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Making Test Automation Work in Agile Projects

How do we succeed with test automation in a fast-paced agile environment? Through hands-on exercises and group discussions, participants will learn to overcome common barriers to successful test automation. A whole-team approach to test automation even helps if you’re a tester on a more traditional project without the support of programmers on your team.

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SBTM using Mindmaps

SBTM is a time boxed, mission focused personal level and test project management level approach co-invented by the Bach Brothers. It is an important step forward, for exploratory testers across the world to answer questions from stakeholders on accountability, coverage, productivity and visibility. In this half day workshop, you and I would sit and do test sessions, de-brief and do a whole bunch of things to make ourselves highly accountable and more valuable using mindmaps.

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Windows 8 development with XAML/C#

Windows 8 is without a doubt an intriguing opportunity for every developer. For people with prior WPF, Silverlight or Windows Phone experience, this is the continuation of a journey started in 2006 in the XAML landscape. For others, the learning curve is steeper but made easier by the active community in these platforms. From networking to sensors, from best practices to visual tools, this half-day should give you a kickstart in the Windows 8 world.

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Rediscovering Modularity with Restructure101

The principles of modularity are applied routinely in the development of classes, but not to the organization of the classes themselves. This is unscalable; inevitably it will extract a big tax on development dollars as the team starts to drown in an ever-expanding sea of classes. This tutorial gives concrete strategies for constructing a hierarchical, levelized, modular structure for an existing code-base, with minimal impact on working code. Many pattern-action-result examples are given.

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Asynchronous UIs

Asynchronous UIs are a complete revolution in the way programmers are creating interfaces for the web, with an emphasis on speed and client-side state. This talk will take you through all the steps needed to implement an asynchronous UI, from serving up JSON to rendering everything client side with frameworks like Backbone and Spine.

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Pure, Functional Javascript

Are you comfortable passing functions around, returning them from other functions, and generally enjoy the pleasures of higher-order functions? Join in on a brief hour implementing ideas from functional programming in JavaScript. I will show you how you can significantly up your game by leaving loops behind and embracing functions as your primary unit of abstraction.

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Node.js in the Cloud with Windows Azure

If I told you that you can build node.js applications in Windows Azure would you believe me? Come to this session and I’ll show you how. You’ll see how take those existing node apps and easily deploy them to Windows Azure from any platform, how you can make yours node apps more robust by leveraging Azure services like storage and service bus and how to take advantage of cool tools like socket.io for WebSockets, node-inspector for debugging and Cloud9 for an awesome online development experience.

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Secrets of the Chrome Developer Tools

The Developer Tools built into Google Chrome provide powerful ways to understand, debug, and profile web applications. Most developers are familiar with its basic inspection and debugging tools, but some of its most valuable features, like the timeline and memory analysis tools, are lesser known. This talk will provide an overview of the Chrome dev tools and an in-depth demonstration of some of the lesser-known features.

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Testing Online Crazy Glue

PHP won the early battles for the web because it is online crazy glue. Testing applications written in PHP can be challenging without some guidance as there is lots of info on how to use testing tools but very little info on how to build your application in such a way that it can be easily tested. This talk will cover strategies that can be used to shape your application in such a way that you'll be making production pushes multiple times a day with complete confidence.

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Travis CI - I Hear You Like Pull Requests

If you've ever used it, you've probably fallen in love with Github Pull Requests. This is the story about adding automatic Pull Request testing to Travis CI. We will explore the depths of Git, GitHub and Travis CI. Expect to learn something about Git internals, undocumented APIs, distributed systems and real world usage of hypermedia. And why it all matters.

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Future of Testing and Quality

This talk addresses the impact of changes such as Cloud, Open Source and Software Complexity on testing professionals and looks to assess where the future will take us. It summarises two years of research on this topic, discussions with hundreds of software testing professionals, and provides suggestions on possible solutions.

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Automated Testing Strategies for Databases

Almost all significant applications involve some sort of database. Many challenges come up when automating tests of data-intensive applications, including test repeatability, performance, transactional integrity and parallel test execution. This session will present solutions to these problems along with concrete implementations. Participants will be expected to have a working knowledge of relational databases and an understanding of the principles of database programming and test automation.

