgerald is a Quality Advocate with 15 years of experience. He is passionate about whole team testing and working with teams on quality improvements. Currently, he is working as Head of Testing for Poppulo in Cork, Ireland. He has spoken at a number of conferences in recent years, including SoftTestDublin, TestBash,OnlineTestConf, and RebelCon.
Conor is an active member of the test community and is a Co-Founder of the Ministry of Testing Cork.
Previous positions included Test Consultant, Test Lead/Manager and Automation focused roles. These positions were held in a wide variety of industries from embedded systems to financial systems with companies ranging from startups to large multinationals such as Intel.
Occasionally blogs here at conorfi.com and frequently tweets at @conorfi.
13:15-14:00 EDT
19:15-20:00 CEST
How to make developers LOVE writing E2E tests
Session with Yevheniia Hlovatska
Developers writing e2e tests is a great practice. It makes code testable, provides a fast feedback loop and helps to shift QA left. But it doesn’t mean that developers love to do it. In most cases they were not taught how to do it correctly, which makes tests flaky and creates a big pain in the ass.
We’ve recently started the transition from QA-only writing tests on Java to developers writing e2e tests in JS. We needed to convince teams that this new approach is amazing and help them make it a part of the culture. We needed to “sell” it to our target audience – Front End developers.
Process was not that fast. Almost every time I just said “e2e tests” close to the developers they started imagining thousands of failing builds and years of debugging. And started to cry, kidding:) Eventually I’ve started to notice, that there are some things that make this process more smooth and attractive. We’ve created our list of tips to help developers write meaningful coverage and love it at the same time.
But wait, this talk is for QA Engineers, where is their place in this process? Will it mean they will never write tests again?
Trust me, there will be a huge room for their work. I believe QA is the best person to make such changes happen and continue working along the way. – well-designed coverage is 50% of success – tests must be short, focused on 1 use case, independent, designed for parallel execution.
– build trust with 1 nice test – flakiness kills all good intentions, better to have 1 good test, then 100 tests you developer will skip
– create best practices – improvisation and over engineering are not the best friends with good coverage, it is always better to create best practices in advance and use them
– monitor tests success with QA hands – always keep an eye on stability, improve tests based on incidents
About Yevheniia Hlovatska
QA Guild Leader in Wix, ICAgile Authorised Instructor in Agile Testing, Founder of Alpha IT School, Global Ambassador of WomenTech Network
Passionate about Agile Testing, Test Automation, building quality on all levels and bringing value to products and teams. Growing as a public speaker, willing to share my knowledge as trainer and consultant.
14:15-15:00 EDT
20:15-21:00 CEST
How to Accelerate Cross Browser Testing using Cypress and Selenium
Session with Eran Kinsbruner
As digital reality becomes a win-lose situation for the majority of enterprises today, having a solid test automation strategy for your web applications is key for business success. In the current landscape, there are two strong technologies, Cypress and Selenium, that when utilized properly, can enable a sustainable continuous testing workflow. In this session, Perfecto by Perforce Chief Evangelist, author, and Sr. Director Eran Kinsbruner, will provide a deep overview of both Selenium and Cypress and address the key benefits of using both as part of your testing strategy.Attend this session to learn the following:
1) The core benefits of Cypress and Selenium.
2) The main differences between the two frameworks, and why teams should leverage both.
3) How teams can boost their velocity and productivity by running Selenium and Cypress in the cloud.
About Eran Kinsbruner
Eran Kinsbruner is a bestselling author, TechBeacon Top 30 test automation leader, and the Chief Evangelist and Senior Director at Perforce Software. His published books include the 2016 Amazon bestseller, “The Digital Quality Handbook”, “Continuous Testing for DevOps Professionals”, and “Accelerating Software Quality – ML and AI in the Age of DevOps”, which was named the “Best New Software Testing Book” by Book Authority. With a background of over 20 years’ experience in development and testing at companies such as Sun Microsystems, Neustar, Texas Instruments, General Electric, and more, Eran holds various industry certifications such as ISTQB, CMMI, and others. Eran is a recognized influencer on continuous testing and DevOps thought leadership, an international speaker, blogger, and also a patent-holding inventor (test exclusion automated mechanisms for mobile J2ME testing). Eran is active in the community and can be found across social media and has his own blog (https://continuoustesting.dev/)
15:15-16:00 EDT
21:15-22:00 CEST
Roadmap to becoming an Impactful QA Engineer
Session with Julia Pottinger
QA Engineers are amazing people that are tasked with ensuring the quality of a product is of a certain standard. They do this through manual and automated tests. But how do you become a QA engineer and what skills do you need to be impactful in your role?
