Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR testing conferences. Now, they’ve come to the combined Agile Dev, Better Software, and DevOps conferences too. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consist of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. Some of the best-known experts will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning. Get multiple keynote presentations for the price of one—and have some fun at the same time.

The trend in mobile apps today is who can deliver the best and the most new apps as quickly as possible to keep up with the competition. With this, the need for more and better testing seems to grow exponentially. Open source Appium is a unique mobile app testing framework that allows you to write a single test which executes for native or hybrid apps on different operating systems running simulators/emulators and real devices in parallel. Harry Roberts describes how to create and implement a successful mobile testing strategy using Appium across Android and iOS devices. After discussing the basics of Appium and demonstrating it live, Harry outlines how you can determine when to run tests on emulators/simulators vs. real devices and which tools are most efficient and cost-effective.

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). Learn techniques for testing APIs at the service level and how to test APIs faster with greater coverage and quicker test automation. Walk away with an understanding of what JSON is, how APIs use JSON, and how to go about verifying that it is correct. With new knowledge and skills, you’ll do a better testing job and give more valuable feedback to the API designers and developers.

Agile DevOps focuses on moving changes through the pipeline as quickly as possible, which means that more operational tasks—like software deployment—will occur earlier. As a result, testing teams will begin assuming more responsibility in managing those deployments in order to perfect reputability. Tracy Ragan provides an overview of release automation as it relates to testing and explains how automation is key to achieving faster and leaner testing cycles. She discusses why deploying new code across diverse environments can be really tricky and slow, and how properly implemented release automation will streamline code deployments across the lifecycle. Release automation may sound like a topic important to production control teams, but as processes are shifted left, testing teams will take on more responsibility in continuous deployment and associated infrastructure components.