What’s INSIDE WELCOME MESSAGEqaicampus.com/questmagazine/2019_QUEST_Magazine.pdf · 3 The Loews Hotel Chicago O’Hare 5300 N. River Road, Rosemont, Illinois, 60018 United States

WELCOME MESSAGEWelcome to the Quality Engineered Software and Testing (QUEST) Conference and EXPO! We are excited to welcome back those of you who have attended QUEST regularly. To our first-time guests, we welcome you and want to assure you that we will work hard to make your QUEST experience fantastic.

Professional conferences provide many great opportunities for attendees. The QUEST motto of LEARN | ACCESS | APPLY | CONNECT states very distinctly the goals we have for you, our conference guests.

To facilitate your opportunity to LEARN, the conference provides full-day courses, half-day tutorials, great keynote speakers, presentations from industry thought leaders and one-on-one coaching sessions. The solutions sessions led by professional practitioners allows you to ACCESS your organization against similar organizations. Learning and accessing are one thing, but the ability to APPLY what you learn is critical to your ROI for attending. The Manager’s Solutions Workshop, best practices workshops, and the roundtable discussion groups help you consider the application of new ideas for your team back home. Finally, the opportunity to CONNECT with your professional peers in a variety of activities is invaluable. Each night of the QUEST Conference there are events planned for you to meet your fellow conference attendees and broaden your professional network.

The QUEST Conference team has worked hard to ensure your time here is both rewarding and enjoyable. But we can only do so much. Now you must plan your QUEST Experience carefully to seize the opportunity to LEARN, ASSESS, APPLY and CONNECT with fellow quality advocates and testing professionals both locally and worldwide.

Tom Ticknor Nancy Kastl COO, QAI Global QUEST Conference Chair

5 Manager’s Workshop 6 Networking Events 11 Full-Day Classes 13 Half-Day Tutorials16 Keynote Presentations20 Certification Programs23 Hotel Map23 QUEST at a Glance26 EXPO Talks29 Early Bird Sessions 31 Presentations/Workshops41 Sponsors, Exhibitors & Supporters

What’s INSIDE

CHICAGO

CALL 866.724.6013 OR 407.363.1111 EXT 301 TO REGISTER OR WWW.QAIQUEST.ORG/2019

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS & FEATURED ARTICLES

Featured ArticlesLeprechauns, Unicorns, & In-Sprint AutomationBy Scot Noftz ................................................................................................................................................. 8

Eliminating Reliance on the IT Honor Code By Tim Gorman ............................................................................................................................................. 10

Reciprocity and Rent Seeking In Agile TeamsBy Tom Cagley .............................................................................................................................................. 19

The Positivity of “No” By Jamie Kelley .......................................................................................................................................... 21

How Can Cloud, Codeless Test Automation, and Machine-Learning Test Analytics Boost Continuous Testing?By Eran Kinsbruner .................................................................................................................................... 28

The QA Profession Has Never Been Hotter! By Kirk Walton ............................................................................................................................................. 30

Managing Risk in Agile ProjectsBy Moss Drake and Philip Lew .................................................................................................................. 46

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The Loews Hotel Chicago O’Hare 5300 N. River Road, Rosemont, Illinois, 60018 United States | Phone: (847) 544-5300

About the Hotel QUEST 2019 will be held at the Loews Hotel Chicago O’Hare. The Loews will treat you to their signature Loews service and amenities—along with their particular brand of Midwestern friendliness. The hotel’s award-winning concierge is there to help with arrangements for travel downtown, or with suggestions for great restaurants and shopping right in the Rosemont area. Our QUEST out-of-town guests will appreciate the 5 minute ride from O’Hare International with free shuttle service running every 15 minutes.


HOTEL & CONFERENCE OVERVIEW

Manager’s Solutions Workshop (2 Days)

�� 2-day Manager’s Solutions Workshop with experts leading solutions discussions

Classes & Tutorials (2 Days)

�� 5 full-day skills based classes �� 10 half-day skills based tutorials

Certification Opportunities

�� Prep class for Certified Software Tester (CSTE)

�� Prep class for Certified Software Quality Analyst (CSQA)

�� Practice tests for CSTE and CSQA

Conference (3 Days)

�� 4 keynote presentations by industry leaders�� 38 sessions by leading industry experts

and corporate practitioners in concurrent conference tracks

�� 10 extended workshop sessions�� 2 bonus sessions�� 20 roundtable discussion groups

Exhibitor EXPO and Talks (2 Days)

�� 24 Exhibitors to browse�� 10 EXPO Talk products/services

demonstrations

Networking

�� Hundreds of quality professionals to network with

�� Manager’s Solutions Workshop Connection Dinner

�� Welcome Reception�� Attendee Appreciation Evening Event �� Evening reception with exhibitors

Why QUEST? The QAI Global Institute’s Quality Engineered Software and Testing Conference (QUEST) is a week of classes, tutorials, educational sessions, hands-on workshops, discussion groups, and networking events for IT professionals from around the world. QUEST’s unique learning opportunities address high interest topics and aids IT professionals in increasing their knowledge and skills in this dynamically changing industry.

Why attend QUEST? » LEARN from industry thought leaders through attending sessions, participating in workshops and discussion groups, and coaching sessions » ASSESS your practices against those of other companies and organizations as presented by peer managers and practitioners » APPLY your experience and knowledge to produce solutions during classes, tutorials, and interactive work groups » CONNECT with fellow practitioners, contribute to the industry, and explore career possibilities. Enjoy four outstanding networking events

Leadership �� Change Management�� Collaboration�� Communication�� High Performance Teams�� Measurement�� Quality Engineering�� Recruiting Talent�� Risk Management�� Selling Quality�� Strategy Roadmap�� Testing Skills�� Transformation

Built-in Software Quality

�� Agile�� Architecture �� CMMI �� Continuous Testing�� Data Privacy �� Estimation�� Kanban�� Performance Testing �� Planning & Design �� Process Improvement �� Test Data �� Test Strategy

Automation & Tools

�� APIs and Services �� Appium �� BDD �� Cross-Browser�� Scriptless/Codeless�� Frameworks �� Open Source �� Selenium �� SpecFlow�� Unit Testing��

Testing Innovations

�� AI / ML�� CI /CD�� DevOps�� Exploratory�� IoT �� Mobile �� Predictive Analytics �� Production Testing�� Robotics�� Security �� UAT

SPONSORS

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QAI GLOBAL INSTITUTE

*Participating entities are as of April 29, 2019. All logos are trademarks of their respective companies and/or organizations.


PARTICIPATING COMPANIES/ORGANIZATIONS

Participating Companies:

ABC SupplyAbridge TechnologyAccuity Inc.Advantage Leadership, Inc.AimcoAlmacAmerican Academy of Family PhysiciansAmerican Academy of Orthopaedic SurgeonsAmerican Access Casualty CompanyAmerican Hospital AssociationAmerican Society of AnesthesiologistsAndrew Davidson & Co., Inc.Anthem, Inc.API Fortress Inc.ApplitoolsArch DevOpsAssurant, IncAudibleAugeo FIAutomation Services Co.BancolombiaBelvedere TradingBloomberg BNABooz Allen HamiltonBottle Rocket, LLCBrainlyBroadcomBrookfield PropertiesCA TechnologiesCanada Revenue AgencyCareCentrixCDWCentene CorporationCentric ConsultingCerner CorporationCharter MfgCheckpoint TechnologiesChenegaChevronChicago Quality Assurance Association

CIBC Bank CanadaCIBC Bank USAConstellation BrandsContinental Automotive SystemsCrowe LLPDamco SolutionsDardenDelphixDePaul iD LabDerivcoDonleneMoney Advisor, LLCEpamExoprise SystemsFederal Home Loan Bank of ChicagoFederal Reserve Bank of ClevelandFieldglass SAPFollettFootLockerForte Research SystemsFusion Systems and ServicesGaditekGraingerGreat Health WorksGTreasury, Inc.HERE Technologies, Inc.Horace MannHSNiHuntington National BankHyland SoftwareIBMIBM Watson Health ImagingIEEE Chicago SectionIneffable SolutionsInfostretchInternational Software Certifications

BoardJellyvisionJemuraiJFR Consulting

Joint Commission ResourcesJRI AmericaKMS TechnologyKobitonLibrary of CongressMayer Brown LLPMilliman IntelliscriptMilwaukee ToolMITREMobile LabsModern Woodmen of AmericaMoolya Software Testing Pvt LtdNational Futures AssociationNationwideNorthern TrustNVIDIAOBS GlobalOriginal SoftwareParasoftPaylocityPeapod Digital LabsPennsylvania Turnpike

CommissionPerfectoProgressive LeasingPulse SystemsPVH CorpQAI GlobalQASymphonyQualitest GroupQuality SquaredQVC IncRafaelRainforest QARandstad-Life-Sciences-TakedaRentPathRio Grande Jewelry SupplyRoyal Bank of CanadaRTI Surgical, Inc.Salesforce

SAP FieldglassSauce LabsSBC GlobalScrum.orgSendgridSentry InsuranceSmartBearSobeys IncSodoto SolutionsSogetiSPRSQS USASSI, LLCSSM HealthSynopsysTakeda Pharmaceutical - Randstad

Life SciencesTap | QATechnology Strategy ResearchThe Pokémon Company

InternationalTiffin UniversityTotal Performance ConsultingTrissentialTruckstop.comUlta BeautyUnimagined Testing Inc.Utopia SolutionsValorem LLCValuemomentumVGTWawanesa InsuranceWespath Benefits and InvestmentsWI Dept of Employee Trust FundsWinston & Strawn LLPWISEWIRESWolters KluwerXBOSoftZenergy Technologies, Inc.Zuci Systems

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QAI EXCLUSIVE MANAGER’S SOLUTIONS WORKSHOP

The Manager’s Solutions Workshop focuses on the top challenges facing managers in building, testing, and delivering quality software applications and products in today’s fast-paced and demanding environment. This intense and interactive workshop provides a unique opportunity for managers to learn from the QAI Global Institute’s professional staff and industry leaders and to develop solutions with their peers from other companies. Each attendee will have the opportunity to have their specific challenges and concerns addressed during the workshop. An example of some of the challenges that have been addressed in past Manager’s Solutions Workshops include:

• Proving the value of software quality and testing• Transitioning to Agile• Defining quality and testing metrics• Improving the software testing process• Building quality in throughout the software development

process• Making test automation work• Establishing a testing center of excellence• Estimating the testing effort• Improving requirements• Building effective teams Why Attend QAI Global Institute’s studies show that if an IT organization forms an internal team to develop a solution to a current challenge, the cost to the organization can range from $10,000 to $50,000. By attending the Manager’s Solutions Workshop you will get solutions to your work challenges at a fraction of this cost, plus connect with peers who can be contacted for advice in the future. Workshop Format Prior to the Manager’s Solutions Workshop, participants complete a survey about their current challenges. These challenges are consolidated into a list of potential topics, which are ranked in order of importance to the workshop participants. Four to six challenges become the agenda for the workshop.Each challenge is introduced to the workshop participants, who then break into small work groups. Using the QAI Global Institute’s problem-solving approach, the work groups define the challenge and develop potential solutions based on their collective experiences and shared knowledge. Each group selects one of their potential solutions and defines “how to” tactics for the solution. Each group presents their proposed best solution which is critiqued by the workshop’s leaders and guest industry experts. Additional time is spent by the guest industry thought leaders to share their solutions and answer specific questions from the workshop participants. All workshop participants are given opportunities throughout the workshop to bring their specific challenge before the group to ask for friendly group advice. Participants will leave the workshop with a series of potential solutions to today’s quality challenges.

Connections Dinner In addition to the two-days interactive workshop, participants will also have the opportunity to attend the Manager’s Connection Dinner. This evening will provide the workshop attendees a chance to discuss the topics and related quality issues in a more relaxed setting, and provides an ideal opportunity for networking with peers and exchanging ideas. Who Should Attend This workshop is designed for managers responsible for the building, testing, and delivering quality software applications within their companies or software products for the marketplace. Persons who would benefit the most from attending the Manager’s Workshop are those holding positions of, or similar to:• IT/IS Vice Presidents and Directors• Quality Managers• Quality Assurance Managers• Testing Managers• Project Managers

Thought Leaders

Testimonies “The Manager’s Workshop is a valuable way to share your lessons learned, current needs, concerns, and challenges. I highly recommend attending and look forward to returning next year.”

“Well chose and well balanced selection of topics presented. A nice diverse group of attendees. Well worth the time. Thanks.”

“An awesome lineup of guest experts! Great venue!”

“I love the excellent practical experience that I can actually implement! Very nice.”

Don’t miss this great opportunity to be part of a select group of managers and industry thought leaders who will aggressively tackle today’s most pressing quality issues!

Manager’s Solutions WorkshopMonday & Tuesday, May 13 & 14

**The Manager’s Solutions Workshop is an entirely independent function of the QUEST Conference. Prior registration is required to attend.**

Tom Cagley Nancy Kelln Jim Trentadue Philip Lew

Clyneice Chaney

Jeremy Berriault

Nancy Kastl, Moderator

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NETWORKING EVENTS

Opportunities to Connect

EXPO Reception

Thursday, May 16th ~ 5:00 - 6:30 PM

Sponsored by EXPO Exhibitors

The closing event of the Exhibitors EXPO is a reception open to all conference attendees. This is a great opportunity to meet with the exhibitors in a social setting and to network with fellow conference attendees. The main event at this reception will be the raffle of exhibitors’ prizes. There is also surprise entertainment planned for this reception!

Manager’s Workshop Connection Dinner

Monday, May 13th ~ 5:30 PM to 8:30 PMHosted by Tom Ticknor, QAI COO and Nancy Kastl, QUEST Conference Chair

Reserved for the attendees of the Manager’s Solutions Workshop, this dinner event provides an opportunity to continue discussions from the workshop and connect with industry peers, the QAI faculty, and thought leaders in a more informal setting. Managers at QUEST will enjoy a fun evening out at the Hofbräuhaus. The day’s invigorating conversations continue in a stylish Bavarian ambiance and turn-of-the-century flair ending day one of the workshop with laughs, music and great classic German food. Let’s raise a stein to that!

Welcome Reception

Tuesday, May 14th ~ 4:30 - 6:00 PM

Sponsored by

The Tuesday evening reception welcomes all guests to the QUEST Conference and the Chicago Rosemont area. Designed specifically as an opportunity to meet fellow conference attendees in an informal setting, our guests enjoy delicious appetizers, drinks, and raffles while participating in some fun networking games. Meet people and make plans to learn during the day and continue your QUEST experience in the evening at one of the many great dining and entertainment locations just steps away from the conference site.

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Wednesday, May 15th ~ 5:30 - 10:00 PM

Sponsored by

Join Applitools, the QUEST team and your fellow attendees for an unforgettable night of dining and dancing while cruising Lake Michigan. Transportation is provided from the conference hotel to Chicago’s famous Navy Pier where attendees will embark on the Spirit of Chicago and venture on a scenic tour of Chicago’s breathtaking skyline. Enjoy dinner, dancing, take some great Chicago skyline selfies, and network with fellow attendees in a casual and lively setting while aboard! QUEST conference attendee’s admission to this event is included in eligible conference packages. Please indicate on your online registration if you plan on attending. Guests are welcome at an additional cost.

Attendee Appreciation Night in Chicago – Lake Michigan Dinner Cruise

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Leprechauns, Unicorns, & In-Sprint Automation By Scot Noftz

In-sprint test automation – writing automated tests as developers are coding new features – is something of folklore, akin to a unicorn or leprechaun. At least that’s what most individuals in the Agile software world will tell you. You will hear countless reasons as to why it doesn’t work and how automation must always be at least one sprint behind, or worse, separated into an independent team. Let’s explore how in-sprint test automation is possible, and the necessary steps to get on the path to catching the leprechaun – or, at least being able to do in-sprint test automation (because, spoiler alert, leprechauns really don’t exist).

How in-sprint automation succeedsIn-sprint automation fails for several reasons, often disguised or hidden in your SDLC processes. Far too often, leaders fail to implement the necessary processes that allow in-sprint automation to succeed. Or, they fail to recognize the exact cause of why in-sprint automation is failing. Below are the main policies that allow in-sprint automation to succeed.

1. Developers must check code in often and early within a sprint. This is the first and most important process that makes in-sprint automation possible. It’s also the most often overlooked issue, causing a big impact on in-sprint automation. All too often leaders and team members are focused on why testing has become a bottleneck and don’t focus on the real problem. They will try many things including adding more resources for testing, only to find the bottleneck still exists. This only addresses the symptom and not the problem. In-sprint automation cannot be successful if developers do not get their code in early and often. It’s all too common to see developers waiting to check completed features in, often right before the sprint is set to end. If testers barely have time to do manual testing how can they possibly be able to write automated tests in such a short period of time? It is imperative that developers start deploying code to the test environment early in the sprint and often. That means not waiting until the feature is complete, but rather, start testing when it’s complete enough where testers can begin – and continually deploy as more and more of the feature is coded. By doing this, testers can begin to write automated test components, continually building the components and tests as more and more of the feature is deployed.

2. Automation Engineers must be on development scrum teams. They should not be on a separate team working off a separate backlog automating your regression suite, but rather should be full scrum team members. By placing automation engineers on development teams, they will become a part of the team and will advocate for the best ways to do test automation and can influence the team to implement in-sprint automation. By placing them on a scrum team you give your automation engineers a voice within your organization. By having actively participating automation engineers, it will be clear that test automation is a primary focus of your scrum teams and not an afterthought.

3. You need well-trained automation engineers. Now that we have talked about making automation engineers actively participating development scrum team members, we can address who should be doing test automation. For in-sprint automation to succeed you need to have well-trained automation engineers. A well-trained automation engineer is a team member that is skilled in both testing processes as well as writing development code. These engineers are multi-function individuals that are capable of writing and executing manual test cases as well as being able to write automated tests in the programming language of choice for the team. It is important to have team members with the necessary skills that can quickly write new tests and all corresponding automation features to keep up with the quick pace of agile development. A lot of organizations fail at this step because they try to convert manual testers to automation engineers – people who often do not have the necessary programming skills to effectively write new tests and testing components. In-sprint automation is not achievable without having well-trained automation engineers that can write tests and testing components quickly, shortly after features are deployed to the testing environment.

4. Write small, concise and descriptive test cases. A good automated test case should only verify one feature or sub-feature. They should not be long workflows verifying multiple components within the app. The test cases should be very explicit as to the steps the test is completing. By taking the time to write clearly defined steps and expected results you can speed up the process of writing automated tests. With a well written test case an automation engineer can focus on automating the test versus figuring out what the test is trying to verify and how to do that. It is also important that the automation engineer be involved in the test case process, whether that be writing test cases or simply talking with other testing team members to determine what should be tested within the sprint. By involving the automation engineer in the test case process, they will know exactly what a test is verifying and how to best write the automated test.