Join me as I walk you through my journey to being an impactful QA Engineer as well as give you a roadmap on how you can become an impactful QA Engineer.
– Role of a QA Engineer
– Skills needed to be an impactful QA Engineer
– Roadmap of skills and techniques needed
About Julia Pottinger
Julia Pottinger is a Training and Development Manager at QualityWorks with expertise in manual, automated and API testing and training. She is passionate about sharing her knowledge and experience and contributes to the testing community through writing articles, and delivering testing content on Test Automation University as well as her Youtube Channel and blog. She also conducts testing bootcamps for persons interested in entering the field.
OTC Sessions - Day 2
May 12th
10:00-10:15 EDT
16:00-16:15 CEST
Introduction – Welcome to day 2 of Spring OTC
10:15-11:00 EDT
16:15-17:00 CEST
Don’t Let Your Automation Step On Its Toes
You’ve done your due diligence. You’ve reviewed your automation implementation. You’ve responsibly removed or refactored appropriate components. You’ve even culled scripts that no longer provide value. But despite these efforts, your automation takes longer to execute than you can tolerate; your team just can’t wait that long for feedback, particularly in the CI/CD pipeline.
No problem! You can just parallelize your automation runs, right? Not so fast.
Automated test script concurrency can absolutely reduce the duration of an automation suite’s execution. Having success and consistency with concurrent execution, however, requires upfront work to obtain detailed knowledge of the application being tested and dependencies in the automation suite. Omitting this work will result in your automation being unable to get out of its own way; automation will inevitably step on its own toes.
Join Paul Grizzaffi as he walks through important aspects of automation parallelization, aspects that must be addressed in order to be successful when implementing concurrency.• A basic introduction to threads and some of the considerations when using them
• Data dependencies a system may have, how to handle them, and limitations thereof
• Considerations about automation execution environments for concurrency
• An alternate, administrative approach to resource management
About Paul Grizzaffi
As a Principal Automation Architect at Magenic, 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/.
11:15-12:00 EDT
17:15-18:00 CEST
Extreme learning situations as testers – How to add value while you’re still learning
Session with Christian Baumann
As software testers, we accept that each new role will require us to learn new technologies and skills. We also know that we often feel the need (or are told of the need) to provide value to the project quickly. Both of these competing expectations are normal to a certain degree. When I joined a new project about testing an API against a European Union standard for payment services, I had to do both to an extreme I had never experienced before.
The list of things to learn from almost the ground was long: an API and how to test it (including exploratory, automated and performance testing), understanding more than 400 pages of specification and learning the business domain. Despite this, other project members were expecting valuable contributions from me shortly after joining.
In this talk I will share my story and the strategies I used to manage this challenge. I’ll go into:
* How to find out what the most important priority is
* Dealing with multiple parallel tasks without losing focus through too much context switching
* Learning while doing
* Expectation management
* Keeping myself healthy despite of the challenges
I will package my experiences in lessons learned you can use to make solid progress in conditions of uncertainty, and in need of learning new tools, techniques and products.
In summary, I’ll look at what aspects testers and other IT professionals can take to reduce these sorts of situations, while also providing takeaways on how to deal with them in case you are in this kind of project.
* Learn how to manage overwhelming learning requirements
* Protect your time and focus to enable continuous progress on the project
* Help you recognise and talk about such projects, even perhaps help to prevent
About Christian Baumann
Christian is a test engineer with 15+ years of experience in the field of software testing. He has successfully held different roles in the context of testing: From Test Automation Engineer to Test Team Lead.
During his career he worked with various test (automation) tools using programming languages, but also applied certain development/ testing methodologies.
Christian is strongly driven by his context, always searching for the best fitting solution for a given situation. He’s able to understand business’ and people’s problems, and is always eager to learn and improve himself, while staying curious, open minded and willing to share his knowledge.
