Shifting our mindset from Quality Assurance to Quality Advocacy

     While assuring quality is a necessary step for project success, true impact can only be achieved through advocating quality. Sure, we can follow the typical QA model and just stop bugs from happening at the end, OR we can advocate for quality at all stages of a project in order to outperform and transform!

     Ensuring the quality of a product is difficult to do if you only begin to worry about it at the end of a project, and yet the QA role that is tasked with ensuring quality is traditionally treated as the last stop for development. Instead, it is better for QA to be involved in advocating for the quality of the product from the very first stages. What does quality advocacy look like? How do you implement it and continue to engage with all factors of discovery and development throughout the duration of a project? Finally, what are the benefits of having quality advocacy as opposed to traditional quality assurance? Quality Assurance is a team effort; therefore strong relationships between Quality Assurance Analysts and Developers are vital.

LinkedIn: No Longer a Place Your Resume Goes to Die

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     LinkedIn is no longer a place where your resume goes to die only to be revived if you need to land a new job. The leading online professional network boasts over 700 million users from every industry, meaning, no matter what you\'re looking to accomplish in your career, you can find a LinkedIn connection willing to help! But with dozens of social media platforms each having their own nuances of how to act, what to post and who to be, feeling comfortable using LinkedIn can be a bit overwhelming. In this session, you'll learn everything you need to know to use LinkedIn to connect with fellow professionals. From optimizing your profile to the settings you need to change in order to ensure your profile is being seen along with how to identify the decision makers and most importantly, how to turn those connections into genuine relationships and walk away with a refreshed and optimized LinkedIn profile. We may be living in a virtual world but using LinkedIn to create relationships will take your career to the next level.

The Human Side to Testing

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     As testers, we are known for breaking things and testing the limits, and patience, of our team and our systems. We advocate for quality in all things and we advocate for the end user. We push our teams to be more quality focused and to do what is functional but also good for a user. But, none of us actually think about how our varied backgrounds influence what we do and how we test. In this session we will explore how our previous (and current) experiences subconsciously affect our testing and how to bring those experiences to the forefront in order to be better testers all around. We’ll discuss how experiences we’ve had, both current and previous, affect how and what we test. By recognizing that our individual life experiences flavor the way we test and interact, we can be better testers and teammembers. Attendees will see how their varied backgrounds influence their testing and make them better testers.

Open Testing: Opening Tests like Opening Source

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     Testing is a vibrant discipline with well-established practices, but many times, nobody but the testers who write the tests ever see them. Tests could offer so much value if they were openly shared—with developers, product owners, and perhaps even end-users. So, why don’t we open our tests like we open our source? There are so many parallel benefits: helping others learn, helping teams develop higher-quality software, and helping users gain confidence in the products they use. Opening tests includes sharing the tools, frameworks, and even test cases themselves. With AI and ML technologies, we could even build a future where generic open tests for common behaviors could run on any kind of app. In this keynote, we will look at ways a team could be more open about testing. Not every team may be able to publicly publish their tests, but any team could still benefit from the openings that shift-left practices can bring. Open Testing could be revolutionary. Let’s make it a reality!

Hyperautomation – The New Era of Digital Transformation

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     QA Automation has always been a strategy that when successfully implemented enables organizations to improve software quality while releasing more frequently. Roughly a year ago a new concept emerged from Gartner as the leading technology trend for 2020, “Hyperautomation”. Hyperautomation is the concept of automating everything in an organization that can be automated utilizing QA Automation, Robotic Process Automation, and Machine Learning / AI. Come discover how you can digitally transform your organization enabling the fully automated enterprise.

Ensemble Testing: Creating A Mob: A New Tester’s Journey to Getting People Together To Test

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     As someone new to the QA and the testing community, within his organization, Ben was experiencing difficulties testing stemming from communication issues across teams. It felt like he was often the middle-man in a game of telephone between stakeholders, often making it difficult to efficiently manage how they test new features and products. To help address this issue, Ben incorporated ensemble testing into their testing culture. He will focus on what he has found to be the benefits of ensemble testing (such as improved communication and relationships among teams & spreading product knowledge), helpful hints for making sure the sessions go well (such as being prepared ahead of times & following up and using temporary Slack channels as a tool), and his journey of how, as a new tester, he helped his organization leverage ensemble testing to overcome communication difficulties and improve the speed and impact of their testing efforts.