5. Add automated testing to the Definition of Done (DOD). By adding automation testing as a DOD item, you are gaining team agreement to put focus and importance on the automated testing processes. It will become a topic of discussion in Retrospective meetings and teams are compelled to continually improve the process until in-sprint automation is achieved. In-sprint automation can be difficult but not impossible. With the correct processes implemented, you can achieve it and decrease your time to deploy and improve the quality of your application. As with anything that is difficult, it takes time to become proficient. But if you implement the correct processes and stay the course you will find the benefits are worth the hardship.

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FEATURED ARTICLE

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Eliminating Reliance on the IT Honor Code By Tim Gorman

10 FEATURED ARTICLE

In terms of property damage, the year 2017 was the most destructive wildfire season on record in California at the time. On top of that, hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria led the most destructive cyclone season ever experienced by the entire US up to that time.

Now imagine for a moment...

Imagine that you are a project manager at FEMA (a.k.a. Federal Emergency Management Agency) and you are responsible for helping victims of catastrophe as quickly as humanly possible. It is not just your career. It is not just your job. It is your passion. You lead efforts to control wildfires, rescue people from flooding, and plan repairs and rebuilding once the crisis is past. This is no ordinary job. It is a labor of passion requiring long days, under unrelenting pressure, with people’s lives and well-being affected.

The contractors you hire to accomplish tasks need more than just a statement of work and a purchase order. They need information specific to the disaster and the afflicted to get the job done. Everyone is focused on helping people in need. Nobody is using these situations as opportunities.

Now in 2019, you discover that, in the fury to accomplish the mission, you may have provided too much information to one of your contractors. Nothing bad happened, but the risk was created. Auditors, reviewing actions from the comfort of hindsight and with the rules at hand have detected that you inadvertently distributed some information that was not absolutely necessary to get the job done. You learn about this over a year later in an article in the New York Times (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/22/us/fema-data-breach.html) where it is labeled as the “FEMA data breach”.

It wasn’t an actual data breach. Nobody broke in and no data was misused. The article says as much, but in a sidebar after the lead states that FEMA “unnecessarily shared sensitive personal data of more than two million disaster victims with a contractor, subjecting that information to potential identity theft and fraud”. A moment’s inattention or bad judgement by including a few additional fields brings disgrace and maybe ends careers.

Was there a mistake made? Yes, all people make mistakes. In making this mistake, are you solely responsible? No, and here is why.

IT organizations have been lax about data security for decades, back to the dawn of computing. Only recently have most bothered to truly protect personal and confidential data as regulatory risks have increased from laws like HIPAA, SOX, GDPR, and CCPA. Every IT organization has relied on the IT honor code as the main line of defense. This honor code was once implicit, ostensibly understood by all that data should never be shared outside inappropriately.

In the past decade, IT organizations have begun educating all IT personnel explicitly about what is OK and what is not OK while handling data. The necessity of the honor code has been reinforced, implying that we are “privileged” with access to data that we should not have, thus we must be careful not to violate

that “privilege”. It is a reflection on the quality of the people in IT that confidential data has not been exposed more often.

Very little effort has been made to eliminate unnecessary access to confidential data. Instead, industry has largely been content to rely on the IT honor code, pushing the responsibility to employees and contractors.

First off, the biggest problem with an honor code as a primary defense is, of course, that it is not foolproof. This should be obvious, as Edward Snowden demonstrated in 2013. The next biggest problem is human error, as demonstrated by the FEMA situation cited earlier. The next problem is that any honor code protects only the organization and does not protect the people wielding it. If anything happens, investigators must focus on what is possible, not on what is intended. In order to avoid suspicion, one must not be merely unwilling to do expose data deliberately, one must be unable to do so. The same is true to prevent human error.

The IT honor code is outmoded. What can replace it?

On production systems, authentication, authorization, and audits ensure that data is handled appropriately. Authentication ensure that the authorized person has access, and auditing ensures that the authorized person does not exceed their authorization.

On non-production systems used for software development, testing, and training, nobody needs access to confidential data… period. Access to realistic data is needed for effective testing, but not access to real data. Software developers and testers are authorized only to review and modify code, but they are not authorized to review and modify confidential data.

Yet, for decades, data used in software development, testing, and training has been copied from production systems because realistic data provides the best test cases. Because of this practice, confidential data has been deliberately exposed to people not authorized to access it, with full dependence on the IT honor code that nothing bad would happen. IT professionals see this as standard practice and see nothing wrong with it, because they haven’t stopped to think.

The solution is data masking, which is obfuscating or anonymizing data so that it no longer has the ability to cause any harm if it falls into the wrong hands. Masking data as it is copied from production systems to non-production systems averts the exposure of confidential data standard practice in software development for so long.

IT professionals should learn more about data masking and how it can reduce the surface area of risk. Data masking vendors and consultants are still bootstrapping the practice, and there is much to do. IT can substantially reduce the risk of breach by eliminating all access to confidential data for those who do not absolutely require it. There are no excuses. Mistakes will always happen, and they should not turn anyone into the next person behind the headlines.

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FULL-DAY CLASSES

Monday, May 13, 8:30 AM - 4:30 PM

LEADERSHIP Finding the WHY for “QA”Jeremy Berriault, PulseThere is a movement that has been building over the past decade: The Why movement. It all started with Simon Sinek and his “Golden Circle”. Over time it has grown into something that individuals and organizations can use to get a deeper meaning to what motivates them to do what they do. As individuals in the QA discipline, we all know the What and the How we do what we do. It is the Why that is the most difficult to get into words.This interactive class will be diving into the Why for the QA discipline, while also helping the participants down a path to understand their individual Why. We will be using tools and techniques to create a statement that will provide the positive emotional response to why individuals within a discipline wake up in the morning and are as productive as they can be. The statement will be used as an inspirational tool to others and to show those outside the discipline what they get when they work with QA.This class will give you a foundation and a statement of why people in the QA discipline do what they do. You will be able to take what you have learned back and build on it. Share the message and have it organically grow to improve productivity and communications.

AGILE Essential Patterns of Successful Agile TransformationsShaun Bradshaw, Zenergy Technologies The very title of this class is meant to challenge your preconceptions. Many prefer terms like adoption, migration, or business agility shift. However, successful implementations of shift-left testing within agile requires a transformation to occur at multiple levels and goes beyond mere implementation of testing within time-boxed sprints, attending daily standups, and reviewing product backlogs. This class was created because so many organizations struggle with effectively integrating testing within agile approaches. Join Shaun as we explore critical patterns for transformations including identifying an agile champion for testing, adding test leaders within the Agile Transformation Team, and how to communicate the WHY behind testing transformation. We’ll also explore some of the organizational challenges that you’ll have to overcome. Finally, we’ll review the role leadership plays in safety, culture, modeling, and generally guiding the transformation journey. You’ll leave this class with ideas around how testing can be incorporated into an effective transformation backlog that you can immediately start executing for your own agile testing transformations.

Learning Objectives:• Identify the activities required to initiate a successful agile testing transformation• Determine who needs to be part of the transformation team• Create a backlog of testing transformation “stories” for the transformation team to utilize throughout the transition• Review key strategic and tactical patterns necessary to get your organization moving in the “right direction”• Discuss the 4 quadrants of agile metrics that your organization should track to gauge overall progress along the quality and agile continuum• Review key cultural patterns that must be in place to make the transition successful

AUTOMATION Test Automation Foundations and Principles 101Jim Trentadue, Aristocrat Test Automation is one of the most talked about topics in the software testing industry today. Everyone wants it and everyone wants to be involved with it; yet almost 70% of the QA industry is testing manually. Test leaders must respond to automation – why they aren’t doing more or why they aren’t doing it at all. Only with a better understanding of automation can test leaders respond to these questions.There are many classes that are hands-on starting with Selenium or other automation solutions, yet do not discuss the foundations of an automation build or framework. All test automation solutions are built on three key principles – accessibility, modularity, and reliability. Using these principles, you will learn how to select the right automation solution for your environment, thus saving countless hours and days to increase your productivity. This class is tool-agnostic, but we’ll talk about the tools that may be in your organization or in the marketplace. You are guaranteed to have a strong knowledge base when leaving the class. Whether you are a Test Leader, Test Analyst, or supporting IT professional, this class is perfect for you.

Learning Objectives:• What is the Why movement• Importance of messaging• Differentiation between Why, How and What?

Learning Objectives:• Understand the roots of test automation and trends on where it’s going• Experience how to apply three key principles of Accessibility, Modularity and Reliability• Learn how to perform test automation without programming skills• Document a strong argument for initial investment or continued investment in test automation from upper management• Build your own test automation sample scripts in class

• How to improve motivation within self and a team• Foundational framework to help organizations

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FULL-DAY CLASSES

Monday, May 13, 8:30 AM - 4:30 PM

BDD BDD Test Automation: Maximum Team Collaboration Thomas Haver, Huntington National BankBehavior Driven Development (BDD) is an industry practice in which the team collaborates on feature development by reframing the system testing as user behavior. In BDD, the scripted tests take the form of requirements by example, and the developer focuses on making those examples pass. BDD is often implemented with automation tests in mind, as the examples can be scripted to both elaborate the requirements and verify the user behavior has been delivered. One such way to write automation for BDD is with a tool called Cucumber, a software development collaboration tool.Attendees of this class will build a Test Automation framework capable of supporting Behavior Driven Development. Before any code is written, this class will first develop a quality language capable of scaling with an organization. The attendees will learn how to write BDD automated scenarios, handle test data, implement continuous integration with Jenkins, and create standards around test development.

RISK Managing Testing Risks in an Agile and Rapid WorldClyneice Chaney, Quality SquaredRisk management is a key component of doing business in any industry. If a business manager neglects risk management when running an amusement park, the results could be catastrophic. Similarly, financial managers must be keenly aware of the risks to financial assets and must take steps to minimize the downside. But what about testing managers and leads? What risks are associated with managing the test portion of a software development project and how can they be minimized?This course addresses risk management approach tailored for testing managers and test leads. It provides the necessary approaches, techniques and tools to manage the testing project to ensure that risks which can potentially derail your project are known and effective mitigation strategies are in place to address the harmful events.

Learning Objectives:• Create test scenarios in Gherkin• Craft reusable step definitions based on central user actions• Continuous integration with Jenkins• Effective data management with databases

• Debugging & code reviews• Refactoring & code metrics• Build a shared team understanding of quality requirements

Learning Objectives:• Explore standard definitions and approaches for risk• Delve into testing-specific checklists designed to assess risks relative to testing projects• Explore how to utilize methods for analyzing and managing risks• Review methods for taking the output of a test project risk assessment and utilizing an effective approach to manage the testing project• Explore effective measurement and reporting techniques to provide relevant test project status

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Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA Have you ever felt the disconnect between your desired result and the requirements you have given to your employees or customers? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve your communication skills or results? If you have ever wondered what your core communication competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your communication competencies and strategies such as mind maps to improve communication and connectedness. Join Jennifer as she explores a set of eight dimensions of successful communicators , provides suggestions on how you can improve competencies that are not in your core set of strengths, and describes techniques for leveraging and building on your strengths. These tools can help you become a more effective and valued leader in your organization. Exercises help you gain an understanding of yourself and strive for balanced leadership through recognition of both your strengths and your “development opportunities.”Learning objectives:

• Effective communication strategies to connect teams• Activities to enhance connectedness of the team• Understanding and removing your blind spots

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HALF-DAY TUTORIALS

Tuesday, May 14, 8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

LEADERSHIP

Susan Brockley, Consultat It is one thing to say you are “Agile”; it is another thing to say you have consistently adopted and implemented it across your organization. Yet, industry surveys show that companies that master Agile and DevOps adoption see up to 60% higher revenue and profit growth! (…and who wouldn’t want to be a part of that???)In this tutorial you will examine ways to enhance your Agile adoption from many perspectives – from team members to executives. Through experiential learning you will discover how to motivate your teams to “be Agile” rather than “do Agile”. You will also learn how to begin scaling your organization and the traps and pitfalls to avoid along the way. Finally, you’ll better understand the role you play as a quality assurance professional in your company’s Agile transformation journey.Learning objectives:

• Understand the difference between “doing Agile” and “being Agile” and why that is important to mastering Agile adoption• Discover tips on how to transform and quickly stabilize your Agile teams so that scaling is possible• Determine the triggers for scaling Agile teams• Learn how to choose an appropriate scaling approach• Understand how a mix of Scrum and Kanban teams influence the scaling process• Enhance your role as a quality professional in your company’s Agile transformation

AGILE A Whole New Level: Transforming and Scaling Agile Teams

Sara Joseph, CDW Are you ready to learn how to immerse yourself into the sights and sounds of the DevTestOps culture? With today’s rapid release cycles and shift left approaches, it is essential for quality professionals to understand their seat in the DevTestOps transformation. However, do we know how to speak the language of DevTestOps so we can walk the talk? The 3Cs is your grammar guide. Allow for Continuous Testing to provide Continuous Quality by ensuring requirements are met and stable systems perform during Continuous Delivery.Join Sara to learn how to influentially speak to your development and operations teams advocating and measuring quality when deploying individual units with the efficiency of a service-based architecture. By using proper templates and checklists, your test execution will have the ability to scale up or down as your release cycle fluctuates. Sara will teach problem solving skills, test automation fundamentals, and cultural know-how to increase your fluency when speaking ‘DevTestOps’ with your peers and leadership. By observing case studies and workshop simulations, you will learn the different dialects of this space and integrate new vocabulary into your everyday DevTestOps experiences.

Learning objectives:• What is DevTestOps: Development, Testing, Operations• What are the 3Cs?: Continuous Testing, Continuous Quality, and Continuous Delivery• DevTestOps Cultural Experience: Articulation of the DevTestOps language and behaviors

AUTOMATIONDo you speak DevTestOps? Your 3Cs Journey into Continuous Testing, Quality, & Delivery

Connecting Better with Customers and Employees for Improved Results

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HALF-DAY TUTORIALS14

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Tuesday, May 14, 8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Tuesday, May 14, 1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Phillip Lew, XBOsoft When implementing software quality metrics, we need to first understand the purpose of the metric, who will be using it, and what decisions will be made based on it. Will the metric illustrate the level of quality in software products, or drive towards a specific objective? QA managers typically want to deliver productivity metrics to management while management may want to see metrics that support customer or user satisfaction or cost related (ROI) initiatives. With Agile development methods, we often lose sight that our primary objective is the same, quality. Many organizations are myopic on the objective of velocity. However, velocity means little without quality. You need to define quality for your organization through an agile looking glass with intermediate metrics that lead to both quality and velocity objectives. Join this tutorial to learn how to develop and implement software metrics with actions toward improving both quality and velocity. You will gain insight on how to develop and use metrics within an Agile framework that can be used throughout your development and QA organization. More importantly, you will be able to answer the key questions of your stakeholders and get them to stand up straight and pay attention to software quality.Learning Objectives:

• How to connect your metrics with agile related objectives to ensure your agile process is on track• How to develop a measurement framework that measures not only typical test results such as defects, but processes and

functions and their alignment with your agile objectives• How to include measurements, metrics, objectives, questions and answers (for your stakeholders) to see if they really want to be

agile or are just talking• How to use metrics to not only evaluate, but also predict what could go wrong in your agile process

MEASUREMENT Software Quality Metrics For Agile

Frank Rios, Consultant and Danka Grujicic, HERE Technologies High-performing teams! Wishful thinking or reality? How do you know? As leaders, we talk about high-performing teams and how effective and engaging they are. As teams, we produce results, overcome challenges, and meet our deadlines. Because of this, we are a good team. However, does that makes us a performing or high-performing team? Creating an environment for a high-performing team is not easy, but it’s something we can all do.During this tutorial, you’ll learn what research shows are the successful traits of high- performance teams, how to build emotional intelligence in groups, and learn the meaning of a term called “Ba”; and how “Ba” is energized with intentions, vision, interest, and mission. These learnings will be mixed with hands-on activities that will get you out of your comfort zone. You can then take these activities back to your teams where you will be able to see the greatest benefits.Learning Objectives:

• What researchers discovered while investigating high-performance teams• How to build Emotional Intelligence in groups

LEADERSHIP Journey from Good to Great: Building High-Performing Teams

• What “Ba” is and how it can lead to a high-performing team• How to facilitate these activities with your team

Dmitry Vinnik, Salesforce There are many types of testing that companies need to perform in order to have confidence in their product: security testing, integration testing, system testing, performance testing, and more. Often Mobile developers rely on frameworks like Appium, or Robotium to ensure that end-to-end flows of their applications work. However, in the Mobile domain, Visual Testing is essential as mobile devices differ drastically in capabilities, display dimensions and operating systems.Visual regression testing targets specific areas of visual concepts like layouts, responsive design, graphics, and CSS. Because modern mobile applications are built as both hybrid and native applications, there is no way to scale this sort of testing using manual resources. To accomplish this requires Visual Test Automation which should be a crucial piece of your testing stack.In Dmitry’s tutorial, the attendees will learn about major Visual Testing Frameworks targeting both responsive web applications and native mobile applications.Learning Objectives:

• Visual Testing: What, Why, How and When• Visual Testing in Practice: Visual Test Pyramid• Choosing the right Visual Testing Tool for Your Team

MOBILE Uphill Battle Of Mobile Visual Regression

HALF-DAY TUTORIALS

Tom Cagley, Hyland Software Organizations of all size must continuously evolve through strategic process improvements. Process improvement requires a solid understanding of how teams transform ideas and knowledge into value that a customer can consume. Value Chain Mapping is a high-level representation of how an organization transforms raw materials into a product and then delivers that product to its customers. Value chains need to be decomposed into process maps to effectively implement agile or scaled agile approaches. Process maps are a critical step to reduce process burden and to shift quality activities left in agile.In this tutorial Tom will provide insight to value chain concepts and how to use value chain mapping and process maps to evaluate process and value flow. You will learn what activities add value and those that support delivery within the process. Using a set of metrics, you will be able to identify waste, wait time, and other targets for improvement within your process, which developers, testers and scrum masters can act upon.Learning Objectives:

• Define value chain concepts• Understand Value Chain Mapping techniques• Review the differences between value chain and process maps

AGILE Value Chain and Process Mapping Techniques for Agile Organizations

Tanya Kravtsov, Audible “It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most adaptable to change.” ~ Charles DarwinThe most critical step in Continuous Delivery adoption is identifying the bottlenecks in the product development cycle. In this interactive tutorial, you will learn about tools and methods that facilitate the bottleneck discovery as well as ways to deal with the most common bottlenecks that cripple development process. I will demonstrate how treating automation as a silo causes it to fail or be shelved, and how automating “before” and “after” which includes build, environment, data, test results analysis and monitoring will help them to succeed. To solidify the concepts, you will play the “Continuous Delivery” game, competing with other Agile teams to deliver feature to production while improving your software delivery process. This game serves as a great tool to understand the importance of automating Quality Gates and investing into process improvement initiatives to achieve long-term success.Learning Objectives:

