GEORGE UKKURU - Head of Quality Engineering, UST Global

NO CODE PLATFORMS AND SCRIPTLESS AUTOMATION

With the ongoing COVID pandemic across the globe, the way companies are handling their operations have changed completely. With millions of employees working from home, many businesses were forced to digitize their monitoring the ways employees are working from home. It suddenly became utmost important for the companies to digitize internally as well externally. Because of the sudden demand for digitization, companies had limited time for it, and there was no proper plan available. The session talks about how scriptless automation can help to automate the testing of low code or no-code platforms and increase the speed of releases to production.

CRAIG RISI - QA Architect, Allan Gray Proprietary Limited

A TESTER’S GUIDE TO UNIT TESTING

In this presentation I will showcase ideas and a proven framework on how you can take any team or product and work to achieving a testing framework and approach that allows for automation across every required frontend and backend layer, unit and end-to-end test in a way that can be completed within a sprint with as minimal tech debt and left backlog as possible. Often teams focus too much on different tools and automation frameworks to help them achieve this rather than looking holistically at “how” they are building their software and whether it is appropriately testable, addressing a team culture that enables quality ownership throughout and empowering your testers to operate at all levels across the stack so that they can test earlier and more effectively.

KGOSI MOLEFE - Cognitive Intelligent Automation: Core Business Operations, Deloitte Consulting

INTEGRATING AUTOMATED TESTING INTO DEVOPS AND AGILE

Development wants rapid change

Operations want stability and quality

DevOps helps achieve both objectives through creating and transforming shared culture, processes, and technology

MICHAEL MASEKO - QA Lead CoE, Banking

IMPLEMENTING MAINFRAME DEVOPS & TEST AUTOMATION JOURNEY

COBOL turned 60 years old in September 2019. A quote from Derek Britton, Micro Focus global director of product marketing, application modernization, and connectivity, reminds us how ubiquitous COBOL is in our daily transactions with :
“Any time you phone a call center, any time you transfer money, or check your account, or pay a mortgage, or renew or get an insurance quote, or when contacting a government department, or shipping a parcel, or ordering some flowers, or buying something online at a whole range of retailers, or booking a vacation, or a flight, or trading stocks, or even checking your favorite baseball team’s seasonal statistics, you are interacting with COBOL."

But Testing COBOL Mainframes remains a challenge and lacks focus in the testing world. The mainframe is the backbone of many organizations and contains critical business rules or logic. Only Testing Mainframe code via the front-end or RestAPI is not effective. To truly achieve DevOps or Agile delivery Mainframe Test Automation is critical. My journey would include the following:
• The test engineer and leads should have a quality mindset, not just focus on testing.
• The approach and design of quality assurance
• The ineffectiveness of testing mainframe through front-end
• The process or method to integrate Mainframe into DevOps/Agile Environment
• Skills required to test Mainframe.
• It’s time to go back and amend our oversight to revolutionaries Mainframe testing.

JAMES LEWIS - Automation Engineer, Inter Africa Transport Forex

AUTOMATION TESTING - PAGE OBJECT MODEL

Automating a test might be a simple task but making a test automatable for multiple scenarios is the winning recipe. Using proper PageObject designs and also understanding where your tests code starts and where the value sits is important, as when you make a mistake with the architecture of the automation projects, fixing the architecture might be costly and time-consuming task.

Once you understand that recipe, that same thought process can go into automating not just other tests but Deployments as well.

Enter the Automation engineer The power, value, and minds of automation testers are becoming a powerful role within organizations, where they do not only want to automate tests but everything else that comes with DevOps as well.

Like automating client feedback to your agile boards from clients, automating deployments of local websites hosted on-site or on cloud platforms (AWS or Azure), Integrating code when a developer merges changes to a branch, and then ultimately deploying the correct code when deploying to production.

For the past 5 years, it has come to me that automating tests and automating deployments and part of the DevOps processes are tightly integrated into each other, and automation testers are geared with the right thinking to fulfill these processes.

The minds, skills, and innovative thinking we as automation testers have are a powerful tool in teams, and I will gladly share my experience with the automation testing community

CHRISTOPHER LINNELL - Switching Implementation and Quality Assurance Lead, Healthbridge

THINGS TO CONSIDER WHEN STARTING YOUR TEST AUTOMATION JOURNEY

An experience based talk/presentation on the ups and downs of implementing test automation at different levels (UI, integration, unit, load/performance) some things to watch out for and expectations to manage.

DESMOND MATHEBULA - CEO, Ntokoto Technology Group (Pty)Ltd

QUALITY ENGINEER'S FUTURE

Data-Driven Approach leads to organizational transformation and digitization, Is Testing trailing, leading, or moving along?

This topic is intended to invoke the Testing community so that we ask ourselves where we want to be in the Digital Transformation process. I believe we have lost opportunities in the industry but it is not all lost.

NATASHA ANDERSON - Engineering Practices Lead, Standard Bank

KEEP CALMS AND DEVOPS ON

The pace of change and rate of disruption is at unprecedented highs and as such the balancing act between delivering at high speed and quality while creating client and business value has become as optional to each of our strategies as oxygen is for human existence. What does this mean for us as leaders in the Quality Engineering discipline? What are the principles of practices like DevOps, SRE and Agile that enable the success criteria for speed, quality and value? What are the emerging trends that can fast track impact? How important is it to make people feel safe and valued in our teams and what are some of the key elements of culture that you need to get right?

In this session, Natasha Anderson provides an overview of fundamental DevOps principles, its impact to quality engineering and engineers and the emerging trends in strategy and culture that continue to accelerate this change.

RAPHAEL ROEMS - Test Automation Lead, The Foschini Group (TFG)

IMPLEMENTING TEST AUTOMATION FOR BACKEND TESTING

A review of a journey implementing test automation for backend testing, within an ecommerce context. This includes identification of existing issues that test automation aimed to address, together with considerations for the test automation framework. The challenges encountered in the implementation process, quantification of the benefits of test automation, maintenance considerations and future plans are also discussed.

CALLIE BANEY - Head of PMO, Ignition Group

DEVOPS – PEOPLE, PLACES, PLAYTHINGS

The world of Information Technology is moving into a seamless end to end DevOps environment. The traditional roles and responsibilities are morphing into a seamless stream of adding value across the board, from inception to production stabilisation.

Traditional information technology business models divided engineering and operations, who essentially had their own cultures, languages, and motivations. Often these cultures created opposing goals. Within the SDLC the same divides existed, as an example the divide between development and testing.

The DevOps world focuses on smooth cradle to grave delivery, without the walls. The CAMs model aims to create a Kaizen environment where all team members work without walls.

I would like to focus on Culture and Sharing within the changing Information Technology world.

Ahsan Mumtaz - Senior QA Engineer, Clarksons, PLC, UK

NEXTGEN TEST AUTOMATION: CYPRESS

Talk about following points
1. Challenges in test automation in today's world
2. Why Cypress over Selenium or other Javascript testing framework
3. Visual regression testing in Cypress
4. Testing in different view ports
5. Continuous integration and continuous testing in pipelines

LEELA PUTTEN - IT Specialist Consultant, Rosstone Consulting

CONTINUOUS QA IN A DIGITAL WORLD

"Quality is Built-In" - What does it really mean for the testing community?
As the digital transformation is taking over the world, the testing and quality assurance community has had a lot of challenges in redefining and evolving our role based on the fact that Quality is meant to be built in and automated. Our topic will look at the journey to continuous QA and testing in the continuous and faster delivery models in IT.