STARWEST 2018
![](https://www.agileconnection.com/sites/default/files/conferences/images/STARWEST.png)
PRESENTATIONS
Troubleshooting and Understanding Modern Systems: Tools Testers Need
Successful agile testers collaborate with programmers as code is written, isolating problems, troubleshooting defects, and debugging code all along the way to getting the product to done. But modern systems are scaling beyond what traditional teams are able to understand using familiar tools. |
![]() Chris Blain |
Use Soap Opera Testing to Twist Real-Life Stories into Test Ideas
Reality is a great source of inspiration. Real-life situations can present complexities that are not always anticipated—and, as a consequence, not always handled well. Business functional tests should try to present situations that are routed in reality but also aren’t too obvious. Testing and automation pioneer Hans Buwalda came up with a concept for test design called "soap opera testing" based on this concept. It is a style of writing tests where one writes as if they were episodes in an imaginary soap opera on television. |
Hans Buwalda |
What Aircrews Can Teach Testing Teams
United Flight 232 should have crashed with all 296 lives lost. Asiana Flight 214 should not have crashed at all. But the reality is very different. Peter Varhol and Gerie Owen explain that the critical difference between the two flights was the interactions of their respective aircrews. United Flight 232 divided up responsibilities and worked as a team, using Aircrew Resource Management (ARM) to guide how the crew behaved during the flight, and especially in a crisis. |
![]() Peter Varhol |
What You Can't Measure, You Can't Improve: Measurements for a Continuous Delivery Organization
Ashwin Desai has faced the daunting challenge of using measurements and metrics to assess and improve product quality through process change. Join him as he shares what he learned on the journey to move the sports technology firm Hudl from a reactive approach to quality to quantitative, data driven, proactive means to improve product quality. |
Ashwin Desai |
What's an API and How Do I Test It?
API-based applications have become ubiquitous in the past few years. Yet many of us still really don't know what an API is from the inside out. Moreover, many of us don't know much about how to comprehensively test them! Join Paul Merrill to learn what everyone is doing and talking about, related to APIs: microservices, REST, endpoints, requests, request methods, and responses. Paul demonstrates four free tools you can use to directly interact with a simple API: curl, the browser, Postman, and Java (with Rest Assured). |
![]() Paul Merrill |
Why "Why...?" Can Be the Most Important Question for QA to Ask
To test a product, there are so many questions to ask, and so little time in which to ask them. More often than not, we get caught up in the who, what, when, and how, but Jane Jeffers from Riot Games explains that “why…?” questions can be the most important ones to ask when it comes to QA work. When missing the whys, we can wind up only focusing on specific details like who needs to do the work or when our deadlines are, and subsequently lose the bigger picture of why a project matters, and why we do what we do. |
![]() Jane Jeffers |
Working with Anxiety: From Personal Weakness to Career Strength
Each of us has personal weaknesses that are often perceived to have negative impacts on performance and capability in the workplace. When this weakness is prominent to yourself or others, are you capable of benefiting IT teams and qualified to do the job? In dealing with negative impacts of her Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Julene Johnson falls into this category and has experienced personal doubt in her ability to perform her job well. |
![]() Julene Johnson |