• Learn to identify and prioritize the bottlenecks in the software delivery lifecycle• Leverage tools available in the market to address above bottlenecks (e.g. test environments, manual regression)• Use innovative techniques to move towards Continuous Delivery

CI/CD Innovative Techniques for Achieving Continuous Delivery

• Introduce a set of measures to evaluate process and value flow• Learn the steps need to develop both a value chain and process map

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Tuesday, May 14, 1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Jamie Kelley, Huntington National Bank As automation testing suites mature, the need to create maintainable tests increase. Creating easy reusable test harnesses becomes imperative, otherwise the test suites become outdated and cumbersome to the software development process. Furthermore, applications continue to push forward into a more service level architecture. This growth in RESTful services means our automated testing suites need to be robust and maintainable enough for the demand.In this hands-on tutorial through a user story driven approach, you will learn how to create a robust RESTful API testing harness. You will learn guidelines on how to introduce good object-oriented design patterns for readable code. You will create common utility methods to wrap around third party libraries. Finally, you will build a data management layer for your calls’ payloads and parameters. Ruby and an existing local RESTful API will be used for training purposes, but the insights you gain are transferrable to any programming language and API.Learning Objectives:

• Review what a common RESTful API testing suite can look like• Introduce good programming principles to the suite

API RESTful API Testing in Ruby

Nancy Kelln, Unimagined Testing, Inc. More and more, testers are using exploratory testing and context driven testing techniques in their organizations. However, as many testers start to embrace these testing methodologies, they are uncovering questions in their implementation.In this half-day tutorial, we will explore the various aspects of testing including test planning, test design, test execution, and test reporting from the exploratory testing mindset. We will also cover how to prepare your organization for the shift from more traditional methods to exploratory testing methods. Testers who attend this session will leave understanding how to implement exploratory testing concepts through all the phases of test planning, design, execution and reporting and feel confident returning to their organizations to implement their changes.Learning Objectives:

EXPLORATORY Exploring Context Driven Testing & Exploratory Testing

• Learning about key layers to build in the suite• Covering key design questions you will have to answer

• How to prepare their organizations for the shift from more traditional testing to Exploratory Testing

• How to deal with resistance to Exploratory Testing techniques

• How the various aspects of the testing cycle (Test Planning, Design, Execution and Reporting) are different in Exploratory Testing than they are in traditional testing

• How to implement Exploratory Testing concepts through the various aspects of the testing cycle

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KEYNOTES

Don’t Fear the RobotJason Huggins, Founder of Tapster RoboticsDon’t worry, the Terminator is not coming for you or your job. But you might need a Terminator someday to test your mobile app. Desktop and web development happen in a relatively constrained environment: keyboard and mouse for input, video for output — easy to virtualize and test anywhere, locally, or in the cloud. However, with mobile apps, running tests in a simulator can sometimes be hard or impossible. There are more parts involved (e.g. touchscreen, physical buttons, camera, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc.) and the possible interactions can complicate a team’s ability to automate end-to-end test scenarios (e.g. receiving a call or text, taking a photo, controlling a Bluetooth device, making an NFC payment, etc.).In those hard-to-automate situations, a robotic device that can emulate human interaction can be a good option. In this talk, we’ll go into more detail on why teams might want to make their own robotic mechanisms, and how they can do it without “terminating” their budget or schedule.

Learning Objectives:• When and where small desktop robots can be useful (or not) on software testing projects• The D’s of robotics: dirty, dangerous, dull, or dexterous work• How open source and the maker movement have made it easier for any team to have or make their own testing robots

An internationally known software engineer specializing in test automation, Jason Huggins started the Selenium and Appium projects, which have become popular software testing tools and a W3C standard. Among Jason’s more notable career stops are Google and President Obama’s “Tech Surge” team called in to help fix HealthCare.gov in 2013. Jason co-founded Sauce Labs and later founded Tapster Robotics, to combine his testing expertise with his lifelong enthusiasm for robotics. Jason’s robots have been featured in Popular Science, Wired, TechCrunch, and purchased by auto manufacturers, mobile phone manufacturers, and tech companies worldwide. Jason lives and works in Oak Park, Illinois.

W E D N E S D A Y

8:30 AM – 9:30 AM

Expecting Secure, High-Quality Software: Using High Assurance Test Regimes in Mitigating Risks

Joe Jarzombek, Director for Government, Aerospace & Defense Programs in Synopsys, Inc. and previously Director for Software & Supply Chain Assurance in the US Department of Homeland SecurityAs the cyber landscape evolves and external dependencies grow more complex, managing risks attributable to exploitable software includes requirements for security and quality with ‘sufficient’ test regimes throughout the software supply chain. The Internet of Things (IoT) is contributing to a massive proliferation of a variety of types of software-reliant, connected devices throughout critical infrastructure. With IoT increasingly dependent upon third-party software, software composition analysis and other forms of testing are used to determine ‘fitness for use’ and trustworthiness of assets. Standards for measuring and sharing information about software security and quality are used in tools and services that detect weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Test and certification programs provide means upon which organizations use to reduce risk exposures attributable to exploitable software. Ultimately, addressing software supply chain dependencies and leveraging high assurance test regimes enable enterprises to provide more responsive mitigations. Learning Objectives:

• External dependencies contribute risks in the form of technical debt throughout the software supply chain• Standards can be used to convey expectations and measure software security and quality• Software composition, static code analysis, fuzzing, and other forms of testing can be used to determine weaknesses and

vulnerabilities that represent vectors for attack and exploitation• Testing can support procurement and enterprise risk management to reduce risk exposures attributable to exploitable

software.

Joe Jarzombek is Global Manager for Software Supply Chain Management for the Synopsys Software Integrity Group. At Synopsis he leads efforts to enhance the Software Integrity Platform to mitigate software supply chain risk via automated analysis and testing technologies. This enables the detection, reporting, and remediation of defects and security weaknesses and vulnerabilities throughout the lifecycle. Prior to joining Synopsys, he served as the Director for Software & Supply Chain Assurance in the US Department of Homeland Security Office of Cybersecurity and Communications. He is a retired Lt Colonel in the US Air Force. He is a Certified Secure Software Lifecycle Professional (CSSLP).

T H U R S D A Y

8:30 AM – 9:30 AM

KEYNOTES 17

More Than That

For a Fresh Perspective on Team Leadership Look to the Drummer. What?

Damian Synadinos, Ineffable Solutions

“What do you do?” It’s a frequent first question asked at parties, networking events, and bad dates. And sadly, the answer often includes the word “just”. Perhaps a more interesting question is, “Who are you?”. But, how should you answer? Often, our identity is dominated by our professional image. However, even those that “live to work” have other facets which may contain hidden value.In this keynote, Damian explores labels, anxiety, models, and more in order to examine our identities, explore our interests, and help us find value in unexpected sources. Through humor, improv, personal stories, examples, research, and pop-culture, this talk inspires and motivates while simultaneously providing practical tools to help you reevaluate Who You Are and Who You Can Be. Join him to laugh while you learn, as you “unjust yourself” and discover that everyone is More Than That!

Learning Objectives: • A deeper consideration of how we label ourselves and others• Different ways to think about and cope with anxiety• Tools to help rediscover Who You Are and Who You Can Be

For more than 25 years, Damian Synadinos has been helping “build better software and build software better” through testing. Now, through his company Ineffable Solutions, Damian offers talks and training that are focused on fundamental topics and people-skills, based on real-world experience, and supplemented with deep research. His experience spans many roles, industries, and companies, including CompuServe, NetJets, Abercrombie & Fitch, Nationwide Insurance, and Huntington Bank. Damian also helps organize an annual, regional testing conference, QA or the Highway, and frequently mentors, coaches, and advises IT professionals around the world. As an international speaker and trainer, he presents at numerous conferences and corporations around the world. Additionally, Damian has over 10 years of theatrical improv experience and frequently uses applied improv to teach.

John Ryskowski, JFR Consulting and Drum-Talks Assume you have no authority, no control over anyone or anything, and you need to inspire members to perform as never before. Who are you? “Oh, you must be the drummer, set your kit up next to the piano dude.” When searching for helpful techniques to improve our leadership skills, sometimes the best place to look is to a completely unrelated field. Did you know the techniques used by a big band drummer parallel those of a successful team leader? On the surface the big band drummer is just another “side-man” without any authority or control. Once the music starts the drummer can invoke confidence and inspire individual members and the entire band to play like never before. Sit back and enjoy this unique keynote address by John Ryskowski as he provides live demonstrations of the techniques drummers use to support the band in their goal to sound great. He will perform an actual big band chart then deconstructed one section at a time. As the drumming techniques are revealed, so are opportunities to realize new perspectives on team leadership.

Learning Objectives: • Learn specific leadership techniques and lessons from an unrelated field supporting self-discovered insights into leadership

without power• Go for a mind ride. Go on an adventure where you get to experience being someone else doing something very different for

a short time, then come back and apply that experience to your present day’s dilemmas• Be inspired with renewed energy to get back and lead

John Ryskowski has been helping organizations transform themselves since 1989. He is particularly interested in the social entanglements that preclude progress as organizations work to create their vision and achieve goals. He also happens to have been playing drum set professionally for the last 35 years. John holds a MA in Education from California Lutheran College, a BA in Mathematics from California State University Northridge, is a Problem Solving Leadership graduate, a CMMI High Maturity Lead Appraiser, CSM, yoga practitioner, electric muscle care evangelist, and the creator of drum-talks.com.

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8:30 AM – 9:30 AM

1:30 PM – 2:30 PM

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1 / 2 P A G E A D

Special Interests Roundtables Wednesday & Thursday during LunchConference attendees have a wealth of knowledge and experience to share. That is why we are turning some of our circular tables at lunch into special interest group roundtable discussions. Look for the topic signs at these special designated tables and join in the group discussion over lunch. This is also an excellent opportunity to connect with others who share your topic of interest and add them to your network of professional contacts. All you need to bring to the table are your questions and your experience.

No prior sign-up is required, but seating will be based on a first come – first serve basis.

Coaching Sessions Wednesday, Thursday and Friday based on availabilityHave you ever heard an interesting idea or solution in a conference presentation and would have liked to discuss it further with the speaker? But, when you tried to talk to the speaker immediately at the end of the presentation, you found that the conference schedule just didn’t allow enough time?

Included with the QUEST conference experience is the opportunity for you to meet one-on-one with conference speakers or the professional QAI instructors in an informal setting to discuss how to turn ideas into solutions that address your specific needs.

Speakers will be available for free coaching sessions on the day of their conference presentation. Time slots with available speakers can be found in the QUEST Information – Coaching page of the QUEST Mobile App. Instructions for requesting a meeting with a coach are provided in the app. Specific time and meeting location are handled directly between you and your coach.

ROUNDTABLES & COACHING

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Reciprocity and Rent Seeking In Agile TeamsBy Tom Cagley

One of the hardest lessons I have had to learn is that some people on a team are passengers and others play different, more involved roles. Being a passenger long-term on a team or in an organization is a form of rent-seeking and is not valued highly by others. Rent-seeking involves seeking to increase one’s share of existing wealth without creating new wealth as a team.

A rent-seeker will increase their share of the credit while minimizing the use or contribution of their own resources. In the popular comic strip Dilbert, the character Wally works very hard at being a rent-seeking passenger. In real life, I have known very few Wallys. Most passengers exist for a short period of time because they are learning a new concept or are changing roles. Long-term passengers on teams use the team’s inertia to minimize the amount of effort they need to expand. Long-term or professional passengers often employ reciprocity as a form of rent-seeking behavior to enhance and solidify their position in a team.

Agile teams succeed or struggle as a team. This can be at odds with cultures which lionize individuals. Outside of organizational structures such as Teal or Holacracy, there is a built-in conflict between the needs of the team and those of the individual. Even in the most agile organizations, I have rarely seen a whole team promoted, even though agile is a team sport. This conflict creates a seam in organizational behavior that allows the misuse of reciprocity to create or reinforce the rent-seeking behavior. Need to expand this sentence.

Several years ago, I was asked to coach a team that was having a hard time meeting their commitments. After observing the team for an iteration, I noticed that one individual seemed to be in every meeting, some of which they scheduled and some that they were “invited” to attend – often because they would show up with treats (cookies, cake, and donuts). The person never completed a story and often opined on how being so busy was keeping them from getting a critical story completed. The lack of progress frustrated the team, but the team did not feel empowered to confront the behavior or cut the person out of meetings, because the person often fed them. The equation was cookies for meetings. As an outsider, the observed behavior was a chronic combination of reciprocity and rent-seeking that was at odds with the needs of a high-performance team. The behavior reduced the value of the team which reflected poorly on the entire team.

Typical hierarchical organizations need to leverage both leadership from middle managers and coaching from someone outside the team. Middle managers are an important component in hierarchical organizations because they deliver the people-oriented support (HR add hyphen here) type things like training, raises, logistics, and other functions. Both middle managers and coaches are outsiders who often can see through the noise and help teams and individuals to improve value delivery.

Reciprocity is a basic human behavior that is often useful for helping teams to create the strong bonds needed to accomplish great feats. Reciprocity, however, can entrench bad behavior such as rent-seeking. Wally is not my favorite character in Dilbert but he is pretty close (I really like Asok). Wally is close to the top of the list because he challenges all of us to consider whether we are actively generating value or are rent-seeking, living off the value of others.

Every team member, leader or coach needs to pause to reflect before they take and action that they believe is part of the flow of reciprocity. Here is a simple checklist comprised of seven questions to help consider whether you are generating reciprocity for good or nefarious reasons:

1. Am I acting with an expectation OF gaining a reciprocal benefit from your action? If you are taking action to generate another action you need to consider your motivation.

2. Will I become angry or hurt if my action is not reciprocated? Reciprocity is a tool that needs best deployed with little to no emotional baggage; begin with generosity.

3. Do I feel like I have the right to control how a recipient uses my gift or advice? Attaching strings is a tool for manipulating the recipient. I once read an article in a local paper about a benefactor to a school that donated a gym with the agreement that school would accept his children as students. The act may have been a contract perhaps, but not reciprocity.

4. Am I acting out of generosity or out of a sense of obligation? Having a different team member pay the lunch check every day is not reciprocity but rather an obligation.

5. Am I providing this gift (remember advice or knowledge can be a gift) because I want to provide something of value? This is called trading, not reciprocity.

6. Am I providing this gift to reduce my sense of obligation? Giving gifts to reduce an obligation is not about reciprocity and can be an indication that you are being manipulated.

7. If I don’t give this person some piece of value, will there be an undesirable outcome?

Remember just like dealing with nefarious telephone salesmen, no one wants to feel manipulated. Coaches need to learn to evaluate and trust their judgment so they can distinguish acts of true generosity from actions designed to manipulate those they are coaching. Going out of your way to activate obligatory giving to get people to act the way you want them to act will generate genuine mistrust.

CALL 866.724.6013 OR 407.363.1111 EXT 301 TO REGISTER OR WWW.QAIQUEST.ORG/2019R


FEATURED ARTICLE 19

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INTERNATIONAL SOFTWARE CERTIFICATIONS BOARD

CCCCCCCCEEEEEEEEEE FFFFIIIIIIIIICCCCCCERTIFICATIONSSSSS eeeeeeeeSoftwareCertification Programs

www.softwarecertifications.org

Software Testing

On Demand Training Courses

Aligned to the Software Testing Body of Knowledge, these certifications evaluate awareness of the testing principles, knowledge of the testing function, the different types of testing and the techniques and tools which can be used to carry out and manage the Testing process.

Certified Associate in Software Testing (CAST)A Foundation Level Certification for Software Testers, Software Developers, System Analysts and recent engineering graduates.

• Demonstrates an understanding of testing principles and practices.• Suitable for entry-level individuals who are interested in making a career

in testing.

Certified Software Tester (CSTE)A Practitioner Level Certification for Test Engineers, Test Architects, Design Analysts and Test Leads.

• Demonstrates a professional competency for practice of quality control and testing.

Certified Manager of Software Testing (CMST)A Managerial Level Certification for Test Managers, Test Leads, Test Architects and Project Managers.

• Demonstrates capabilities to practice and manage the software testing function.

• Suitable for existing and to-be managers in the software testing function.

Software Quality AssuranceAligned to the Software Quality Assurance Body of Knowledge, these certi-fications check the proficiency in the principles and practices of the quality assurance function.

Certified Associate in Software Quality (CASQ)A Foundation Level Certification for Software Engineers and recent graduates.

• Demonstrates foundation level understanding of quality assurance prin-ciples and practices.

• Demonstrates the understanding of quality principles, concepts, and practices.

Certified Software Quality Analyst (CSQA)A Practitioner Level Certification for experienced Quality Analyst, SQA Team Leaders and Members.

• Demonstrates professional competence in the practices of QA in the IT profession.

• Provides a complete overview of the quality function.

Certified Manager of Software Quality (CMSQ)A Managerial Level Certification for SQA Managers, Architects and Project Managers.

• Demonstrates capabilities to practice and manage the software quality function.

• Suitable for existing and to-be managers in the software quality function.• Provides a tool to predict the likelihood of success of individuals consider-

ing managerial roles.

On Demand Virtual Courses provide 24/7 access to the best exam prep courseware available. The courses include a downloadable copy of the Body of Knowledge book, course workbook, recordings of each session, and the course specific items listed below.

Certified Associate in Software Testing (CAST)• Overview of the Software Testing Body of Knowledge for CAST with expert instructors (totaling over 40 lessons).• Over 200 multiple choice questions that simulate the types of objective questions that will be experienced on the CAST exam.• 70 essay questions with sample answers to reinforce the material. • A final sample exam to test your exam readiness is provided.

Certified Software Tester (CSTE)• Overview of Software Testing Body of Knowledge for CSTE with expert instructors (totaling over 50 lessons).• Over 250 multiple choice questions that simulate the types of objective questions that will be experienced on the CSTE exam.• 90 essay questions with sample answers which simulate constructive response questions that will be experienced on the CSTE exam. • A final sample exam to test your exam readiness is provided.

Certified Software Quality Analyst (CSQA)• Overview of CSQA Common Body of Knowledge with expert instructors (totaling over 40 lessons).• Over 200 multiple choice questions that simulate the types of objective questions that will be experienced on the CSQA exam.• 40 essay questions with sample answers which simulate constructive response questions that will be experienced on the CSQA exam.• A final sample exam to test your exam readiness is provided.

Business AnalysisThe need for improved and more reliable information transfer requires Software Business Analyst professionals who can effectively bridge the knowledge and language gap between the business and IT communities.

Certified Associate Business Analyst (CABA)A Foundation Level Certification for Software Business Analysts, System Ana-lysts, and recent college graduates.

• Demonstrates an understanding of software business analysis principles and practices.

• Suitable for entry-level software engineers interested in making a career in software business analysis. Certified Software Business Analyst (CSBA)

A Practitioner Level Certification for Business Analysts, Project Leads and Architects.

• Demonstrates proficiency to manage the link between the business and information technology communities.