12:15-13:00 EDT
18:15-19:00 CEST
Career Crafting – Dare, Prepare, Share
Session with Lena Wiberg
Growing up, I believed I could become anything. Do anything. No one ever told me my dreams were too big, or too unrealistic.
As the years passed, hitting walls and obstacles, something happened to that ability to look to the stars. I started hiding my dreams, partly because I didn’t want to look like a failure when they didn’t come through and partly because I stopped believing I could achieve them. I stopped dreaming and I fiercely told myself, and people around me, I did not want certain things.
As luck would have it, that view was unexpectedly challenged by an innocent comment made by my boss at that point in time. First, it made me laugh out loud. But honestly, even I could hear the hurt hiding behind the laugh and it made me start on the journey that has taken me where I am today.
Admitting my first goal, to myself and others, was incredibly hard, but once spoken out loud – I reached it in half the time I thought possible with the help of people around me. After that, it has been a weird chain of events taking me through public speaking, collaborating with people I admire, being elected into boards and other positions, creating a card deck, writing a book and even singing on stage!
What this journey has taught me is that I do indeed have dreams, aspirations. They might be incredibly hard to find after years of oppressing them, but once you start looking – they start appearing everywhere!
And speaking them out loud – you will find that people everywhere will go out of their way to help you achieve them!
So, don’t be careful what you wish for!
Wish for the moon and the stars and be prepared to reach them, and so much more.Making dreams explicit is the first step to reaching them
Telling others of your dreams allows them to help you
People want to help you, they want you to succeed!
Taking actions on your dreams changes you into the person you need to become
Learning how to define your goal helps you teach others, making you a better coach and/or mentor
About Lena Wiberg
Lena has been in IT since 1999 when she started out as a bright-eyed developer. After a decade of code, she found her calling in testing and has since then worked in most testing-related roles, from being tester in a team so building and leading testing organizations. She believes continuous improvement is something we should all strive for by keeping up to date and always challenge ourselves, our assumptions and the way things are done. Since 2017 she works as a manager and finds that the skills that makes her a good tester also works wonders when making people, teams and organizations grow.
She is an avid blogger, speaker and workshop facilitator as well as the creator of “Would heu-risk it?” – a risk based deck of cards. Lena lives outside of Stockholm and shares her house with her family, loads of gaming stuff and books. She is currently working as an Engineering Manager at Mentimeter.
13:15-14:00 EDT
19:15-20:00 CEST
Approach your testing like a S.W.A.T Operation
Session with Joel Montvelisky
Different projects require different testing approaches.
It is true that in many instances we require a very defined and structured approach, making sure all the high-risk areas of the product are completely covered before releasing our products to the field.
But many times we need a different approach, one that is aimed specifically at providing fast and critical information. Without much knowledge and even less time for preparations. Just like the legendary Israeli Commando Units, deploying fast and efficiently, in order to fulfill a specific and hard to achieve objective.
We will review what the preparations for S.W.A.T units are, and how they approach their work in order to succeed in their hard missions. We will then review how to apply a similar approach in order to develop in our team the skills required for these special tasks when we are asked to perform specific and complex testing tasks, under hard conditions and in very short time frames.
In this session we will:
- – Learn testing tactics based on military methods
- – Generate a plan and test tool-set for immediate testing tasks
- – Understand how quick testing doesn’t have to be dirty and how quality can be obtained even in the hardest situations.
About Joel Montvelisky
Chief Solution Architect at PractiTest
Joel has been in testing since 1997. He has been a tester, test manager and QA Lead working in both SU companies as well as global enterprises. .
He is a keynote speaker, Lecturer, Blogger, and the chairman of the OnlineTestConf
14:15-15:00 EDT
20:15-21:00 CEST
Succeeding as a Testers, Test Lead, Test Manager and Test Coach in today’s environment”
Roundtable discussion with QA professionals: Pete Walen, Joel Montvelisky & Lena Wiberg
15:15-16:00 EDT
21:15-22:00 CE
OTC Happy hour!
Quick 5 minutes pitches by OnlineTestConf attendees – to awe and inspire
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For continuous updates and sneak peeks at what’s to come