ADAM SANDMAN – CEO, Inflectra

MANAGING RISK-BASED TESTING IN THE AGE OF AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing how software testing is performed, allowing for faster and more accurate detection of defects. However, with this new technology comes new risks that must be managed to ensure the quality and reliability of the software being developed. In this talk, Adam Sandman will explore the concept of Risk-Based Testing (RBT) and how it can be applied in the age of AI. He will discuss the challenges that arise when implementing RBT, including the need to balance the benefits of AI with the risks of false positives and false negatives. Adam will also examine the various techniques and tools that can be used to manage these risks, such as model-based testing, exploratory testing, and risk analysis.

CHRIS HARBERT – Founder & CEO, Testery

BE A DEVELOPER WHO TESTS

Whether you’re a developer or a tester, the skills and experience required to get the job done have more and more overlap than ever before. Fewer organizations are hiring developers who can’t test. Fewer organizations are hiring testers who can’t write code. At the same time, we each bring unique perspectives, experiences, and attitudes toward building software. Companies that navigate this well will have happy productive teams — and those that don’t will ship poor-quality software.

ANDREW KNIGHT – Principal Architect, Cycle Labs

REIMAGINING AUTOMATION

Let’s face it: test automation is hard. Teams across the industry continue to struggle with the same old problems again and again: flaky tests, poor coverage, and never enough time to develop automation. While many teams have reached success, many others feel left behind.

It’s time to rethink how we approach testing and automation. Instead of building automated test suites that merely repeat hard-coded presuppositions, what if we built autonomous tools that could learn our products dynamically and point out changes during development? Any time we make a change to the code, we could run these tools to find out if the actual changes in behavior meet our expectations or cause bugs.

In this talk, we will learn what autonomous testing is and how it will make testing truly Agile. Although we don’t have fully autonomous tools available yet, we will learn how we can start building them today. Autonomous testing could help resolve so many frustrating parts of testing. Let’s build that future together!

CHRIS SELLEK – Staff Software Engineer, Gainbridge

A GOOD TEST SUITE WHO CAN FIND

Have you ever found yourself hesitating, your cursor over the “deploy” button, with sweat pouring down your face because you know who will be blamed if (or let’s be honest: WHEN) everything explodes? You’re a QA engineer, of course you have. If only there were some way to have a higher degree of confidence in those pesky devs you’re working with!

The more astute of you will know what’s coming next: THERE IS! And that “some way” is your test suite.

Couple questions for you:

• If your test suite is green, can you push to prod RIGHT NOW with a high degree of confidence that nothing will explode?
• If your test suite is red after running your e2e tests ONLY ONCE APIECE, do you have a high degree of certainty that something is actually wrong?

If you answered “no” to either of those questions, then it’s likely you dread deploy day. And what does that mean? Your test suite isn’t doing its job.

A test suite’s entire purpose is to buy you confidence — a high degree of confidence — that there are no regressions with the latest updates to your codebase. Anything less and it’s not just underperforming, it’s misleading.

In this session, we’ll talk about what a solid test suite should look like and how it’ll give you more confidence than you’ve ever had in your deploys. It might even mean deploy days stop being sweat-inducing stressmares that keep you up at night!

JENNY BRAMBLE – Director of Engineering, Papa

SETTING YOUR TESTS UP TO FAIL

It’s a fact of life that we often have to write automated tests for features that have defects, that interact with 3rd party APIs that aren’t returning the right responses, or for items that we know aren’t working right. When the team has decided that the behavior isn’t going to be fixed, what’s an automation engineer to do? Let the tests fail? Not write them? Champion harder for the defects?

Jenny will suggest writing your tests to pass and setting them up to fail.

By creating tests that pass on the current expected behavior (the defect), we are in a perfect position to tell when the defect is resolved, or the API is returning the correct information or any of the other error cases we may be encountering. This prevents failure fatigue (from seeing a test ‘always fail), while still providing meaningful, actionable information out of our test suite.

We will discuss several cases that she has experienced that this method has worked for as well as how to keep the rest of the team informed through TODOs, Jira stories, and documentation. And–of course!–what to do when your test finally fails.

ALEX HARRISON – Software Engineer, Cisco

YOU’RE NO LONGER A TESTER, NOW WHAT?

In the ever-changing world of our industry, our roles evolve and transition. Sometimes we may find out that the next organizational shift means that we are no longer “testers”. What does that mean for us after all the effort put into honing our testing skills?

FEROZ LOUIS – Senior Lead Transformation Coach, Wells Fargo

MOBILE TEST AUTOMATION STRATEGY AND TOOLS WITH MODERN ENGINEERING PRACTICES TO BETTER WORK IN AGILE MODE

Learn about the salient features of the strategies and tools you need to utilize for an effective automation approach for Mobile Web, Native, and Hybrid apps. He will cover the strategies to gain optimal test coverage with the least effort and learn from utilizing actual mobile test automation tools that provide low code options for teams to get started early and achieve shift left in their test automation efforts in a Modern Agile Development environment which utilize Ci/CD pipelines and monitoring tools.

RYAN BARNES – Test Automation Engineer, Aspida

ON-DEMAND TEST EXECUTION: BUILDING A SELF-SERVICE TEST EXECUTION & REPORTING APPLICATION

Given the day to day needs of the larger engineering team, we can often be asked to run this test or that test. With these requests coming in, we get pulled away from getting our work done. The solution: a web application for on-demand execution of tests. We’ll look at how to build a simple Node server and front-end application to run tests, report results, and take user inputted parameters. This flexible application can be used to automate time-consuming tasks in your products, to executing load and performance testing in an on-demand basis. We’ll discuss best use-cases and general best practices for this novel approach to testing.