Certified Manager of Software Testing (CMST), Certified Software Business Analyst (CSBA) and Certified Associate in Software Quality (CASQ) On Demand Courses are also available.

“No”. A simple word. One with complex impacts on your everyday lives though. Take a second and conjure up memories of times you heard or said the word “No”. Most often you would picture some negative event in your life. A job a passed up on. Having to tell someone no to a meeting. The list could go on and on.

Society has demonized the word “No”. There is a fear it will break positive atmosphere of society. “No”, by definition, is a negative response after all. You will avoid people just so you don’t have to say or hear that word. It’s almost a curse word in modern culture. Why though?

The main reason is that the current culture emphasizes the idea of positive attitudes. Everyone wants to embrace this idea and avoid all negative thoughts. For most “No” is the largest precursor to something negative. Afterall in this positive society who wants to be the one to bring something negative into the world. People who do get described as “Downers” or “Party-Poopers”.

It also permeates people’s work lives. You’re told if you want to make it in this world you have to make sacrifices. To say “No” to someone means you aren’t the team player or don’t work hard.

Even in our early childhoods, “No” is taught as something wrong. Most parents use the idea of do as I say no questions asked. You don’t talk back. You don’t ask questions. The same goes in school. The teacher is the authority. You listen but you can never say no to them.

It’s no wonder that people don’t learn how to embrace “No” and its positive aspects. They are only taught its negative points. “No” is one of your most underused tools for creating a positive environment for yourselves.

It can help you reestablish your personal boundaries. Those boundaries everyone has like wanting a certain work life balance, needing personal alone time, or just being able to move. Today’s fast passed world can leave you feeling like a resource. You are an interchangeable cog with little control over your life, constantly being fed through the machines of society.

There is nothing wrong with wanting to help others. The issue becomes when society doesn’t let people stop for themselves. The martyr is so interwoven into society’s idea of greatness people push themselves as hard as they can. It’s working that weekend because your boss says you need to. It’s saying yes to one more task even though you’re already struggling with the ones you have. It’s being angry at an employee because they said they couldn’t come in. Even recreational activities often can become part of the self-sacrifice culture of today. People are constantly trying to make every happy hour, birthday party, or social event for your personal connections.

Everyone wants to be that reliable person that always says “Yes” to everything. There are always issues though when you do this.

First, so many people burn themselves out. They push and push to please. They want to be the best, to be that successful person. They do what society has taught and that is to say “Yes” to everything. You can only do this for so long until you crash and burn.

Along with burn out it makes it hard for people to have true honest conversations. Business owners will promise customers new features by certain deadlines. From fear of being negative, colleagues cause the project leaders to accept these new requirements. Development teams frantically try to finish those tasks. This often leads to teams getting behind as they can’t keep up. The business side refuses to move dates because they don’t want to tell the customers they have to accept delays.

If this scenario sounds exhausting and familiar you are not alone. Countless shops around the country are experiencing this exact scenario right now. In fact, for many of them this is the normal development process. People are so afraid to say “No” that they end up in a never-ending cycle of delays, miscommunication, and frustrations.

Therefore, people must learn to discard the negative stigma of “No”. In the technological age boundaries are harder and harder to keep. Everyone needs to learn that’s it is okay to have personal boundaries. “No” is one of the best tools you can use for that task. It’s telling someone “No” you can’t go out because your tired. It’s saying “No” to working on the weekends because you’re already feeling exhausted from work. It’s telling someone you don’t like to be hugged because it causes you stress and anxiety. It’s asking bosses to not stand over your shoulder because it causes you to lose focus.

People shouldn’t just learn to use “No” more, society also needs to learn to accept “No”. It’s okay to be disappointed at hearing the word. Hearing “No” often means someone didn’t get something they wanted. The positive side of hearing “No” though is that people are being honest with you. They are letting you know what they truly think of something. It opens new levels of dialogue to a person. Society needs to learn to appreciate that extra level of communication.

That type of honest communication can lead to a better understanding of your colleagues, friends, family, and even yourself. That’s something that should be celebrated. So, don’t be afraid to say “No”. Don’t be afraid to be honest. Don’t be afraid to look at the positive side of the negative.

It will help create the honest world everyone truly needs.

The Positivity of “No” By Jamie Kelley

21FEATURED ARTICLE

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7:30 AM – 8:30 AM Registration [Museum Wing – Grand Foyer] & Breakfast [Louvre 2&3]

8:30 AM – 4:30 PM Two-Day Workshop and Classes Full Day Classes

Break 10:00 AM

Lunch [Louvre 2&3]

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

Break 2:30 PM

MANAGERS SOLUTIONS

Metropolitan

Manager's Solutions Workshop Workshop breakfast served in Metropolitan

LEADERSHIP Teylers

Finding the WHY for “QA” Jeremy Berriault, Pulse

CERTIFICATION Hara CSQA Certification Prep

AGILE Field

Essential Patterns of Successful Agile Transformations Shaun Bradshaw, Zenergy Technologies

CERTIFICATION Bode CSTA Certification Prep

AUTOMATION Louvre 1

Test Automation Foundations and Principles 101 Jim Trentadue, Aristocrat

BDD Prado

BDD Test Automation: Maximum Team Collaboration Thomas Haver, Huntington National Bank

RISK Guggenheim 1

Managing Testing Risks in an Agile and Rapid World Clyneice Chaney, Quality Squared

5:30 PM – 8:30 PM [Hofbräuhaus] Manager’s Connection Dinner - Hosted by Tom Ticknor and Nancy Kastl, QUEST Conferences

7:30 AM – 8:30 AM Registration [Museum Wing – Grand Foyer] & Breakfast [Louvre 2&3]

8:30 AM – 4:30 PM Two-Day Workshop and Certification Prep Classes – Continued from Monday

Half Day Tutorials: 8:30 AM – 12:00 PM Half Day Tutorials: 1:00 PM – 4:30 PM

Break 10:00 AM

Lunch [Louvre 2&3]

12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

Break 2:30 PM

LEADERSHIP Teylers

Connecting Better with Customers and Employees for Improved Results Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA

LEADERSHIP Teylers

Journey from Good to Great: Building High-Performing Teams Frank Rios, Consultant and Danka Grujicic, HERE Technologies

AGILE Field

A Whole New Level: Transforming and Scaling Agile Teams Susan Brockley, Consultat

AGILE Field

Value Chain and Process Mapping Techniques for Agile Organizations Tom Cagley, Hyland Software

AUTOMATION Louvre 1

Do you speak DevTestOps? Your 3Cs Journey into Continuous Testing, Quality, & Delivery Sara Joseph, CDW

CI/CD Louvre 1

Innovative Techniques for Achieving Continuous Delivery Tanya Kravtsov, Audible

MOBILE Prado

Uphill Battle Of Mobile Visual Regression Dmitry Vinnik, Salesforce

API Prado

RESTful API Testing in Ruby Jamie Kelley, Huntington National Bank

MEASUREMENT Guggenheim 1

Software Quality Metrics For Agile Phillip Lew, XBOsoft

EXPLORATORY Guggenheim 1

Exploring Context Driven Testing & Exploratory Testing Nancy Kelln, Unimagined Testing, Inc.

4:30 PM – 6:00 PM [Guggenheim Ballroom] Welcome Reception - Sponsored by QAI Global Institute

23CONFERENCE AT A GLANCE

MONDAY, MAY 13: Pre-Conference Classes & Workshop

TUESDAY, MAY 14: Pre-Conference Tutorials, Classes & Workshop

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CONFERENCE AT A GLANCE


WEDNESDAY, MAY 15: Conference & EXPO7:30 AM – 8:15 AM Registration [Museum Wing – Grand Foyer] & Breakfast [Guggenheim Ballroom]

8:15 AM – 8:30 AM [Guggenheim Ballroom] Opening Remarks & Announcements - Nancy Kastl, QUEST Conference Chairperson

8:30 AM – 9:30 AM [Guggenheim Ballroom] Keynote Presentation: Don’t Fear the Robot Jason Huggins, Founder of Tapster Robotics

9:30 AM – 10:00 AM [Louvre 2&3] Morning Refreshment Break - Sponsored by Rainforest QA

9:30 AM – 5:00 PM [Louvre 2 & 3] Exhibitor EXPO - Browse and learn from the industry’s leading service and technology providers!

[Metropolitan] [Louvre 1] [Teylers] [Prado] [Field]

10:00 AM – 11:00 AM LEADERSHIP AGILE AUTOMATION CONTINUOUS TESTING UNIT TESTING

Presentations

Lord of the Rings: High Performing Teams Edition Joseph Ours, Centric Consulting

Adopting Kanban Practices within Scrum Steve Porter, Scrum.org

Incrementally Eating the Elephant: Automating Your Test Suite Gary Pedretti, Sodoto Solutions

Making the Move to Continuous Testing: 6 Key Considerations Alissa Lydon, Sauce Labs

Unit Testing: Why and How QA Can Get Involved David Dang, Zenergy Technologies

11:15 AM – 12:15 PM LEADERSHIP AGILE AUTOMATION CONTINUOUS TESTING BDD

Presentations

The Value of Qualitative Metrics in Testing Nancy Kelln, Unimagined Testing, Inc.

Using Agile Where Agile Fears to Tread Tom Cagley, Hyland Software

Using Kanban to Manage your Test Automation Jim Trentadue, Aristocrat

Test Automation in DevOps: Moving Towards Continuous Testing Lee Barnes, Utopia Solutions

Putting the UX Back in UI with Behavior-Driven Development Param Chopra, SmartBear Software

12:15 PM – 1:15 PM [Guggenheim Ballroom] Special Interests Roundtables & Lunch - Sponsored by Sauce Labs

1:15 PM – 1:45 PM EXPO TALK EXPO TALK EXPO TALK EXPO TALK EXPO TALK

Expo Talks

Open Banking: What will it mean from a testing perspective? Chris Colosimo, Parasoft

Continuous Testing Made Awesome with Sauce Labs Bill Meyer, Sauce Labs

Why Test Automation Fails, and How to Change That Culture Lee Barnes and CJ Montano, Utopia Solutions

Supercharge Mobile App Testing Earl Adona, Mobile Labs

Cross-browser Testing for the Modern Web Patrick McCartney, Applitools

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM LEADERSHIP AGILE AUTOMATION MOBILE UAT

Presentations

Projecting Personal Power: Leading With or Without Authority Rebecca Staton-Reinstein, Advantage Leadership

Agile Quality Antipatterns: What’s Keeping You from World Class? Robert Gormley, SQS USA

Automation Pitfalls and How to Swing Past the Tar Pit Scot Noftz, SPR

From Robotium to Appium: Choose your Journey Dmitry Vinnik, Salesforce

Baggage Claiming: A Ground-Breaking Technique for Business Process Testing Jonathan Pearson, Original Software

3:00 PM – 3:30 PM [Louvre 2&3] Afternoon Refreshment Break - Sponsored by Total Performance Consulting

3:30 PM – 5:00 PM LEADERSHIP AGILE AUTOMATION MOBILE MEASUREMENT

Workshops

A Methodology for Drafting Outcomes-Based Testing Services Clareice Chaney, MITRE and Clyneice Chaney, Quality Squared

Bridging the Gap: Lessons Learned from Globally Dispersed Agile Teams Frank Rios, Consultant and Jolie Roy, HERE Technologies

Shift Left Test Automation – Demystified Ramapriya Raju and Rohit Khare, IBM

Improving Mobile App Usability and User Experience Philip Lew, XBOSoft

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Metrics with a Punch! Elizabeth Wisdom, Ulta Beauty

5:30 PM – 10:00 PM Lake Michigan Dinner Cruise, sponsored by Applitools

THURSDAY, MAY 16: Conference & EXPO7:30 AM – 8:15 AM Registration [Museum Wing – Grand Foyer] & Breakfast [Guggenheim Ballroom]

7:30 AM – 8:15 AM [Louvre 1] Early Bird Session: Timeless Testing Skills for Modern Testers - Gerie Owen, Qualitest Group and Peter Varhol, Technology Strategy Research

8:15 AM – 8:30 AM [Guggenheim Ballroom] Announcements - Nancy Kastl, QUEST Conference Chairperson

8:30 AM – 9:30 AM[Guggenheim Ballroom] Keynote Presentation: Expecting Secure, High-Quality Software: Using High Assurance Test Regimes in Mitigating Risks

Joe Jarzombek, Director for Government, Aerospace & Defense Programs in Synopsys, Inc. and previously Director for Software & Supply Chain Assurance in the US Department of Homeland Security

9:30 AM – 10:00 AM [Louvre 2&3] Morning Refreshment Break - Sponsored by Parasoft

9:30 AM – 4:00 PM [Louvre 2 & 3] Exhibitor EXPO - Browse and learn from the industry’s leading service and technology providers!

[Metropolitan] [Louvre 1] [Teylers] [Prado] [Field]

10:00 AM – 11:00 AM QUALITY PLAN/DESIGN AUTOMATION AI/DL/ML SECURITY

Presentations

Quality Engineering: Preparing Your Testing Workforce for the Future Billy Flannery, Nationwide

Getting Past the Initial Estimation to Better Hit the Target Jeremy Berriault, Pulse

Can Codeless Testing Scale? Moshe Milman, Applitools

Turbo-Charge your Testing with Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics Shamin Ahmed, CA Technologies

Real World Security Testing Joseph Kerby, Jemurai

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CONFERENCE AT A GLANCE

THURSDAY, MAY 16 CONTINUED: Conference & EXPO[Metropolitan] [Louvre 1] [Teylers] [Prado] [Field]

11:15 AM – 12:15 PM QUALITY PLAN/DESIGN AUTOMATION AI/DL/ML RISK

Presentations

Driving Enterprise Quality with Data Michael Baldwin, Northern Trust

Effective Test Strategies! Are They Meeting Stakeholder Needs? Clyneice Chaney, Quality Squared

Cross-Browser Test Frameworks for Responsive and Progressive Web Apps Eran Kinsbruner, Perfecto

Turbocharging the SWQA Toolbox: How Deep Learning Can Make a Difference Martina Sourada, NVIDIA

Strategic Approach to Risk Analysis and Testing Bob Crews, Checkpoint Technologies

12:15 PM – 1:15 PM [Guggenheim Ballroom] Special Interests Roundtables & Lunch

1:15 PM – 1:45 PM EXPO TALK EXPO TALK EXPO TALK EXPO TALK EXPO TALK

Expo Talks

Digital Integration Testing in DevOps Shahan Ahmad, Fusion Systems

Rethinking QA Testing for Fast-Paced Dev Teams James Wise, Rainforest QA

For Automated Continuous Testing - Go Scriptless! Al Rago, SPR

Agile Performance Testing in the Real World Amit Patel, Total Performance Consulting

Watching the World Burn: API Testing as an Afterthought Patrick Poulin, API Fortress

2:00 PM – 3:00 PM QUALITY PLAN/DESIGN AUTOMATION PERFORMANCE API/SERVICES

Presentations

The New CMMI 2.0: Relevancy and Advantages for Quality Richard Bechtold, Abridge Technology

Regression Testing: Ensuring Adequate Coverage and Prioritization Bindhya Sathyapal, Grainger

Building an Automation Framework Using SpecFlow for UI and API Testing Mary Jo Zervas, Paylocity

Jump-Start Your Performance Testing Practice Kevin Dunne, Tricentis

Simple Approaches for Microservices Testing Chris Colosimo, Parasoft

3:00 PM – 3:30 PM [Louvre 2&3] Afternoon Refreshment Break - Sponsored by API Fortress

3:30 PM – 5:00 PM QUALITY PLAN/DESIGN AUTOMATION PERFORMANCE API/SERVICES

Workshops

The Change Effect: Change the Mind, Change the Behavior Yolonda Kennedy and Candace Rountree, Anthem

Personas and User Stories: Testing from a User’s Perspective Gerie Owen, Qualitest Group and Peter Varhol, Technology Strategy Research

Intro to a Keyword Driven Framework Daniel Schiff, Augeo FI

Performance Testing: Old Methods vs New Techniques Deepak Arora and Goldie Shah, IBM Watson Health Imaging

Testing APIs Like A Hero Tom Arnett and Bob Timm, Bottle Rocket

5:00 PM – 6:30 PM [Montrose Room] EXPO Reception

FRIDAY, MAY 17: Conference7:30 AM – 8:15 AM Registration [Museum Wing – Grand Foyer] & Breakfast [Guggenheim Ballroom]

7:30 AM – 8:15 AM [Louvre 1] Early Bird Session: Think Like a Recruiter: Hiring and Retaining Talented Teams Kirk Walton, tap|QA

8:15 AM – 8:30 AM [Guggenheim Ballroom] Announcements - Nancy Kastl, QUEST Conference Chairperson

8:30 AM – 9:30 AM [Guggenheim Ballroom] Keynote Presentation: More Than That Damian Synadinos, Ineffable Solutions

9:30 AM – 10:00 AM [Grand Foyer] Morning Refreshment Break - Sponsored by Fusion Systems and Services

[Metropolitan] [Louvre 1] [Teylers] [Field] [Bode]

10:00 AM – 11:00 AM LEADERSHIP IoT DATA PRODUCTION TESTING CERTIFICATION

Presentations

Blurring the Lines between Testers and Developers Susan Brockley, Consultant

Risk-Based Testing Approaches for Hardware and Technologies Integration Dawid Pacia, Brainly

Automate Your Data: Free Your Mind Aaron Swerlein, Huntington National Bank

Preparing to Test in Production Mush Honda, KMS Technology

CSTE/CSQA Practice Certification Exam - Multiple Choice

11:15 AM – 12:15 PM LEADERSHIP IoT DATA PRODUCTION TESTING CERTIFICATION

Presentations

The Life of a Tester from Once Upon a Time to Happily Ever After Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA

Hyper-Connected Apps: Testing Peripherals and Mobile Apps Interactions Andrew Morgan, Infostretch

Accelerating QA/Testing Securely Using Data Virtualization and Masking Tim Gorman, Delphix

Production Stability: QA Role in “Strengthening Right” Shalla Goyal, Northern Trust

CSQA/CSTE Practice Certification Exam – Constructive Response (Essay)

12:15 PM – 1:15 PM [Guggenheim Ballroom] Lunch & QAI Grand Prize Drawing

1:30 PM – 2:30 PM [Guggenheim Ballroom] Keynote Presentation: For a Fresh Perspective on Team Leadership Look to the Drummer. What? John Ryskowski, JFR Consulting and Drum-Talks

26 EXPO TALKS

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Chris Colosimo, Parasoft

With benefits including improved customer experience, new revenue streams, and access to traditionally under-served markets, there has been a lot of excitement around Open Banking and how it will fundamentally change the financial industry. However, in order for institutions to shift to this model, they will have to prepare for the issues surrounding regulation and data privacy, as well as seamless customer experience. Join Chris for an Open Banking overview and learn why it is redefining the industry. He’ll discuss the what Open Bank and PSD2 are, how to prepare, and then demonstrate Parasoft technologies, including API testing and service virtualization, you need to help make it happen.