Scale your Testing and Quality with Automation Engineering and ML

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     Many teams and organizations struggle to scale their quality and testing strategies once they reach tens of teams and hundreds of developers and services across their systems. Traditional strategies and techniques, like testing phases and code freezes, do not work at scale and quickly add friction, reduce productivity, and make testing and quality harder.
     In this presentation, we will cover different ideas and strategies to make things like BDD and TDD easier to adopt at the beginning, how to include observability and operability in your definition of quality, and how leveraging ML/AI can augment your devs and testers and reduce risk while accelerating value.
     By the end, you will have some "low quality" indicators that you can use to identify patterns and practices that won\'t scale well. You will have new insights and ideas for how you can set up your teams and strategies for success long term, and you will see tangible, practical examples you can take to your team and company to start this transformation now.

Is This [Joke] Appropriate?

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     Don\'t poke the bear" is an old saying that usually means "Don\'t do things that are likely to cause trouble".

Can jokes cause trouble? Sometimes. But when, and how can you know?

This talk intends to address this topic and these questions...and make it all applicable to you and your job.

Join me as I explore Risk Analysis in a different, fun way!

How to Make a Market-Driven Decision on Test Automation Frameworks

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     In this rapidly evolving world of app development and testing, how does one pick a test automation framework? Or decide whether to add or switch to a different framework?

In this session, Eran Kinsbruner, Author and Chief DevOps Evangelist at Perfecto by Perforce, will isolate the many moving parts and show you how to make a market-driven decision that supports your testers and developers. He will walk you through the core changes challenging web & mobile testing right now (from new devices and OSes to market innovations like APKs, PWAs, and more) and then share critical considerations among leading and emerging test automation frameworks.

You’ll learn:

- Driving forces that are impacting the mobile & web app landscape.

- Differences among mobile frameworks: Appium, Espresso, XCUITest, & Flutter

- Differences among web frameworks: Selenium, Cypress, & PlayWright.

- How to select the proper framework for your team.

- When to switch, mix, or remain with your current tech stack.

What's Next for QA? The Journey to Quality Engineering

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     Trends such as the migration to the Cloud, transition to DevOps, and growing customer expectations have put a spotlight on QA teams. However, our traditional approach to quality assurance silos teams and slows down product velocity. To continue delivering quality software quickly, we as an industry need to adjust our approach to testing by practicing quality engineering. But, how do we get there? In this talk, Darrel will share observations on the industry trends shaping our approach to quality, define quality engineering, share strategies to respond to these trends, and provide a look at how mabl can support your quality journey.

Automation eVALUEation

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     We all know that Automation Testing has been a major enterprise focus for the last 10 years. Often times we spend so much effort getting the automation in progress and being built that we never think how do we get value from those tests.

So if you ever wondered why do we spend so much money on automation? If you've ever thought about how do these tests benefit us? If automation has just become another checkbox for your teams but doesn't seem to help. This will be the session for you.

We'll go over what types of Automation Testing there are. How to get the best return on investment for each type. We'll learn what their limitations are. What their strengths are. How judge if your automation is doing what it needs to be doing.

So at the end of this session you will be better equipped to use automation to fuel your teams' success.

Quality Leadership, Testing, and Governance Tactics that Make or Break Your Progressive Delivery System

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     More and more companies are using Progressive Delivery to get all types of changes – new features, configuration changes, bug fixes, and experiments – into production in a safer, faster, and most importantly, a sustainable way.

Software companies that shift to Progressive Delivery benefit from low risk releases, faster time to market, higher quality, and in general 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.

Make sure you build the right product, and build the product right!
How to decide what testing strategies should be implemented (how to setup your unit test, end to end automation, etc)
What tactics are most effective for keeping your implementation healthy and effective (feature flag governance!).

From Fear to Risk: Redefine What Drives Your Enterprise Testing Strategy

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    Many quality engineering leaders say they do risk-based testing, but walking the walk is showing to be more challenging than enterprises realize. Often, quality engineering teams practicing risk-based testing end up testing “everything” because they continue to test from a place of fear as opposed to calculated risk. Others never reassess or renegotiate risk as their application matures. Additionally, sometimes quality engineering teams lack accurate testing data in order to make well-informed decisions.

Enterprise quality engineering leaders must apply a truth-telling question: What motivates your test coverage decisions? Fear or risk?

