development

DevOps teams struggle to ensure quality in multiple daily deployments. Traditional testing approaches have often failed in this context, but there are exciting new ways to test. Laurent Py and Vincent Prêtre will explain how, at Hiptest, DevOps teams combine behavior-driven development (BDD) techniques with business metrics analysis to continuously assert the quality of their product. BDD scenarios align teams to a common goal, and users provide feedback to ensure their needs are met. The team transforms usage scenarios into tests that enable developers to deliver the functionality expected, and product analytics are collected to ensure that the functionality is valuable to users. Analytics data is then used to learn how the new feature impacts the user experience. Laurent and Vincent will explain how this approach reduces siloed communication and combines scenarios and data in living documentation.

Empathy is a technical skill. Don’t worry; you read that correctly. While empathy is often cited as a critical “soft skill,” it doesn’t stop there. Empathy is also an incredibly technical topic that is more accessible to analytical engineers—and more vital to building software—than you might think. Andrea Goulet, a noted expert on communication in the software industry, will debunk several myths around empathy, including that empathy is just a feeling, that technical folks can’t access empathy, and that empathy is just a high-level, touchy-feely fad. Andrea will demonstrate how empathy is a crucial skill for all developers of software, and she will give you practical and immediately actionable advice for making empathy a central focus of your daily software development communication practices. She'll also explore the place for empathy while you’re coding and testing.

The DevOps movement is front and center across enterprises. Companies with mature systems are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams and departments. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, development organizations have been filled with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. Adam Auerbach says this has to change. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding in order to stay relevant and add more value to the business. Based on his experiences at Lincoln Financial and Capital One, Adam explores what the DevOps movement is all about, its core values, and proven patterns for how testing must evolve.

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. New appreciation for systems and complexity theory, as well as disciplines and tools around emerging areas such as observability and resilience engineering, are offering solutions that allow teams to actively debug their systems and explore properties and patterns they have not defined in advance. Chris will share the basics of the theory of these new ideas, as well as some tools that support this type of work. He'll show how dynamic analysis can be used to isolate and understand puzzling system behavior.