Bill Meyer, Sauce Labs

As engineering organizations make the shift from waterfall to Agile development practices, they find that one of the most difficult, and expensive bottlenecks to achieving true CI/CD is continuous testing. This talk will show how to get this critical piece of your pipeline right, and properly implement automated testing in a DevOps environment. Bill Meyer, Solution Engineer at Sauce Labs, will demonstrate how to leverage test automation at scale with the Sauce Labs cloud. With access to 1,000+ browser/OS/device combinations (including mobile) to run your functional and JSUnit tests, your team doesn’t have to worry about maintaining infrastructure, and instead can focus on delivering quality code more frequently.

Lee Barnes and CJ Montano, Utopia Solutions

Has your IT enterprise yet to realize the benefit of a DevOps and CI/CD pipeline? Is your organization questioning the value of DevOps? During this session, Utopia Solutions and its partner, Forte Group, will demonstrate how systems and processes are useless if they’re not aligned with organizational value. Attendees will walk away with four methods practitioners can use to build a well-oiled continuous delivery pipeline.

Earl Adona, Mobile Labs

Mobile app developers and QA teams have their hands full. From managing and sharing devices, running manual tests, and incorporating test automation, enterprise mobility teams are super busy with limited resources. To thrive, all team members need to make sure they have the best tools and solutions to release updates on time. To solve these challenges, many teams have implemented a mobile device cloud to boost DevOps and facilitate collaboration. Join Mobile Labs’ Earl Adona and discover the benefits of a mobile device cloud to streamline device management and to make mobile app testing faster than ever.

Patrick McCartney, Applitools

Digital Transformation has made cross-browser testing a critical part of delivering a quality user experience. However, while the technology that powers the web has evolved, our approach to testing the web has mostly stayed the same. In modern web applications, most cross-browser defects are visual, yet we still test as if they are functional. In this session you will learn: 1) How bad cross-browser testing strategy hurts us; 2) Where and how to cut corners on browser coverage; 3) What causes cross-browser defects; and 4) How to test smarter, not harder with a modern approach.

Wednesday, 1:15 PM – 1:45 PM





Open Banking: What will it mean from a testing perspective?

Continuous Testing Made Awesome with Sauce Labs

Why Test Automation Fails, and How to Change That Culture

Supercharge Mobile App Testing

Cross-browser Testing for the Modern Web

Shahan Ahmad, Fusion Systems

Industries are transitioning from their legacy business processes and systems to the digital world. There are unique challenges including inflexible technology stack, complex development processes, and migration to cloud with hybrid environments. A mix of legacy and cutting-edge technology stacks adds to the complexity. The challenge is how to automate testing faster and be cost effective without compromising work quality. Can there be one test team instead of separate manual, automation and performance testing teams? How can cloud be leveraged for on-demand performance testing? We are introducing Fusion’s ITAS for a comprehensive testing lab at the enterprise level to address the above challenges.

James Wise, Rainforest QA

Software development is moving faster than ever, but traditional QA techniques often hold teams back. In this session, James Wise will demonstrate how Rainforest automates the QA process -- not just tests -- so fast-moving teams can test more effectively and have more confidence in every release. By combining the best of automated browser testing with trained human testers, Rainforest is able to offer the flexibility of manual testers at the speed of automation.

Al Rago, SPR

Today’s world of Agile and DevOps requires speed, flexibility, and accuracy. How do you verify your application’s data and functionality when the targets move faster than the bullets? Using traditional script-based (coded) automation, test engineers struggle to achieve in-sprint automation for continuous testing. A more lightweight testing approach is needed using model-based automation that is ‘low-code/no code’ to rapidly construct stable and resilient end-to-end tests while minimizing hand-coding that causes an automation maintenance burden. The testing tool market has matured with Tricentis’ Tosca as the market leader according to Gartner Magic Quadrant. By joining this talk, you will understand why scriptless automation is transforming testing for modern software delivery.

Amit Patel, Total Performance Consulting

Poor performance impacts quality, cost and customer confidence. Performance testing must be incorporated throughout the entire software development lifecycle. Today’s software is increasingly more complex and it is no longer sufficient to treat performance testing as a final checkbox before promoting hundreds or thousands of hours of work to production. To succeed today, every organization, regardless of their industry or end user, must design a real-world feedback loop and implement the tools and processes that can analyze data points and turn them into actionable insights. Join us as we share our lessons learned and get your valuable insights.

Patrick Poulin, API Fortress

Every organizations needs to keep up to stay relevant in today’s tech economy. Since the mass adoption of APIs, the complexity of the average application has increased. This coupled with the need to always “innovate faster” to keep up in today’s tech environments, puts us into a position of significant risk. Failing to realize that APIs are potentially the most critical entry point of all can have serious consequences and undermine the quality of the entire testing strategy. In this talk we will ground this discussion with real world examples and help audience members understand the variations in risk and technologies.

Thursday, 1:15 PM – 1:45 PM





Digital Integration Testing in DevOps

Rethinking QA Testing for Fast-Paced Dev Teams

For Automated Continuous Testing - Go Scriptless!

Agile Performance Testing in the Real World

Watching the World Burn: API Testing as an Afterthought

27EXPO TALKS

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DevOps, Agile, and Big-Data are no news to any organization. Agile testing and continuous testing are also quite some time in the industry. While these are not new technologies and practices, organizations still struggle to mature their DevOps toward automated continuous delivery.

In most cases, the thing that slows down DevOps maturity is the ability to embed test automation upon each code change and throughout the pipeline. Testing is too complex to develop, sustain, analyze, and execute at scale, especially in today’s digital transformation.

Recent trends in the market are showing significant growth in moving to codeless test automation for web and mobile apps. The reasons to this trend are the ability to quickly and reliably create test automation scenarios that are harder to break, and that are using machine-learning (ML) algorithms to self-heal the scripts regardless of element changes. Eventually, such tests produce consistent results making the software assessment decision easier.

It is important to also understand that as organizations are moving to DevOps, they are looking at more efficient practices, that identify and reduce the overall risks from the continuous delivery of features and software innovation.

Pillars for Success in Continuous TestingSuccess in continuous testing relies on few key pillars:

1. Test automation creation that matches the organization’s skillset 2. Elastic execution of test automation 3. Cloud-Based Lab 4. Ability to analyze big test data

When coming to think about continuous testing, risk-free decision making, and unmatched test automation reliability, considering the above 4 pillars can be a great start.

Empowering the right personas in the organization to use the right test frameworks, whether they are code-based (Selenium, Appium), BDD/TDD based, or codeless with the abovementioned benefits, can be the difference between failure and success. Creation of test scenarios without the ability to scale them across all relevant platforms (web and mobile) in an up-to-date lab misses the point. A lab in the cloud is, in most cases, the most cost-efficient, secure and scalable way. Today’s frameworks with the scale of platforms against which they operate, requires great computing power, large storage capacity and global access that only cloud-computing can provide.

Lastly, when performing continuous testing, teams generate in their lab tons of test data. Being able to quickly analyze and assess risks associated with quality requires a smart test analytics solution –that can clear the noise from the entire test suite report, filter base on test case, keyword, platform, root cause or any other viable option. Executing in the cloud should be fast and analyzing this execution shouldn’t be a bottleneck either.

Bottom LineThe industry is re-inventing itself while transitioning to DevOps. To successfully transform, there are pillars around test creation, execution, and analysis that can help drive teams to greater productivity, faster release cycles, and mature test automation.

Such pillars and transformation should of course take into consideration the other key pillars of successful DevOps that are: People, Process, Technology. Matching the tools with the processes and the people skills will lead to success.

How Can Cloud, Codeless Test Automation, and Machine-Learning Test Analytics Boost Continuous Testing?By Eran Kinsbruner

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EARLY BIRD SESSIONS

As testers in Agile and DevOps, we are challenged to champion quality in new and unique ways. We are challenged to develop innovative test approaches that focus on customer value. It is in using not only our technical expertise but more importantly, our skills in communication, collaboration and creativity in bringing innovative techniques such as test optimization, BDD and others to our test practices that we can make our most valuable contribution. Join Gerie Owen and Peter Varhol as they delve into the key skills that the modern tester needs to be innovative: communication, collaboration and creativity. Using real-life examples, Gerie and Peter will show how to can create intersections of creativity both individually and as a team. You will learn how to look at issues in multiple, unexpected ways to eliminate your own associative barriers. Finally, you will learn how create an intersectional innovation by connecting seemingly unrelated ideas generated by teams of multiple disciplines. Don’t miss this early morning opportunity to enhance your own creativity and that of your team by developing these skills.

Think Like a Recruiter: Hiring and Retaining Talented Teams

Today’s talent market is the tightest of all-time, with dozens of opportunities available for talented IT and QA professionals. Hiring managers are struggling to find the right people for their teams, but perhaps they just aren’t looking in the right places, or selling candidates correctly? In this early bird session, Kirk Walton will explain the processes to help managers “think like a recruiter” when it comes to interviewing, and selling, potential prospects for their organization. Building the Right Team requires you discover candidates you might not otherwise think about but who may well turn out to be all-stars. During this session you will learn the 5 interview questions you need to ask to help uncover these potential stars. Kirk will describe “market mindshift”, that candidates are also interviewing you so you must “Think Like a Recruiter” to sell the perfect candidate! You must present the company they can’t say no to! Finally, Kirk will describe how once you have a great team, what the best practices are for retaining top talent in the hottest IT market in history.

E A R L Y B I R D

Thursday, 7:30 AM – 8:15 AM

Timeless Testing Skills for Modern Testers

E A R L Y B I R D

Friday, 7:30 AM – 8:15 AM

Gerie Owen, Qualitest Group and Peter Varhol, Technology Strategy Research

Kirk Walton, tap|QA

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The QA Profession Has Never Been Hotter! By Kirk Walton

As a Quality Assurance consulting firm, we at tap|QA have been hearing numerous questions centered on the same theme over the past couple of years: “We’ve never had such a hard time finding talented QA people for our team – why is that?” “How come I can find a developer relatively easily, but finding a strong test automation person takes forever?”

In 2019 the Software Quality Assurance role in organizations has never been more important – and QA professionals are reaping many benefits. It seems the role is being perceived as more critical today than ever before. But why is that?

Simply put: Software is EVERYWHERE

Think of where we were just over a decade ago to where we are today. Smart phones and mobile platforms were in their infant stages. Same with software on interconnected devices and the “Internet of Things.” Ten years ago, if you needed a ride from Point A to Point B and didn’t have a car, you called a taxi cab. If you were away from your home and forgot to turn your thermostat down, you were out of luck unless you called a neighbor. Until 2007, watching a movie from Netflix meant getting a physical disc in the mail. If you were in your car and wanted to listen to a specific song, but didn’t have it on CD or mp3 player, you were out of luck.

And then at the end of the 2000s, the iPhone and Android Phone were introduced, and EVERYTHING changed. Today, technology is at the center of our everyday lives. We utilize applications on our phones, computers, and other devices to run a large part of what we do on a day-to-day basis. And with that, for technology to be successful, above all else, it aneeds to work.

With so many product and service options, over 2 million apps available for both Android and iOS, and the mention the software that operates on “Smart Devices”, if a company releases a software product that doesn’t work, or has a website that crashes or is unable to complete a transaction, the chances that a customer moves on to something else is very high – if not a certainty. The rise of IoT technologies, particularly in the Automotive and Home sectors, has placed great demands on the QA and Testing functions, according to the latest World Quality Report. For these reasons, a well-thought out test strategy and ample manpower on the software testing side is critical for any company that produces a technology-based product to grow… or survive.

The way we create software is different – and FASTER

With the advances in software development since the turn of the century including the adoption of methodologies such as Agile, BDD, TDD, etc., software development and release cycles are much shorter. This means software is being tested continuously, instead of being done in bulk in an isolated period at the end of the process.

QA professionals are no longer “just testers,” but need to be an instrumental part of the software planning and strategy phases. QA analysts must serve as true strategists when it comes to the planning and requirements phases. Failure to do so increases the chances for longer, more cumbersome testing cycles (which leads to software releases missing deadlines, or greater chances of defects when that software is released).

In many organizations, the developer-to-QA ratio has decreased dramatically as well; in many cases, QA members actually out number developers which was typically not seen in SDLC organizations in the past. Now more than ever before, QA professionals have a true “seat at the table” when it comes to the creation of software.

Blame the media (and Social Media)

Remember the launch of Healthcare.gov? While the website seemingly works great now, many people will always associate its name with its failed initial launch. One of the biggest reasons for the failure was an alarming lack of planning and insufficient testing. Analysts have commented that this episode may have had more positive impact for the importance of quality assurance than any other event. Let’s face it, when The President Of The United States points out the importance of having technology that works, and the necessity of proper testing, it sheds light on the importance of the QA profession!

The old adage used to be “a satisfied customer will tell one person, but an unhappy customer will tell ten people.” In the age of social media, it could be several orders of magnitude more than that now. Bad news travels fast. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other sites are full of posts complaining about a particular website being down, an app not working, etc. For these reasons, companies are investing in QA like never before.

It’s a GREAT time to be a QA Professional!

With the demand for QA at an all-time high, more and more people are getting into the field each year. As we discussed on our most recent tap|TALK podcast, the career path of the QA professional has become much more well-defined, and the role has garnered much more respect among professionals in the SDLC world than what was previously seen.

In the past, globally, QA was often viewed as a “stepping stone” to other IT roles. Trends are showing that is no longer the case. There are more career-long options for QA professionals – and compensation for the role has never been better. “QA Analyst” has consistently been cited as one of the happiest jobs in America, and CNN Money recently cited the QA Manager role as having a predicted 15% job growth between 2015-2025.

It truly is an exciting time to be a QA Professional!

31WEDNESDAY, MAY 15 - PRESENTATIONS

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10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

L E A D E R S H I P

Lord of the Rings: High Performing Teams EditionJoseph Ours, Centric Consulting Modern software delivery will involve DevOps practices and tools. This will necessitate a change to how teams operate, more specifically, it will require a change in how managers think about teams. Even today’s Agile teams have really struggled to eliminate internal silos, which has resulted in artificial barriers to collabora-tion. So, if we truly want to leverage the power of DevOps, or just high performing teams in general, how should we think about team construction? Join Joseph as he uses comical analogous reason-ing to discuss the fellowship, the roles, the mission, and the skills of the team to discern what can be learned from them. During the session Joseph will answer the questions of, what place do roles have on high performing teams, what commonalities exist for each team member, and what leadership lessons can we learn from key roles? Joseph will extrapolate to make a point, because wizards and IT are not a common mix, and because hey, I’m just trying to make a point.

A UTOMATION

Incrementally Eating the Elephant: Automating Your Test Suite

Gary Pedretti, Sodoto Solutions Building and maintaining test automation is a daunting task for many organizations. Companies with legacy applications often have a significant amount of technical debt around quality and testing, but even startups struggle once they scale beyond a few coders. In addition, functional/UI testing with automated tools is a specialized, high-demand skill, leading to the “throw it over the wall,” separate projects and teams, and “big bang delivery” approaches. But the promise of Agile frameworks – and now DevOps – has always included cross-functional teams, incremental rollout, and a focus on highest-value deliverables first! Join Gary in this session to talk about how you can leverage these ideas and practices with a traditionally big bang, highly-specialized team area like test automation. Learn how to foster teams that understand that quality and test automation are a shared responsibility, not just “the tester’s problem”. In the session you will learn to identify the highest-value parts of a massive test suite and even more importantly, learn how to maintain automated tests in an incremental way.

UNIT

TESTING

Unit Testing: Why and How QA Can Get InvolvedDavid Dang, Zenergy Technologies As companies “shift left” and “flip the Quality triangle”, unit testing is becoming the most critical aspect of software quality. However, Quality Assurance teams traditionally have not been highly involved in unit testing, as it has always been viewed as part of development providing QA with minimal visibility into those activities. Furthermore, many QA team members feel they are not technical enough to understand or assist in unit testing. How do we bridge the unit testing gaps with QA team members? Join David Dang as he explains the benefits of QA involvement in unit testing as well as how to identify the type of unit testing needed to ensure quality. Dive deeper into the benefits of unit testing on an organizational level such as reduced costs to fix bugs, improved cross team collaboration, higher ROI, and quicker product releases. Moreover, he explains the three levels of involvement (comprehending, defining, and authoring) for QA team members. David’s session will provide top insight into how you can better barter up your QA techniques to test smarter.

AG ILE

Adopting Kanban Practices within ScrumSteve Porter, Scrum.org Too often teams spend more time choosing a “process” than working in it. They do research, debate, evaluate, etc., rather than just getting going. If you search on Scrum vs. Kanban, you will get hundreds of hits; however, it doesn’t have to be that way. Scrum is a simple framework from which process evolves. Kanban is a strategy made up of a set of practices that helps work flow. Building a bridge between the two help teams deliver better products to market. Join Steve Porter as he introduces Kanban practices that Scrum Teams can add to help improve their effectiveness and efficiency. During Steve’s session, you will learn how to use Kanban practices, including visualization of workflow, limiting work in progress (WiP), active management of work and many more to help continually inspect and adapt your workflow; all without losing the benefits of Scrum. You will leave understanding how building a bridge between Scrum and Kanban will help your team deliver better products to market!

CONTINUOUS

TESTING

Making the Move to Continuous Testing: 6 Key Considerations

Alissa Lydon, Sauce Labs Today’s modern development disciplines whether Agile, Continuous Integration or Continuous Delivery have transformed how teams develop and deliver applications. To compete in today’s fast-paced digital economy companies must also transform how they test. Successful teams know the secret sauce to delivering high quality digital experiences fast is continuous testing. Many organizations that have seen success in changing their testing practices have a few key things in common. Join Alissa Lydon as she explores the tactical changes QA and development teams need to make to succeed in this emerging practice. She will provide practical advice on how to be the driver of change for your team. To that end, Alissa will discuss solutions for creating a cultural commitment to quality, how to build out automation using the correct testing framework, the importance of investing in a test execution platform for comprehensive coverage and how to scale test infrastructure instantly as needed. She will also describe the effective use of visibility and analytics. Alissa will include real-world examples from organizations that are shifting from legacy practices to full continuous testing.

QUEST Exhibitor EXPO & EXPO TalksOpening on Wednesday morning, the Exhibitor EXPO features vendor booths from leading organizations in the industry. Enter for a chance to win exhibitor prizes, and get your QUEST Passport stamped to enter in the QAI Grand Prize drawing on Friday during lunch (must be present to win).

If you are looking to learn more about specific products and services showcased by EXPO exhibitors, then the EXPO Talks are designed for you! Scheduled just after lunch on Wednesday and Thursday, these Talks are short 30-minute sessions featuring innovative product demos or service presentations. You will have the chance to talk with exhibitor representatives and have your questions answered away from the busy EXPO booths. The EXPO Talks are a convenient one-stop-shop to learn the latest about products and services.

