Targeting Quality 2019

There’s a lot of discussion going on the software development world today about the incredible benefits of tester’s getting comfortable with code (reading it and writing it!) and about developers getting more comfortable with testing; but what is it really like to make that last shift within an organization and what does it really mean?

This talk will walk through how my team was able to shift testing in a way that the whole team was empowered to, and felt comfortable to, pick up QA tasks to increase our efficiency. We’ll go through how we identified the need for this shift, how we got the whole team on board, the process we took, and the outcomes we saw. I’ll also walk you through the challenges we faced and the lessons we learned along the way.

Key Takeaways:
- Understanding what it means and looks like for a whole team to be empowered to test
- Ways to get buy in (on your team and in your org) for non-testers to test
- Lessons learned by my team and advice for empowering your whole team to test

In many ways APIs are the glue of the internet. The modern internet is increasingly built on distributed architectures and companies that want to make their platforms extensible. APIs are a crucial part of these kind of business strategies. They are also challenging to design and test. By their very nature they are meant to be accessed programmatically and to expose underlying constructs in ways that are simple to use and understand. You might be comfortable with how to test manually or even with various types of test automation, but still not really know and understand how to effectively test an API.
 
In this talk I will introduce you to some API terminology and dive into some practical approaches and strategies that you can use as you get into API testing. We will look at a few actual examples and you will leave this talk with the grounding you need so that you can take the next steps in your API testing journey.

Digital is NOT a add on to existing technology stack or process. It forces to rethink the business model. In the presentation I like to challenge the embedded maturity levels ( such as CMMi) etc where we intend to achieve a level of maturity. However in digital world this means constantly "Maturing" versus Matured or maturity.

Digital maturity is a continuous process of adapting to the changing digital landscape. Technology is used not just to digitize the business model/process but exploited to do much more than the current business model allows. Digitally maturing organizations rely less on hierarchical management structure to make decisions. They build cross functional teams that collaborate more and are empowered.

I will present some challenges we faced while introducing this concept in our Digital Transformation program including roll out of “progressive automation” i.e. automate testing as it is being developed and the CI/CD which helped us successfully rollout Digital Transformation.

When building a perfect tester mindset, both in ourselves and in future software testers, we often focus on technical skills. We emphasize these skills because they are critical to what helps us write and execute tests, write defects, etc. But, shouldn’t we also consider the curious, creative, and adventurous traits that lie at the heart of testing? What are we doing to make sure those don't get lost or overlooked as we grow and develop our testing mindset?
In the 1999 film The Matrix, Morpheus says, “Good adaptation and improvisation. But your weakness is not your technique.” When I heard this line, I thought that perhaps this film gets to the heart of these questions. Morpheus, the mentor figure of the movie, focuses on teaching Neo, the protagonist, to re-assess his assumptions of how the system within which they are living should work, to see how it does work. Through the empowerment of his creative and curious traits, Neo is given the tools to find the weak points of the program and the confidence to break the system. Using the film as our contextual guide to give our concepts a relatable frame of reference, we will explore what the movie can show us about teaching new testers, and about growing ourselves as testers. We will explore what skills we can focus on to build fearlessness into the testing mindset. With a fearless testing mindset, we can become The One – A Software Tester.

In 2018, Element Fleet Management committed to implementing "True Agile" into their entire software development organization. With the assistance of Boston Consulting Group, they embraced the "Spotify Model" of Agile which includes organizing Guilds for each role on the Squad. In early 2019, Richard Strang was hired as the QA Guild Leader for Element. This presentation will document his experience and challenges implementing a QA Guild into an enthusiastic but inexperienced organization.

Let's Play and learn some useful Innovation Games that can help you gamify your agile team and workplace, making the team meetings shorter and communication more fun!
We'll present live some innovation games like Speed Boat, Mitch Lacey Team Prioritization and have audience volunteers engage and play games based on known scenarios.

Learn some easy stepping stones to go from manual testing to getting your feet wet with automation to writing full automation suites. In this talk you can expect lots of easy to understand code snippets, lots of sources for more information, and plenty of encouragement.

If you take comfort in knowing that your unit test suite has very high coverage, or think that increasing your test coverage will guarantee catching bugs earlier, I have some bad news. Your test coverage metrics are lying to you.

If you’ve already been bitten by bugs that turned up in code that you thought was thoroughly tested, or suspect that your unit tests leave something to be desired, I can provide some hope. There is a better way!

In this interactive demonstration, I will use just a few lines of Javascript to achieve 100% test coverage without actually testing anything, and then show how using mutation testing tools can expose those lies without writing a single new test.

If you rely on unit tests in your development process at all, you’ll see how this simple technique can be used to evaluate your actual test coverage and highlight exactly what kinds of bugs you might still be missing.