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Building your reputation through creative disobedience

Software Development tends to be tribal -- the developers vs. the testers, the Agilistas vs. the waterfallists, the context-driven school vs. the certification folks, and so on. Matt Heusser will explain how and why these associations spring up, how to to take the best from a tribe -- and to know when to break from the pack. He will also discuss tribes in the workplace, how groupthink happens, and how technologists can use disobedience to fuel improvement in product, process, and reputation.

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Testing that made me proud

“I am proud because of” is the opening line of three testing professionals sharing this lightning talk session with test as its main theme. Martin Karlsson from Lundalogik will share how his company uses dogfooding for ensuring quality. Their administrative staff uses test versions of their own products in their daily work. Mattias Gustavsson from Securitas Direct will talk about note taking as a key part to be successful with Session Based Test Management. What kind of note takers they have and how they created a simple tool that gave freedom to their team so they could be creative but still keep a high quality in their notes. Linda Hoff from RIM will present Test reports that actually bring value. Three examples of test reports that differ from traditional reports but still contains parts that she is specifically proud of.

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Testing in Parallel

Automated functional tests provide valuable feedback to developers by notifying them when they break functionality. Additional value can be derived from the tests by providing fast feedback, as the problem is likely to be fresh in the developers mind and quicker to fix. A Typical functional test suite can take many hours to run because they can only run tests sequentiality. This session will look at the cause of serial tests and how to construct them to run in parallel with other tests.

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Making offshore testing work

During Oredev 2011, at least three people approached me after my talk and shared their challenges dealing with offshore test teams. Like it or not, good or bad, outsourcing testing is happening at large and India is the hub for outsourced testing. Now, although it is a business decision to outsource, it is the technical people who are involved on a day to day basis. So, as a program / dev / test manager / lead, how do you leverage the value out of outsourced testing? This talk addresses problems and possible solutions.

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The Whole-Team Approach, Illustrated

When a cross-functional team commits to delivering a software product with the highest possible quality, that commitment needs to be meaningful. Lisa Crispin's team recently discovered ways to enhance the usability of their web app, and significantly reduce user mistakes, but their GUI test tool doesn't accommodate the new technology. Come hear how Lisa's team has pulled together - though it was difficult - and conducted several experiments to look for a good solution.

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Reinventing software quality

Software quality, as we know it, is a high fantasy. to be competitive we have to switch from quality as a cost centre to quality as value-add, but for that we have to completely change the way we measure, assure and define quality.

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Cross team testing in an agile environment

There are a lot of benefits with having the testers in the scrum teams working side by side with the developers, and not in a separate test team. However, there are also some negative aspects that can endanger the quality of the work the testers are doing. E.g. by taking part in the design work you easily get biased as a tester and also not as independent as needed. Mixup testing is a cross team testing activity to reduced some of these negative aspects.

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Whiteboarding for Testers, Developers and Customers too

How can testers spend more time doing productive testing and waste less effort preparing "useless" project documentation? Whiteboarding techniques enable powerful communication and collaboration without all the paperwork. Rob Sabourin has used whiteboarding to help identify technical risks, better understand user needs and to focus testing on what really matters to business stakeholders.

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API Usability

APIs are consumed by programs, but those programs are built by humans. A good API is one that both programs and humans enjoy using. That means the API not only has to be powerful and responsive, but usable, too. Using examples like Twilio, Twitter, and FourSquare, we'll discuss what makes an API usable or not. We'll talk about common usability traps and the bugs we make or prevent consuming applications. Finally, we'll discuss approaches to API development that improve usability.

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Lead the testing for mobile apps

Mobile apps are threatening to engulf software development at many organisations large and small. Even organisations at the vanguard are struggling to find ways to develop and test their mobile apps, and the rest are either much further behind or yet to dip their toes in the water. Let's find ways to incorporate testing and validation of our mobile apps. This session will provide a catalyst for some of you, for others perhaps you're already making progress so it'll provide another perspective.