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WEDNESDAY, MAY 15 - PRESENTATIONS

11:15 AM - 12:15 PM

L E A D E R S H I P

The Value of Qualitative Metrics in TestingNancy Kelln, Unimagined Testing, Inc. Traditional quantitative software testing metrics lie. They lead us into temptation, give us a false sense of security and allow us to make bad decisions about our software under test. On software projects where the quality of the software built is high or we have an infinite amount of time to test, we can survive the distraction of quantitative metrics. However, on projects where the quality is low or there are time pressures, reporting only quantitative metrics will only cause more problems. If you have high risk systems, with lots of issues and little time to test, you need to consider qualitative metrics! In this talk Nancy Kelln will deliver our test reports from the evil lies metrics tell, by introducing qualitative methods for test documentation. Her approach has been successfully implemented on both large and small scale projects in various organizations. This approach can also be applied to Agile, Traditional and Exploratory Testing approaches.

A UTOMATION

Using Kanban to Manage your Test Automation

Jim Trentadue, Aristocrat Implementing Test Automation could be a challenge in a traditional Scrum environment. Does automation start in the same sprint, is it one behind, how is velocity measured for maintenance? These are just some questions that have plagued teams. To avoid some of these pitfalls, consider moving to a Kanban board for your Test Automation work requests composed by a centralized team. This central team would serve the Scrum teams and in true Kanban fashion. During this session, Jim Trentadue will identify some key problem areas of Test Automation within a Scrum methodology and provide real-world solutions to them. Jim will explain how a Kanban board is structured and what drives prioritization and the benefits the Kanban board provides to the Scrum teams and department overall. By implementing this approach, you could start to see teams more successful with test automation due to the work required going into a request before the work starts – without the worry of failing sprints. This approach would increase throughput as well as provide the broader perspective of automation across the department.

BDD

Putting the UX Back in UI with Behavior-Driven Development

Param Chopra, SmartBear Software Demands for releasing software deployments frequently, managing infinite combinations of devices and creating standardization to increase velocity have put pressure on software teams to deliver the latest feature to users. Everywhere we look, software teams are turning to agile methodologies to increase speed but that should not come at the risk of a bad user experience. Behavior-driven development is a modern approach to software development that drives software teams to build applications with the end-user in mind and to marry UX with UI. BDD drives product teams to prioritize the user perspective, while continuously delivering value to users through frequent release cycles. Join Akshita Puram as she explores the multiple benefits and challenges to adopting this approach including finding defects earlier and often along with better collaboration across different roles. During this session, Akshita will explain why behavior-driven development is critical to creating great software and how designers to developers to QA teams can accelerate its adoption with the right practices and tools in place. She will also share a demonstration of a use case with BDD in UI test automation.

AGILE

Using Agile Where Agile Fears to TreadTom Cagley, Hyland Software Over the years there have been many scenarios used to identify why agile cannot work and can’t be tested. These were typically ex-cuses to avoid using other methods. They were not valid then and they are not valid now. Taking a less prescriptive definition agile has allowed teams to create hybrids of lean and agile techniques to address real-world testing work that spans the entirety of an organi-zation’s priorities. Join Tom Cagley as he shares five key scenarios that are cited in which agile and agile testing “don’t” work. Tom will explore each fallacy and provide insights into practical solutions. He will also explain why testing is often the key to making agile work providing a palette of techniques to enable agile and agile testing. You do not want to miss this opportunity to hear how Tom’s years of experience in agile testing has led to very decisive solutions to your agile testing challenges.

CONTINUOUS

TESTING

Test Automation in DevOps: Moving Towards Continuous Testing

Lee Barnes, Utopia Solutions The ultimate objective of a DevOps approach is to deliver quality products to your customers. DevOps shops that achieved this state point to continuous testing as a key contributor to their success. However, QA and testing have become forgotten orphans in the DevOps journey of many organizations. For groups that have incorporated testing, many have a release cadence that resembles something more like waterfall. The culprit is often the inability to incorporate stable automation into their testing practices. Join Lee Barnes for an informative talk aimed at both developers and testers. In his session, Lee will discuss how organizations can address these issues and move towards continuous testing within their DevOps delivery pipeline. Specifically, the discussion will touch on key DevOps testing practices and methods for identifying opportunities to apply automation. Lee will discuss how to overcome many of the issues preventing the incorporation of test automation in DevOps processes and share techniques for effectively applying automation to DevOps testing activities.

Lunchtime Reminders

Wednesday and Thursday of the QUEST Conference features Special Interest Roundtables during lunch, which encourages attendees to connect over specific topics of interest. As you enter the general session room for lunch, certain tables will have signage indicating that it is reserved for roundtable discussions for that particular subject. Connect over similar interests and discuss your issues with your peers.

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WEDNESDAY, MAY 15 - PRESENTATIONS

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

One-on-One Coaching SessionsHave you ever heard an interesting idea or solution in a conference presentation and would have liked to discuss it further with the speaker? But, when you tried to talk to the speaker immediately at the end of the presentation, you found that the conference schedule just didn’t allow enough time?

Included with the QUEST conference experience is the opportunity for you to meet one-on-one with conference speakers or the professional QAI instructors in an informal setting to discuss how to turn ideas into solutions that address your specific needs.

Speakers will be available for free coaching sessions on the day of their conference presentation. Time slots with available speakers can be found in the QUEST Information - Coaching page of the QUEST Mobile App. Instructions for requesting a meeting with a coach are provided in the app. Specific time and meeting location are handled directly between you and your coach.

Automation Pitfalls and How to Swing Past the Tar Pit From Robotium to Appium: Choose your Journey

Projecting Personal Power: Leading With or Without Authority

L E A D E R S H I P

Rebecca Staton-Reinstein, Advantage Leadership In today’s world, it’s not uncommon to have limited authority to get the job done. One means of control is to exercise your “Position Power”. Position power comes with the control you have over many aspects of an assignment. However, there is a hidden paradox. When you assert that authority, “because I said so,” you lose authority in the minds of subordinates! Savvy successful leaders learn to use “Personal Power” to get things done with their ability to influence, inspire, or convince others to act. The advantage of this sort of leadership is anyone can exert it, from the lowest ranking to the highest. Join Dr. Rebecca Staton-Reinstein to learn how to use your own “Personal Power” to succeed regardless of title or lack of title. During this session, Rebecca will help you identify sources of your personal power. She will describe how to use personal power to meet your goals by creating an action plan to apply the principles of personal power to your specific situation and how to hone your communication skills to enhance your personal power.

AG ILE

Agile Quality Antipatterns: What’s Keeping You from World Class?

Robert Gormley, SQS USA If online surveys are to be believed, over 75% of all IT organizations are utilizing some form of Agile methodology. They are doing so in order to create efficient and effective teams that not only drive better business delivery but also focus on better quality. Are these organizations actually achieving these benefits or are they falling prey to Agile Quality Antipatterns, self-constructed barriers or challenges that limit the success of the product team? Join Robert Gormley for an examination of Agile Quality Antipatterns: what are they, how do you spot them, how can you resolve them, and how do you measure success so that you don’t fall into them again? Bob will discuss how strategy, vision, and governance can help organizations take the first steps away from Agile Quality Antipatterns. He will further examine the use of Exploratory Testing and Business Process modeling to sustain momentum toward Agile quality efficiency and effectiveness. Finally, Bob will describe how to incorporate the concept of Test Architecture to push the boundaries of agile quality through CI/CD and DevOps.

A UT OMATION

Scot Noftz, SPR Organizations need test automation to achieve the benefits of agile team velocity and Dev/Ops continuous delivery. Although everyone want automation, it’s not a simple one-size fits all solution. Test automation is an investment with many aspects from strategies and tools to people. Mistakes are made that lead organizations to abandon test automation due to high cost or not reaping full benefits. Automation, when used effectively, can yield substantial opportunities to accelerate delivery of quality software. This session will help you build a robust automation strategy that aligns to your organization’s automation goals and avoids common pitfalls. Join Scot to learn about defining clear automation goals, selecting the right-fit automation tool, automating at the right level (UI vs API), identifying target tests for automation, integrating automation within your development process, maintaining your automation suite, having the required automation skills in your team, and more. Real world examples will be included for these automation challenges and their solutions, so you can swing past the automation tar pit to successful automation.

MOBILE

Dmitry Vinnik, Salesforce

Mobile Testing is challenging. It combines a complexity of testing web applications and native mobile applications which run on different mobile operating systems. In other words, Mobile User Interface testing is often twice as involved as regular web application testing. The result is high demand for reliable UI testing in the mobile domain and the creation of many UI test frameworks. In the open source community, two projects are responsible for majority of UI testing: Robotium and Appium. Join Dmitry Vinnik as he takes you on a journey of UI testing starting with introduction of Robotium and its main principles, and later moving on to Appium while highlighting why one would choose Robotium over Appium and vice versa. Ultimately, you should be able to make a choice of what UI test framework is the most applicable to your use case. Dmitry’s session will involve a demonstration of basic and advanced functionalities of Robotium and Appium using Java. In conclusion, TestObject and Firebase will be used to demonstrate how both frameworks can be scaled with the cloud as a testing ground.

UAT

Baggage Claiming: A Ground-Breaking Technique for Business Process Testing

Jonathan Pearson, Original Software Many companies have multiple and overlapping application landscapes that have numerous sources of frequent change. These may come from rollouts, upgrades, cybersecurity, acquisitions or business process ‘flavors’. Achieving a quality outcome through manual testing alone is both costly and extremely time-consuming. Invariably you have several business teams pushing changes for different projects at the same time. The overlapping releases of software to multiple staged environments only exacerbates the issues involved with ensuring a risk-free ‘live’ outcome. In this session, Jonathan Pearson will describe the solution nick-named “Baggage Claiming”. Jonathan will explain how baggage claiming illustrates a real-life customer’s experience combining innovative software solutions with sound management processes. He will go on to detail the approach and the ensuing benefits of full audit trails, no user fatigue, and minimal upfront investment leading to extreme run efficiency. Jonathan will also show how to conduct a complete regression test with every element on every page analyzed and all without the need for a single line of code.

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WEDNESDAY, MAY 15 - WORKSHOPS

3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

L E A D E R S H I P

A Methodology for Drafting Outcomes-Based Testing Services

Clareice Chaney, MITRE and Clyneice Chaney, Quality Squared Outcome is one of the new buzz words and is central to aligning organizational or project visions and goals to measurable expectations. Many organizations continue to struggle with how best to define both the service and outcomes governing testing relationships. Questions of interest are: What are good outcomes for a testing organization? Are outcomes in agile development different from outcomes in more traditional programs? How can outcomes be used for optimum benefit? Defining outcomes: what, how, and why should you? Is there a relation to service level agreements? Clareice and Clyneice Chaney will provide practical and valuable information along with examples for viable testing service outcomes and their use in today’s world. Well aligned and quantifiable outcomes can provide benefits to both the service provider and the customer.Learning Objectives: • Learn how to define viable testing outcomes for projects, products, testing relationships, and processes• Describe the key parameters of service levels: ing and defining service

levels ing process to measure• A Methodology for drafting outcomes-based requirement documents

MOBILE

Improving Mobile App Usability and User Experience

Philip Lew, XBOSoftUser experience and usability are key ingredients of any successful mobile app. In this workshop, Phil will describe the differences between the two as important elements of software quality from the end user viewpoint. User experience, in particular, is an element that many forget until the end and generally don’t know how to measure since there are no standard definitions. Phil will discuss quality modeling and how usability and user experience should be modeled for the enterprise. This discussion will range from the initial components of quality, to breaking usability and user experience down into measurable characteristics for mobile apps, and then, using these characteristics to derive metrics. These metrics can then be used to benchmark, analyze, and improve the app toward end user satisfaction. Beyond this, Phil will also review a case study where various measurements were implemented to show actual usability improvement.Learning Objectives:• You will leave the workshop able to develop a usability model for

your organization• Create appropriate metrics to measure end user satisfaction• Understand key design and evaluation principles in software

usability for mobile applications

A UTOMATION

Shift Left Test Automation – DemystifiedRamapriya Raju and Rohit Khare, IBMShift left testing is the new mantra if an organization is serious about faster time to market, lower cost of testing, and earlier defect identification in the SDLC. This early defect detection can help in faster defect fix time and requirement adjustments much earlier in project. During this workshop, Ramapriya Raju and Rohit Khare will explain how to shift your test automation left using real-world approaches. You will learn how to start automation early by using wire frames before code is written, performing API verification before the UI is available, using module base testing, and automating with behavior driven methods to focus on high-risk requirements. Ramapriya and Rohit will also discuss how the Shift Left approach mandates test automation engineers involvement with all other actors in Agile Scrum teams for information gathering, rapid feedback, and building incremental automated test suites. Using Shift Left automation you will be able to shift from defect detection to defect prevention at a faster scale and pace.Learning Objectives:• Learn how to automate Shift Left testing using Wire Frames• Learn how to automate API/Web Services for Shift Left testing• Understand optimization and automation of Shift Left testing

MEASUREMENT

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Metrics with a Punch!

Elizabeth Wisdom, Ulta BeautyHigh defect rates, tight timelines, multiple unplanned test cycles, swelling costs – and bus tire treads running across your chest! More often than not, QA is the focal point when such things go awry during a project or after go-live. Feedback that QA costs are too high, the team is inefficient (or worse yet, not adding value), or production and UAT defects reported are always perceived as a “QA miss” can be constant unless you develop a thick skin, it can get to you over time. Join Elizabeth’s workshop as she shows you how leveraging metrics – both process and product can effectively and objectively communicate the state of affairs with respect to the QA team’s effectiveness as well as show product quality trends and opportunities for improvement across development, QA, UAT, and project management teams. You may be surprised that you can also get what you need – budget, resources, and time simply by leveraging the data you already have at hand. Get the message across that will spur positive, collaborative action and help obtain the required investment from leadership in order to achieve the continuous improvement goals the organization demands of your QA team. Show your QA team value in a one-stop-shop dashboard and let the numbers speak for themselves!Learning Objectives:• Learn how to determine what metrics make sense for your particular challenges• See real life examples of simple metrics that are easy to collect and can change the way QA is perceived• How to use data and metrics to show ROI in a meaningful way

AGILE

Bridging the Gap: Lessons Learned from Globally Dispersed Agile Teams

Frank Rios, Consultant and Jolie Roy, HERE Technologies Many of us work for global companies and have no choice but to work within distributed teams. This means the recommended Agile approach of co-located teams does not work. There are hurdles in distributed teams like language, culture, and time-zone differences. Join Frank Rios and Jolie Roy as they discuss the pitfalls and struggles they overcame to find their way out. Frank and Jolie’s team consisted of people from Berlin, Chicago, and Mumbai, including various departments within the company. In this workshop, Frank and Jolie will discuss the lessons they learned over the past year while working in a globally distributed team on a project that was critical to the entire organization with a tight deadline. As Agile Coaches, they were surprised by how much they struggled to overcome this common challenge. In this session, they will incorporate activities on how to make handoffs more effective, understand and clarify roles within the team, and emphasize the importance of over-communication to aid in transparency and collaboration. This workshop is an interactive session where Frank and Jolie will incorporate some activities to emphasize the learning objectives. Learning Objectives:• How to make work handoffs more effective• The importance of understanding and clarifying roles within the team• You cannot over-communicate

Evening Event & Bonus SessionJoin Applitools, the QUEST team and your fellow attendees for an unforgettable night of dining and dancing while cruising Lake Michigan. Transportation is provided from the conference hotel to Chicago’s famous Navy Pier where attendees will embark on the Spirit of Chicago and venture on a scenic tour of Chicago’s breathtaking skyline. Enjoy dinner, dancing, take some great Chicago skyline selfies, and network with fellow attendees in a casual and lively setting while aboard! QUEST conference attendee’s admission to this event is included in eligible conference packages. Please indicate on your online registration if you plan on attending. Guests are welcome at an additional cost.

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THURSDAY, MAY 16 - PRESENTATIONS

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

EXHIBITOR EXPO

Thursday is your last chance to visit the Exhibitor EXPO and EXPO Talks. Remember to get your EXPO Passport stamped by all the vendors before the conclusion of Thursday’s EXPO. Don’t miss the EXPO Reception Thursday evening, 5:00 to 6:30, for light snacks, drinks, networking, and great prize drawings!

QUALITY

Quality Engineering: Preparing Your Testing Workforce for the Future

Billy Flannery, Nationwide The change facing the testing workforce is vast and the rate of change is ever increasing. All the while, business expectations for the highest quality has remained unchanged. Addressing the testing workforce need is imperative. Through modernizing testing processes, implementing new tools and up skilling your testing workforce you will gain efficiencies, increase the engagement of your testing talent and meet the needs of your business partners. In Billy Flannery’s session, you will learn how Nationwide is preparing their workforce for the future and building high performing teams in the process. Billy will share the highs and lows that he has experienced as a leader. Billy will focus on providing you three learning outcomes. First, Billy will explain why transformation is important. Second, he will discuss what hasn’t worked and how to avoid it. Third, he will share what has worked and why you should repeat it. This session will also provide direction for you on how to prepare a large workforce for a transformational change and how to build excitement in a changing environment.

PLAN/DESIGN

Getting Past the Initial Estimation to Better Hit the Target

Jeremy Berriault, Pulse To help with a team’s continuous improvement there is a task that needs to be effectively used: Estimating. Most estimating activities tend to be from scratch with a high variance that will get smaller as more information is provided. The problem is the estimate may get written in stone and may not be revisited. Join Jeremy Berriault’s as he shares effective tips and tools to estimate work whether it is pointing tickets in an Agile methodology or going through other methodologies like RUP or Waterfall. While estimating work is not a simple task, Jeremy will help you understand the principles of estimation, so you can stop creating them from scratch. He will also discuss how to use Assumptions, Dependencies and Constraints when communicating the estimate and explain the relationship between reuse and analysis of the estimates versus the actual work done. To that end, Jeremey will discuss how the last component of the estimation process that often gets overlooked is understanding how accurate that estimate was and understanding what variables occurred that impacted it, positively or negatively.

AUTOMATION

Can Codeless Testing Scale?Moshe Milman, Applitools Test automation folklore is full of horror stories of failed attempts to apply record-playback tools to perform UI-based functional testing. In Moshe Milman’s talk, he will take an objective look at record-playback tools and compare them with programming-based automation tools in order to evaluate their applicability to visual test automation. In his session, you will learn how record-playback tools are highly effective as automated visual testing drivers to catch visual bugs pre-production and increase visual UI testing coverage. You will also learn how record-playback tools can be used to implement visual tests for a responsive website using Selenium IDE and other tools without writing a single line of code (other open source and commercial tools that are codeless). Moshe will show how these tools are able to support CI-CD in partnership with automated functional testing teams at scale. During this session you will learn about the latest trends and capabilities in the open source and commercial record/playback tools space and how to use record playback tools as part of your automation strategy. Finding the right balance between code/script based automation and codeless automation is critical.