In this session we’ll discuss:

-How quality engineering leaders assess and measure risk
-The real motivating factors behind test decisions and how to overcome bias created by fear and previous failures
-How to judge if software quality is “good enough” before a release so that testing does not harm development velocity
-How to reassess risk by integrating new data

Align Testing with Business by shifting both Left & Right

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     Agile and DevOps are taking off strongly, because they provide more value to the business aspects of our companies. These revolutionary practices allow testers to help their companies deliver functionality faster, understand how it is being adopted and in turn generate more business revenue. This session will review how techniques such as: User Story Hypothesis Value,
Instrumentation Planning, Behavioral Analysis in Production, and End-to-End metrics help our companies navigate the hypercompetitive business environment we are all a part of.

Main Take-aways:
Learn more about the specific role of the testers in the DevOps (r)evolution.
Understand the tools the QA team has and how changing the way we test can influence the business
Learn useful techniques that testers can use to help the company become more competitive and achieve its goals

Too Much to Test and Not Enough Time? - How to systematically generate the most powerful tests for your needs.

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Testing managers frequently feel the stress of having too much given the demanding deadlines and strict resource constraints they\'re operating under. Senior stakeholders ask questions such as:
* "How do we know we\'re executing the RIGHT tests?"
* "How many tests do we need to test this release thoroughly?"
* "What exactly does this test suite cover?" and
* "What things are we NOT covering with our tests?"

When large numbers of tests are selected and documented by hand, clear answers to those straightforward questions are often frustratingly elusive.

This presentation will describe how proven test generation approaches, while not a "silver bullet" to all testing challenges, usually deliver large benefits to:

* Speed of test selection and test documentation / scripting
* Creation of objectively better tests (being much more thorough and less wastefully repetitive)
* Clear communications between teams (around scope and coverage reporting)

Performance and Beyond

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     Performance testing has been moving and jumping around with Site Reliability, SETs, and many new methodologies arising like Agile, DevOps, Scrum Continuous, and many more.

But sadly not many organizations or professionals have been able to move and evolve with the new set of requirements for the performance engineer.

Learn about why the trade of the performance scripter is dying (or at least diminishing), why it is not suitable anymore for these modern times, and how to tackle the new challenge of not only testing our system\'s performance... But assuring it!

Continuous Performance Testing in DevOps

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     Performance testing isn’t the first thing organizations think about when moving to DevOps – in fact, it’s often ignored as traditional approaches don’t jive well with the fast and nimble world of DevOps. However, performance is still a critical part of the user experience, and poor performance and outages will quickly negate the value of the features you’re delivering. Lee believes that organizations don’t have to gamble with application performance. He will discuss techniques for implementing continuous performance testing in your pipeline, so you don’t have to roll the dice on your user experience. Topics will include performance testing activities at each stage of the pipeline – from the unit level through testing in production. You will also learn how to rethink your approach to performance testing and work with your DevOps practices instead of against them in areas like test environment and data management. You’ll walk away with a new outlook on performance testing in DevOps and ideas you can begin to implement in your pipeline.

Maturing Enterprise Quality

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The two primary contributors to poor quality in an organization are lack of involvement by management and lack of knowledge about quality. Without the right process and people, quality will be either a cost center or forgotten component by development. To achieve organizational success, enterprise quality must take action to build quality from top down.
Managers must accept responsibility for the quality practice within the organization and promote it across the organization. Everyone is responsible for quality, not just QA. The journey is fraught with obstacles – maturing the quality practice of an organization builds long term success with robust process and will train employees.

Moving from Isolated Excel-based Testing to an Organization-wide TCoE

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Join Mohita Prasad for a discussion about her personal journey to create a Testing Center of Excellence (TCOE) for a mid-size consulting firm, AST LLC, a top Oracle partner in the Public Sector. AST has multiple delivery units, where each has its own isolated way of testing. We recognized the need for a better way of test management. We started with a Testing Repository of standardized resources that all delivery units could customize and use for their projects. We migrated from an Excel-based testing approach to one using an ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) solution that is linked to our JIRA issue management system. This approach provides transparency to our clients and to our
internal team throughout the testing lifecycle. Our testing process is now uniform across delivery organizations, increasing customer service and satisfaction.

Building an SDET

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     One of the biggest challenges companies face when they “go agile” is who to task the test automation with? Should it be the testers who have never written a line of code in their life? Should it be the developers who have resisted testing their entire professional career? Should you hire a contractor who hopefully knows what they are doing? Deciding is often the easy part. In this session we will explore the complexities and challenges of what it takes to turn manual testers into respectable Software Developers in the Service of Testing (yes, this is possible), what it takes to make developers respectable Testers (yes, this too is possible), and many options in-between.

