You want to build an effective testing team, but you’re asking yourself, “Where do I begin?” Greg Paskal, a quality assurance engineer with over thirty years of testing experience, shares seven keys to building a successful testing team. Learn the fundamentals every tester should know and how to build upon them to achieve an effective manual and automated testing strategy. Greg’s minimal essential testing strategy (METS), coupled with his proven experience, will help you build an amazing testing organization. Greg will provide specific instruction through each of these seven areas, including fundamentals of software testing, how to begin implementing and executing the METS manual test strategy, outfitting your manual test team with automated testing, and the importance of building strategic partnerships across your IT and technology organization.

Risk-based testing is essential to focus our testing, but it is not always easy to apply to our projects. Risk management tends to focus more on project and process risks (i.e., Will we make the deadline? Do we follow our processes?) and less on the product risks that can act as a foundation for a risk-based approach to test. Including this aspect of risk in your test coverage will give you a solid foundation for defining a test strategy that implements and executes the right tests with the right intensity to mitigate the most critical product risks. In this presentation, Gitte Ottosen walks you through approaches to lightweight product risk analysis that can be applied whether you are working in a traditional or agile context. The approaches focus on the conversation around identifying and classifying product risks as a team effort, as well as how to use product risk analysis to support test specification and execution.

Testing is shifting left, moving closer to testing the code itself before the full product is ready for release. While the backend world already has established methodologies for testing, frontend developers and testers are still trying to figure out how to work together to effectively test the code. Gil Tayar suggests testers need to communicate with the frontend developers to understand the framework by which frontend code is tested, the various kinds of testing that can be performed on frontend code, and which tools can be used. During this session, Gil helps ease your fear of the unknown by teaching you how to test developer code. He discusses various test methodologies you can use and how they fit together in a coherent way. Gil also includes sample code that you can use as a template in your own project. If time permits, we'll get hands on and do a bit of live coding.

QA departments always feel the pressure to start testing quickly, even if the ever-changing software being tested isn’t ready. A bought-in test automation strategy can keep a project on track.