AI/DL/ML

Turbo-Charge your Testing with Machine Learning and Predictive Analytics

Shamin Ahmed, CA Technologies Machine learning (ML) is rapidly becoming a popular AI technique for driving the evolution of next generation of intelligent digital systems such as self-driving cars. AI and ML have the potential to significantly transform how we do testing and continuous delivery to become more intelligent. Shamin Ahmed will begin the session with a high-level introduction to AL and predictive analytics concepts. From there, Shamin will explain how ML and predictive analytics can be applied to the domain of continuous delivery and provide a demo of how to create predictive models using popular ML tools. He will also show how ML can be used (use cases) in the context of Continuous Delivery and Continuous Testing and provide a specific example of how ML is used to perform defect prediction helping to move the QA function from “defect detection” to “defect prevention”. Take advantage of Shamin’s years of experience implementing intelligent DevOps and QA systems by leveraging the power of advanced analytics and ML. Leave this session with an understanding of what the future of intelligent continuous testing looks like.

SECURITY

Real World Security Testing

Joseph Kerby, Jemurai Testing for security is an increasingly important and visible part of software delivery. The classic formula for security testing isn’t working and security analysis tools can’t reliably find certain basic problems. Join Joe Kerby as he introduces concrete things testing teams can do to contribute to the security of a system and identify opportunities to include more advanced manual testing of scenarios that are often overlooked. Process improvements that range from articulating security acceptance criteria to checklists are discussed. In some cases, test automation can be used to raise the security of delivered software. In all cases, the villain persona and negative testing scenarios are foundational to effective security testing. You will learn manual testing steps for two classes of security vulnerabilities. In addition to specific actionable security testing strategies, one goal of Joe’s presentation will be to provide some high-level context for thinking about security testing and how to integrate it into the software development lifecycle effectively. Take the security of your applications to the next level and be more confident.

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11:15 AM - 12:15 PM

Lunchtime Reminders

Thursday lunch is another opportunity to participate in the Special Interest Roundtables. Join fellow attendees for a discussion on hot topics relevant to the everyday practitioner.

Remember to visit the Exhibitor EXPO to have your EXPO Passport stamped by all the vendors before the conclusion of Thursday’s program. Turn in your completed EXPO Passport to the QAI Registration desk to receive a raffle ticket for QAI’s Grand Prize Drawing during Friday lunch (must be present to win).

QUAL ITY

Driving Enterprise Quality with DataMichael Baldwin, Northern Trust Intuition, judgement and past experience are no longer enough to make decisions in this world of Big Data, advanced data analytics, artificial intelligence, machine and deep learning. Embark on data-based decision making to stay competitive and relevant. We need to continuously cross check & correct our traditional wisdom with the context that facts and data reveals. Join Mike Baldwin as he discusses the key areas of decision making from enterprise software quality perspective. He will suggest strategies for capturing and analyzing data, applying resulting knowledge to make decisions and take actions. Mike will cover advanced analytics and data-based decision making in areas including but not limited to test suite/library optimization, ROI based investment in tools and automation, continuous measurement and improvement of testing efficiencies, defect analysis, quality and speed to market. Mike will provide examples of how advanced data analytics are used and data-based decisions made in his organization in areas including defects, test cases, and test automation.

PLAN/DESIGN

Effective Test Strategies! Are They Meeting Stakeholder Needs?

Clyneice Chaney, Quality Squared We’ve all heard about strategic planning. It’s the preparation for battle plans or achieving goals. People talk about strategies when they want to change something or achieve something. So, when we talk about test planning and test strategies are we talking about the same thing? If we have a plan do we need a strategy? If we have a strategy do we need a test plan? In today’s market with the need for leaner, quicker and effective testing what are options to consider with regards to test strategy and test plan documentation. This session discusses test planning and test strategy development and suggests approaches for today’s testers and test managers tied to stakeholder needs. Key concepts discussed include test strategy and planning definitions and to-do’s, how to use test strategies as part of your testing, and feasible formats for documenting the strategy and plan. In the session the differences between a test strategy and test plan is discussed and how test strategies are aligned to a product and its risk. Learn how to apply these concepts within your organization.

AUTOMATION

Cross-Browser Test Frameworks for Responsive and Progressive Web Apps

Eran Kinsbruner, Perfecto Organizations today are required to test their web application across browsers and mobile devices. Choosing the right framework is a matter of organizational as well as technical fit. With a plethora of test frameworks that span across practices such as behavior-driven development, unit tests, UI, and others, it can be a struggle to the right tool. In this session, Eran Kinsbruner will provide an overview of the market and cover the top ten open source test frameworks, with a comparison table of pros and cons about when and why to use one tool over another. Eran will focus on both testing practices for responsive and progressive web apps and take into account technical automation skills, market trends, framework functionality, usability, and integration concerns. He will describe the pitfalls in testing these apps and the key pillars of RWD and PWA test planning and will recommend tools for the job. You will learn about the current cross-browser testing landscape and future forecasts, putting you in a solid position to pick the best open source test framework for your unique needs.

AI/DL/

ML

Turbocharging the SWQA Toolbox: How Deep Learning Can Make a Difference

Martina Sourada, NVIDIA Mitigating risk in quality is a complex challenge for every test engineer and even more so for those in the hardware ecosystem due to the ever-growing support matrix. Join Martina Sourada as she talks about how Deep Learning models have the potential to ameliorate the issue of scale and risk. Martina will provide some examples of better efficiencies already being put into a hardware test production pipeline, as well as provide an overview of how Deep Learning will help with some of the more complex challenges we all face going forward. A useful test toolbox is not comprised of one tool alone. Automation has long been a push in all software spaces, but for the hardware ecosystem, specific characteristics make it challenging, requiring a higher percentage of manual resources and effort. During her session, you will learn the scope and challenges of automation in graphics hardware, how she has applied Deep Learning to address some of those challenges., and based on the success of her model, how she is looking to adapt more Deep Learning models across her production pipeline.

RISK

Strategic Approach to Risk Analysis and TestingBob Crews, Checkpoint Technologies Face it, the scope and complexities of software testing are increasing significantly as new technologies emerge, applications become more advanced, and users become more astute! The quantity of test conditions and test cases can make the process of testing overwhelming, especially when factoring in aggressive deadlines and a lack of resources. Utilizing a strategic risk-based analysis approach will assist you in prioritizing your overall testing effort. If you can’t validate every scenario, every time then at least ensure you test the functionality most critical to your organization. Regardless of your organizations SDLC, risk analysis is an essential element to successfully address the demands of quality in today’s IT landscape. This interactive session will present information to enable your organization to implement approaches and proven strategies to more successfully apply risk analysis to your test plan. You will leave the session with a variety of proven calculations for risk analysis scoring along with a list of scoring criteria for impact. Perhaps most importantly for many, an Agile process to address risk analysis.

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2:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Building an Automation Framework Using SpecFlow for UI and API Testing

QUALITY

The New CMMI 2.0: Relevancy and Advantages for Quality

Richard Bechtold, Abridge Technology The CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) family of standards has been around since the early 1990s. Now, CMMI 2.0 is finally available and it’s the product of decades of insights gained from around the planet. Join Richard Bechtold for an overview of the CMMI 2.0 structure, framework, and high-level content. Each CMMI Practice Area is discussed from the perspective of gaining maximum benefit from its application and use within your Test and/or Quality Organization. The primary emphasis of Richard’s presentation will be the Practice Areas at Maturity Levels 2 and 3 that are often most closely associated with the quality, effectiveness, efficiency, and reliability of quality and test organizations, groups, and teams. These Practice Areas include: Managing Performance and Measurement, Risk and Opportunity Management, Verification and Validation, Peer Reviews, Estimating, Planning, Monitor and Control, and Process Quality Assurance. Each of these areas is discussed from the perspective of implementing key components with the intent of substantially improving the capability of your testing and quality activities. Also presented is a streamlined strategy and adoption lifecycle for minimizing the time and effort to transition into performing these world-class best practices.

PERFORMANCE

Jump-Start Your Performance Testing PracticeKevin Dunne, Tricentis Application performance has never been more important than it is today. Industries are evolving overnight as digital disruption takes place and every app now requires high performance and scalability. Releases of consumer or internal-facing apps resulting in an increase of even a few seconds in a key page load time can affect user experience and cause major revenue impacts. However, many companies have little to no performance testing in place, meaning that any release may have major performance issues. Join Kevin and learn why load testing is becoming a mission-critical discipline. You will gain insight into how best to determine the focus areas of your performance test and how to ensure your performance tests provide realistic load and actionable results. Since performance testing tools have evolved, teams of all skills can quickly add to their capability performance testing of applications with various architectures.

AUTOMATION

Mary Jo Zervas, Paylocity The journey into test automation can take many paths with a major decision point being what tools are the best fit. Third party automation solutions aren’t necessarily a one size fits all solution. Agile teams may want to adopt Gherkin style acceptance criteria for user stories instead of more traditional test scenarios and test cases. Join Mary Jo Zervas and learn how one company built their own custom keyword-driven automation framework using the open source tool SpecFlow within .net development teams. During this session, Mary Jo will provide an introduction to the SpecFlow tool. You will gain insight to their keyword framework with approximately 200 keywords used to create 1500 automated tests across six applications. She will also discuss how common automation pitfalls like UI latency and data management were handled and the success of a community of practice approach to managing changes to the automation framework. Using this custom SpecFlow framework, seventy manual testers were onboarded and trained to creating automated tests. Whereas previous releases were deployed quarterly, now the teams deploy releases confidently each month.

PLAN/DESIGN

Regression Testing: Ensuring Adequate Coverage and Prioritization

Bindhya Sathyapal, Grainger Software applications undergo continuous changes due to changes in customer requirements and business priorities. This means development teams continuously add and modify code from the centralized codebase. Modifying functionality has implications to other functionalities in the application where the affected code is reused or referenced, directly or indirectly. Regression testing is the type of testing aimed at testing all existing functionalities in the application to ensure these code changes have not negatively affected existing application behavior. Join Bindhya Sathyapal as she provides key insights into challenges and solutions in regression testing with the central focus of testing business critical and highly impactful areas of the application. During her presentation, Bindhya will describe techniques for identifying core regression scenarios based on a variety of key factors and how to prioritize them so high priority test cases can be scheduled to run first. She will discuss when repeatable tests can or should be automated. During her presentation, Bindhya will also provide guidance into the processes and procedures required to ensure the smooth ongoing maintenance and optimization of the regression test suite.

API/SERVICES

Simple Approaches for Microservices TestingChris Colosimo, Parasoft Microservices adoption is on the rise, but so are the challnges with understanding how to test microservices. In some ways, testing a microservices application is no different than testing an application built using any other architecture. Microservices use well-known technologies, such as REST or queues, for which there are well-established testing tools and best practices. The unique challenge with microservices is the sheer number of services that make up an application along with the dependencies between the services. Join Chris as he explains the three different patterns of microservices interactions – orchestration, reactive (choreography) and ‘hybrid”. He will outline some of the challenges that arise when creating automated tests for microservices that use these different patterns. You will learn strategies for creating tests for individual microservices. Lastly, you will learn how to create and deploy test scenarios for microservices with maximum flexibility, thus ensuring the high quality and reliability of microservices.

Click is the QUEST Mobile App photo scavenger hunt game that encourages you to take photos at QUEST. We have created over 50 Click challenges including challenges around QUEST and the Rosemont area, on-board the Spirit of Chicago, and while meeting new friends.

Don't Forget to Click!

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THURSDAY, MAY 16 - WORKSHOPS

3:30 PM - 5:00 PM

The Change Effect: Change the Mind, Change the Behavior

Testing APIs Like A Hero

QUALITY

Yolonda Kennedy and Candace Rountree, Anthem It can be very difficult for testers to transition to Agile after many years using a Waterfall methodology. What impact does this have on the team’s view of quality and how do you address it? Do people truly believe that EVERYONE is responsible for quality? The shift in mindset needed to change the perspective of quality requires careful planning to implement. People’s behavior must change to get them to ACT differently instead of just TALKING differently. Join Yolonda and Candace as they share detailed insights into the transition process. They will describe how they addressed the challenge by ensuring people had an understanding of what a quality mindset is. To help with understanding, they used scenarios from real life work situations to show how a person with a quality mindset would have behaved differently in a specific situation. Yolanda and Candace will highlight the importance of an effective organizational change management plan as key to transitioning to Agile as well as any other change in an organization. The key to doing things differently is getting people to see what needs to change, the benefit of the change, what’s in it for them, and how they will get there. Individuals have to change in order for there to be organizational change.

Learning Objectives:• Tips to help change the way people view quality• Steps needed to effectively implement change• How to help traditional testers in Waterfall transition to Agile

PLAN/DESIGN

Personas and User Stories: Testing from a User’s Perspective

Gerie Owen, Qualitest Group and Peter Varhol, Technology Strategy Research How well do you know the users of the applications you test? Knowing your users is critical to customer-focused testing. Personas open that window into your users’ world. Personas offer an immersion into your users’ characteristics, abilities and expectations of the application. By using personas and user value stories, testers can create a comprehensive, customer-centric test approach for functional, UX, performance, and mobile. Personas are a valuable test technique in virtually every methodology, especially in Agile and DevOps. In this workshop, Gerie Owen and Peter Varhol will demonstrate how to develop personas and user value stories and how to incorporate them into your test process. They will discuss different styles of personas and how each can be used most effectively. Using real-life examples, Peter and Gerie will delve into creating personas and user values stories and deriving test cases from them. Finally, they will provide tips on getting stakeholder acceptance on using personas and user value stories in testing.

Learning Objectives:• How personas affect and support decisions that testers/team need to

make• How to create personas and user value stories• How to incorporate personas and user value stories in your test process

AUTOMATION

Intro to a Keyword Driven Framework

Daniel Schiff, Augeo FI It is hard to find a good keyword framework that is free, easy to setup, use, scale and extend, yet there are huge benefits to using this valuable test tool. Using a keyword framework allows the simplicity of an excel interface for commands and results and the opportunity to let testers that are not programmers do effective automation. In this session, Daniel Schiff will provide a basic keyword driven framework that reads about 10 commands (e.g. navigate, click, enter-text), has about 5 verify commands (e.g. verify text in a given html element), and writes results to an excel file. The framework is written in Java, and executes its tests using Selenium. To use this tool you should be familiar with HTML but no programming is necessary though Java will need to be installed. There is no limit to the tests that can be automated with this framework. Dan will also briefly overview how new commands can be added via programming in java. If you plan to use this framework at your company, you will likely need some dev support.

P ERFORMANCE

Performance Testing: Old Methods vs New Techniques

Deepak Arora and Goldie Shah, IBM Watson Health Imaging Since the inception of software application development, the performance and reliability of applications have been a top priority. The Dev and QA groups have used various old-school methods which are either manual or somewhat semi-automated. These methods involve manual efforts and troubleshooting to diagnose the root cause of performance problems. Although these old methods worked for years in the past, newer techniques are needed for performance testing within DevOps, Agile and Leaner testing approaches. Dev and QA groups must take a shift-left approach to performance testing. This workshop will share knowledge on how QA teams can go parallel in testing with development and find performance issues early in the life cycle by creating performance test plans specifically for APIs. Using JMETER as the choice of tool, Deepak and Goldie will demonstrate the scenarios to include when defining the API performance test plan.

Learning Objectives:• Overcome the issues that have been the classic bottlenecks with old

methods• Gain core knowledge of API performance testing• Learn how to create test plans with emphasis on various API calls (GET,

POST, PUT and DELETE)

API/SERVICES

Tom Arnett and Bob Timm, Bottle Rocket You’re interfacing with an API not built in your house, written using a black-box spec that is not well documented, with a variety of environments on which many different versions are deployed. You are a software engineer, QA, or SDET spending too much time setting up your environment instead of actually getting work done. If you only had a way to deal with these API related challenges your project manager, your QA, your engineers would all call you a hero. Tom and Bob’s workshop will teach you tools, tips, and tricks that have been successful in dealing with these issues. You too, can be the hero that your team needs.

Learning Objectives:• Learn to use the lightweight tool named “Postman” to automate everyday

tasks even monitoring API uptime• Learn how to develop schema’s surrounding your client’s API• Improving Team Workflow by learning how you should be monitoring, and

how you should monitor it.

EXPO Reception & Evaluations

At the conclusion of Thursday’s program, stop by the Exhibitor EXPO for the EXPO Reception, sponsored by all our exhibitors participating in the QUEST 2019 EXPO. Refreshments will be served, entertainment will be provided, and the exhibitors will raffle off their prizes to eligible winners.

Tell us how we did! Remember to fill out your Overall Conference Evaluations, and turn them in to QAI staff members before lunch on Friday to enter the QAI Grand Prize Drawing.

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FRIDAY, MAY 17 - PRESENTATIONS

10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Automate Your Data: Free Your Mind Preparing to Test in Production

L E A D E R S H I P

Blurring the Lines between Testers and Developers

Susan Brockley, Consultant It is widely accepted in the industry that future Testers will need to become more technical, perhaps even to the point of learning basic programming skills. But how do they accomplish that, yet maintain their unique perspective? In this session, participants will learn about an emerging industry role called Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) and how it is changing the way we hire and staff projects. Join Susan Brockley to discuss how you can fill an important niche within high-performing DevOps and Agile teams. Susan Brockley will provide great insights into what is driving companies to seek a blend of testing and development skills rather than purely manual testing skills. She will describe how this blend of skills changes the way companies hire and staff projects. You will leave with an understanding of why it is important for quality and testing professionals to recognize this change in the industry, even if they are not seeing it in your own company. But most importantly, you will be encouraged to assess your own skills to determine if you are ready to step up and become “Testers of the Future”.

PRODUCTION

TESTING

Mush Honda, KMS Technology As teams move to continuous delivery, testers need to change from the traditional approach of testing in pre-production environments only. This is especially true when the team goal is to have minimal manual interactions after the code is checked-in by Dev. The purpose of Mush Honda’s presentation is to discuss how existing test strategies should be revised, re-defined and prioritized by leveraging automation test tools, process automation tools and agile workflows. During the session, Mush will detail what infrastructure and Ops needs should be in place to promote testing in production as well as explaining what code revisions/features should be in place to promote testing in production. Mush will use a case study to illustrate the challenges that you may encounter and how the challenges can be addressed. He will discuss how to isolate test data from the ‘real’ data in production and how testing activities can be isolated to avoid introducing performance issues. Finally, he will make recommendations as to the activities that can be done in production and what testing activities should NOT occur in production.

DATA

Aaron Swerlein, Huntington National Bank Data management is a crucial aspect of any project and is a frequent pain point for QA. Automation can be leveraged to yield multiple benefits when handling test data and databases. Automating redundant testing activities such as test data management can free testers to spend more time on valuable tasks that require their domain knowledge and testing skills. Join Aaron to learn how to reduce your manual effort to create/maintain and remove ‘test’ data. Explore how to cover all data manipulations and scenarios through automated test data. Aaron will also address handling of data for automated tests within your automated deployment process to production and production-like environments. Attendees will learn each level of data automation from data management to the database itself, as well as tools to use for data automation of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) operations.