To BDD or Not to BDD? When the BDD is not used properly.

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​     Behavior-driven development attempts to solve the problem of implementing poorly defined requirements. Our client is in chemical Industry. Hence, it was quite difficult for my team to adapt quickly the corresponding business. To be more precise, in order to build the product, we should understand mathematical models, equations and the glossary of chemical terms. BDD was the solution. Management team heard the magic buzzword "BDD" and hope that it will solve our challenges. However, nobody follows the principles of BDD and finally BDD became just another "automation tool". Business users continued to send documents and emails with the requirements, Developers never used the BDD approach, Analysis team did not follow the patterns to write correct Gherkin syntax as prescribed by the BDD creators etc. The result for the project was just a big mess. In order to address the problems, we had some mini trainings for all our team regarding the correct principles of BDD. We also trained customers with webinars and show them how can write Gherkin files. Also, we have introduced the three amigos concept. Hence, my proposal is this: Do you want to use BDD? Use it right else it will just create more complexity.

What to Avoid When Writing Unit Tests

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     “These tests should never have been written. They provide no or little value.” -ME

Testing code as been described as an "art form." It is, but it should not be. There are many good patterns that should be followed when writing tests. There is even a lifecycle of tests that should be paid some attention. There are also many BAD patterns that developers should be aware of so that they can be avoided (or cleaned up).

This session will provide a series of examples of bad front-end tests and how to write them correctly.

Legoizing Testing

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     Due to the challenges in capturing the requirements with different teams for our project, we changed our approach on testing so as to align with the overall Project Activation timeline and came up with the Lego Test approach. In Lego Test approach blocks for separate areas are identified. Test Scripts for these blocks are created and executed. This is the new Legoizing Testing approach which we implemented successfully.

Our automated journey worked!

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     Six very short months ago, we did not have any automation around big chunks of our product, specifically Salesforce. We set out with a plan to change that! We learned a lot along the way, changed our plans a few times, took drastic measures at others, developed a style guide, changed our development process/culture, and now, we are running a full automated regression suite with every pull request. And if our suite fails, there is no workaround. Everyone stops to understand what caused the fail and fix it.

This has been a huge change in thinking for everyone, not just QA. Product has to understand our step and that they may not get their feature on their pace. Developers had to tighten up their code so it doesn't immediately fail the first round of testing. And Managers had to step in and help everyone understand the value of this new process.

I cannot be more proud of the work we've done or how my team has stepped up! I want to share this so that others can start making a plan to automate their tests and improve quality in their products!

The Rise and Benefits of Robotic Process Automation

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​     Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a term given to technology that allows developers to programmatically emulate the actions of a human to execute a business process. RPA often operates on the user interface (UI) layer to capture data or interact with an application or across multiple applications to perform tasks that are considered repetitive or time-consuming. Originally focused on business processes, many RPA solutions now integrate with SDLC tools. While the promises of easy adoption and scaling are made by almost every vendor, the reality is long-term commitment to an RPA program is the same as any new application. In this presentation, the audience will learn about the benefits of RPA, multiple RPA use cases, and how RPA can be assimilated into a enterprise.

The Valley of Success

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     While the industry is moving toward continuous delivery and continuous testing, most companies still struggle to maintain successful test automation suites. Many automated test efforts focus on the wrong things, and are structured in ways that make it too easy to fail.

This talk will walk through how to focus a testing strategy and organize testing code to get good value from test execution. In addition to big picture strategies, the talk will cover specific examples for how to obtain significant improvements in several different components of a test framework, including successful test writing, data management, page object abstractions and synchronization.

World Quality Report and Role of AI in testing

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     A lot has changed in quality assurance (QA) this year. Find out today’s trends and get recommendations for tomorrow’s challenges. Hitesh will highlight rising priorities, such as the customer experience, QA’s growing role in the adoption of Agile and DevOps practices, the effect of evolving pandemic-impacted requirements for applications across new deployment methods, and the continued growth of AI in continuous testing and quality management tools.

QA Strategy in Digital Transformation

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     Navigate digital transformation by targeting value-based tests with distributed tools that encourage adoption of modern testing patterns. Shift time-consuming tests left with a malleable QA approach and enable Agile teams to own quality. Discuss the full spectrum of testing methods and tools, including automation & performance testing strategies. Share testing implementation experience and challenges from our clients.

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