IoT

Risk-Based Testing Approaches for Hardware and Technologies Integration

Dawid Pacia, Brainly The world of IoT grows by 30% each year and is expected to reach 25 billion devices by 2025. It’s just a matter of time before some of us will have to … get back to the past. Many of today’s testers will soon start their adventure with real hardware devices. This means more and more complicated integration with modern services and technologies like Amazon DRS, Alexa, Behavioral Recognition, vision processing, AI, ML and many more. Join Dawid Pacia as he discusses the main challenges for testers and what a tester should know before she or he enters the IoT testing game. Dawid will explain how to identify the testing risks within IoT and ways to mitigate them. He will specifically describe how the approach to testing changes within the IoT framework and what are the main challenges for future testers. All of these discussions framed in the context of pet cameras, snack launchers and lasers … in other words – IoP (Internet of Pets) world. All dogs and cats are warmly welcomed!

11:15 AM - 12:15 PM

IoT

Hyper-Connected Apps: Testing Peripherals and Mobile Apps Interactions

Andrew Morgan, Infostretch Remember how apps used to be? They connected to the internet and incorporated one device at most. Sure, testers had to factor in performance under different usage conditions, but we had great testing toolsets in place to deal with that. Fast forward to the present. These days sensors enable much more diverse functionality from our connected devices or smartphones and that means mobile app testing is no longer just about testing the app. Smartphones now include many sensors that interface with the ecosystem around them. These software and hardware components can all too easily play havoc with the apps themselves. During his presentation, Andrew will share the complexity of peripherals testing. He will demonstrate sensor testing scenarios including location, camera, TouchID and Bluetooth. Drawing on his years of experience in this testing domain, Andrew will describe current industry best practices, specific challenges and how to overcome them. He will illustrate these unique issues with a case study involving device peripheral automation for one the leading medical device & solution providers.

L E A D E R S H I P

The Life of a Tester from Once Upon a Time to Happily Ever After

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QAMost fairy tales start out with a scary premise and move to a happy ending. Lately, we have heard lots of scary stories about the future of testing. As machine learning and artificial intelligence continue to gain prominence, we see even more concerns about the tester’s career. With the help of a famous animation team, Jennifer will take you through a wild animated journey from what it was like in the early days of software to where we are today. We’ll explore the evolution of the testing profession, as well as what it will become in the future. As this story moves from black and white to full color, you will get a history lesson on where some practices we may take for granted originated, review times when testers and developers were separated and more of adversaries than collaborators, and finish with the present, where quality is everyone’s responsibility. Let Jennifer give you the tools to write your own story and live happily ever after.

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FRIDAY, MAY 17 - PRESENTATIONS

11:15 AM - 12:15 PM

D A T A

Accelerating QA/Testing Securely Using Data Virtualization and Masking

Tim Gorman, Delphix A huge constraint in software testing is data size. Storage is a bottleneck, and while faster SSD/Flash is available, it is often too costly due to the size of many data sets. The old joke about “good, fast, and cheap, pick any two” is true with data as providing full sets of data and code for each tester on each project seems unrealistic. While virtualization solves many of these problems you still have the problem of sharing confidential data cloned from production. The solution here is obfuscation using data masking. Join Tim Gorman as he explains why data virtualization and masking is the two-pronged solution to a problem every tester knows. Tim will share how to clone things securely and quickly and eliminate the biggest constraints to agile testing. In Tim’s session you will learn what data virtualization is and why is it important. You will leave with an understanding of what data masking is and why is it an important new requirement. Finally, learn how data virtualization and data masking accelerate the quality and quantity of testing.

PRODUCTION

TESTING

Production Stability: QA Role in “Strengthening Right”

Shalla Goyal, Northern Trust Most QA organizations think of “shift left” but fail to focus on “strengthening right”. One common thing all test practitioners strive to achieve is mitigating risk for the production consumers through shift left strategies and testing early as possible. The challenge though is how to drive production stability at a time when our technical echo system is becoming increasingly complex creating large gaps between our existing test environments and real production systems. Join Shalla Goyal as she explains the key dimensions of testing in production that are necessary for production stability but ignored. She will explain why 24/7 monitoring/alerting alone is far from enough. She will share the key success factors to effectively conduct automated testing of applications in production like a real user. Shalla will describe how to leverage production incident patterns, establish enterprise process controls, and effectively use the combination of both application and infrastructure automated testing to drive production stability. Finally, she will describe how to institutionalize the patterns of technologies and standard categories of testing for each technology.

LAST DAY REMINDERS!

Friday is the last day for Coaching Sessions. Check the schedule in the QUEST Mobile App (QUEST Information – Coaching page) to see what topics and speakers will be available for the day.

Remember to complete the CONFERNCE EVALUATION survey form and turn it in to a QAI staff member at the registration desk. You will receive a raffle ticket for the QAI’s Grand Prize Drawing during Friday lunch (must be present to win).

412019 SPONSORS, EXHIBITORS AND SUPPORTERS

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Applitools Diamond Sponsor | applitools.com At Applitools, we’re on a mission to help test automation, DevOps, and software engineering teams release mobile and web apps that are visually perfect. We provide the only commercial-grade, visual AI-based test cloud that validates that any app’s user interface (UI) is rendered correctly and appears as intended across all digital platforms. This is the only visual testing solution carried out in a fully automated manner, with our ground-breaking image processing stack that we developed from scratch in-house. We launched in 2015 and currently have 300+ paying customers around the globe, including Fortune-100 companies in software, banking, retail, insurance, and pharmaceuticals. Exhibitor | Sponsoring Wednesday Night-in-Chicago Event

Sauce Labs Platinum Sponsor | saucelabs.com Sauce Labs provides the world’s largest cloud-based platform for the continuous testing of web and mobile applications. Founded by the original creator of Selenium, Sauce Labs helps companies accelerate software development cycles, improve application quality, and deploy with confidence across hundreds of browser / OS platforms, including Windows, Linux, iOS, Android & Mac OS X. Optimized for Continuous integration (CI), Continuous delivery (CD), and DevOps, the Sauce Labs platform is built to handle the most secure data from its customers, who range from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses worldwide. To date, more than 2 billion tests have run on the Sauce Labs cloud. Exhibitor | Sponsoring a Conference Lunch

Utopia Solutions Gold Sponsor | utopiasolutions.com Utopia Solutions is a global quality and testing firm known for its innovative quality solutions built from over twenty years of helping organizations achieve breakthrough software quality and performance. Utopia Solutions offers project-based solutions and managed services, including test automation, performance testing, mobile quality and remote testing. These solutions enable businesses and their IT departments to focus on achieving business outcomes rather than struggle with quality and performance barriers. Exhibitor | Sponsoring Conference Journals

SPR Gold Sponsor | spr.com A trusted partner to businesses for more than 40 years, SPR Consulting builds, integrates, tests and manages technologies that drive enterprise revenue and improve operational efficiency. With its expert onshore testing team, SPR applies automated, manual, and exploratory testing methods to an array of web, mobile, and enterprise applications to increase technology usability, functionality, compatibility, accessibility, security, and performance. Testing services range from setting strategic direction and transforming testing organizations to building reusable test repositories and performing test execution as a trusted testing partner. SPR improves access to information, company-wide collaboration and helps organizations more effectively connect with their customers. Exhibitor | Sponsoring Lanyards

Mobile Labs Silver Sponsor | mobilelabsinc.com Mobile Labs remains the leading supplier of in-house mobile device clouds that connect remote, shared mobile devices to Global 2000 mobile web, gaming, and app engineering teams. Its patented GigaFox™ is offered on-premises or hosted, and solves mobile device sharing and management challenges during development, debugging, manual testing, and automated testing. A pre-installed and pre-configured Appium server provides “instant on” Appium test automation. GigaFox enables scheduling, collaboration, user management, security, mobile DevOps, and continuous automated testing for teams spread across the globe and can connect cloud devices to an industry-leading number of third-party tools. Exhibitor | Sponsoring Conference Bags

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Fusion Systems and Services, Inc. Bronze Sponsor | fusionsystemsinc.com Fusion Systems is a leading provider of Test Automation and Performance Testing solutions. Fusion offers ITAS a one stop shop for test automation of functional, regression and performance testing environments of complex distributed application platforms including mobile. ITAS is cloud and DevOps ready, making continuous testing a no-brainer. Speed to market with at least 5 times faster test automation than any solutions in the market. Today We support fortune 100 companies build their DevOps and Test center of excellence (CoE) ecosystem. Learn more how you can automate your DevOps and Test platform: [email protected]. Exhibitor | Sponsoring a Conference Coffee Break

Parasoft Bronze Sponsor | parasoft.com Parasoft helps organizations perfect today’s highly-connected applications by automating time-consuming testing tasks and providing management with intelligent analytics necessary to focus on what matters. Parasoft’s technologies reduce the time, effort, and cost of delivering secure, reliable, and compliant software, by integrating static and runtime analysis; unit, functional, and API testing; and service virtualization. With developer testing tools, manager reporting/analytics, and executive dashboarding, Parasoft supports software organizations with the innovative tools they need to successfully develop and deploy applications in the embedded, enterprise, and IoT markets, all while enabling today’s most strategic development initiatives — agile, continuous testing, DevOps, and security. Exhibitor | Sponsoring a Conference Coffee Break

Rainforest QA Bronze Sponsor | www.rainforestqa.com Rainforest is changing the way QA is done in an era of continuous delivery. Our on-demand QA solution improves the customer experience by enabling development teams to discover significantly more problems before code hits production. Exhibitor | Sponsoring a Conference Coffee Break

API Fortress Bronze Sponsor | apifortress.com API Fortress is an API testing platform. A versatile platform for developers and QAs that want to achieve full testing automation of their APIs. Create and automate functional tests, virtualize APIs, and perform load tests. Save time with automated test generation, collaborate across teams with a unified platform and versioning, and validate deployments to catch problems before your customers or partners. Exhibitor | Sponsoring a Conference Coffee Break

Total Performance Consulting Bronze Sponsor | totalperform.com Total Performance Consulting, headquartered in Atlanta, GA, is a global performance & quality engineering firm. Our sole focus is ensuring our customer’s applications deliver a world-class user experience. Our solutions include Continuous Performance Validation, Performance Monitoring, Performance Engineering, Quality Engineering, Test Automation, Mobile Testing and QA staffing. Our dedicated focus on quality allows us to meet everything from last minute testing needs to long term test strategy and outsourcing. At TPC we want our customers to focus on building, while we focus on testing. We enable our customers to launch and grow their applications with confidence. Exhibitor | Sponsoring a Conference Coffee Break

Checkpoint Technologies Bronze Sponsor | checkpointech.com Checkpoint Technologies, Inc. is a solutions provider that specializes in Business Technology Optimization. We are experts in all areas of quality assurance and software testing – performance, functional, and security. Checkpoint Technologies provides leading-edge software solutions, training, mentoring, senior consulting, and staff augmentation. Our services include both manual and automated testing with automated testing being an area in which we are known for our expertise. Checkpoint Technologies is an HP Business Partner and Certified Training Partner. We have assisted numerous organizations with their implementation of testing solutions with on-site consulting, staff augmentation, and training. Exhibitor | Sponsoring a Conference Pens

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QAI Global Institute Exhibitor | Conference Host | qaiusa.com Founded in 1980 in Orlando Florida, QAI is a global workforce development and consulting organization addressing the education and ‘Operational Excellence’ needs of information technology and knowledge-intensive organizations. QAI Global Institute, the workforce development division of QAI, focuses on creating education and training products and services. The Institute caters to a wide variety of industries and provides access to a wealth of concepts and skill building reinforced through consulting, training, assessments, benchmarking, certification, conferences, and eLearning. QAI has trained over 140,000 individuals and certified over 50,000 professionals.

Delphix Exhibitor | delphix.com Delphix’s mission is to connect people to data and accelerate innovation. The Delphix Dynamic Data Platform securely delivers virtual test data copies from production to end users in a fraction of the time and space of physical test data. Delphix provides testers with data controls—including the ability to refresh, rewind, bookmark, and branch test data as a self-service—to drive massive increases in productivity and application quality. Fortune 100 companies use the Delphix Dynamic Data Platform to connect, virtualize, secure and manage data in the cloud and in on-premise environments.

Kobiton Exhibitor | kobiton.com Kobiton is mobile device testing for quality-obsessed customers. Our fleet of real devices and flexible deployment options help QA and development teams create the perfect mobile experiences for their end-users. At Kobiton, we understand how important customer experience is to brand perception, and want nothing more than to help companies reduce app abandonment and accelerate delivery while increasing the joy users experience with their product. Whether you need to expand device coverage with access to our public cloud, tame device chaos with our private and local cloud, or simply increase your team’s bandwidth using our automated health check feature, Kobiton has something for every team striving to create a memorable CX.

Perfecto Exhibitor | perfecto.io Perfecto is a cloud-based platform for web, mobile and IoT software testing, empowering enterprises with the tools needed to deliver better digital experiences. Perfecto’s users can automate continuous testing throughout the DevOps cycle, using a test lab comprised of real browsers, smart phones and devices under real end-user conditions. More than 3,000 customers, including the top global enterprises across the banking, retail, telecommunications, hospitality and media industries rely on Perfecto to help meet user expectations, boost brand reputations, and establish loyal customers. For more information about Perfecto, visit www.perfecto.io and join our community.

Qualitest Exhibitor | qualitest.com Qualitest Software Testing and Business Assurance solutions leverage our deep technology, business and industry-specific understanding to deliver solutions that align with our client’s business context. In turn, our clients often comment that our solutions are among the most comprehensive and creative that they have ever experienced while delivering the highest value. Our clients also comment that Qualitest’s solutions have increased their trust in the software they release. This has enabled Qualitest to become their primary software testing and business assurance partner.

Software Certifications (the International Software Certifications Board – ISCB) Exhibitor | softwarecertifications.org The International Software Certifications Board’s (ISCB) origins date back to 1980 when it was founded as part of the Quality Assurance Institute (QAI). QAI was established as a professional association whose charter was to represent the software quality assurance (SQA) professional. The founding directors of the institute recognized the need to insulate the professional certification program from the association and to that end the ISCB was structured as an independent board of overseers to provide guidance and governance of the certification program. The ISCB officially launched the first certification program, the Certified Quality Analyst CQA (later to be renamed the Certified Software Quality Analyst CSQA), in 1985 and the first formal examination based certification was launched in 1990. Today, the ISCB’s professional certification programs cover three domains, Software Quality Assurance, Software Testing, and Software Business Analysis. Approximately 52,000 individuals have been certified on six continents.

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Synopsys Exhibitor | synopsys.com Synopsys technology is at the heart of innovations that are changing the way we live and work. The Internet of Things. Autonomous cars. Wearables. Smart medical devices. Secure financial services. Machine learning and computer vision. These breakthroughs are ushering in the era of Smart, Secure Everything―where devices are getting smarter, everything’s connected, and everything must be secure. Powering this new era of technology are advanced silicon chips, which are made even smarter by the remarkable software that drives them. Synopsys is at the forefront of Smart, Secure Everything with the world’s most advanced tools for silicon chip design, verification, IP integration, and application security testing. Our technology helps customers innovate from silicon to software, so they can deliver Smart, Secure Everything.

Trissential Exhibitor | trissential.com Trissential, an Expleo Company, continues to be a trusted partner, delivering end-to-end quality solutions with first-class expertise and best practices. United globally, we offer Integrated Engineering into our Management Consulting and Quality Assurance services portfolio. We help our clients attain sustainable advantage over competitors and gain world-class performance with a unique combination of our strategic capabilities: Management Consulting, Business Agility, and Continuous Quality. Our global organization now brings a 50-year track record, 15,000 employees, footprint in 25+ countries, and $1.25B revenue generated in 2018. Find out how Trissential is The Shape of Business Improvement at www.trissential.com

Zenergy Technologies Exhibitor | zenergytechnologies.com Zenergy Technologies is a software delivery solutions firm that helps clients develop and maintain better software. Zenergy has in-house experts in multiple software disciplines including Agile, DevOps, QA, test automation and performance. These industry recognized experts are not only in high demand as speakers and keynoters at all major software conferences in the U.S. and internationally, they also oversee all Zenergy’s solution and staffing offerings. From helping clients improve processes at the strategic level to managing Zenergy teams as they deliver Agile, DevOps, QA, and automation solutions, the experts at Zenergy will help you succeed.

Zuci Systems Exhibitor | zucisystems.com Zuci Systems is revolutionizing the way software platforms are engineered with the help of patented AI and deep learning models. Driven by our competency in delivering superior customer experience, business efficiency, and actionable insights we have evolved to developing cutting-edge technology with a nimble and collaborative approach. We aspire to augment digital revolution!

Chicago Quality Assurance Association (CQAA) Exhibitor | Sponsor | cqaa.org The Chicago Quality Assurance Association was established in 1984 and is the second oldest chapter of the QAI Global Institute. CQAA promotes software quality principles and practices within the Chicagoland area by providing a forum for networking and information sharing. CQAA offers monthly speaker programs, lunch & learns, webinars, and training classes a to over 1500 members for continuing education. Professional certification is supported by hosting the CSQA and CSTE certification prep classes in Chicago and facilitating local study groups. Other activities have included one-day vendor showcases and symposiums, special interest groups for information exchange, co-hosting programs with other professional organizations, and job search service.

DePaul Innovation Development Lab Exhibitor | Sponsor | depaulidlab.com The DePaul Innovation Development Laboratory was founded in 2016 by Dr. Olayele Adelakun. Setting the new standard of innovation through collaboration, we partner with organizations —many of which are Fortune 500 companies— to bring their innovative, value generating ideas to life. Highly skilled in the of fields of software engineering, UI/UX, business analysis, data analytics, and research, we deliver proof of concepts, minimum viable products, and prototypes to our client base. Additionally, we host quarterly educational events centered around innovation including trainings, workshops, and our flagship Optimizing Digital Innovation Conference which is held each fall. For more information please visit our website: https://depaulidlab.com/

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IEEE Chicago Section Exhibitor | Sponsor | ieeechicago.org Chicago Section serves electrical engineers and computer related professionals in the Chicago Metropolitan Area. It is an active professional network of over 5000 local technology practitioners, innovators, business leaders, educators and students. It is part of the world’s largest professional association (www.ieee.org) dedicated to advancing technological innovation via publications, conferences, standards, and professional and educational activities.

Atlanta Quality Assurance Association (AQAA) Supporter | aqaa.org The Atlanta Quality Assurance Association (AQAA) was founded in 1984 with the belief that no one company or individual can learn everything that is needed to assure a Quality Environment. AQAA is a not-for-profit organization which is organized to share state-of-the-art Quality Assurance methods, tools and techniques among its members. Our membership is comprised of professionals working primarily in the information systems industry. The AQAA is a Quality Assurance Institute (QAI) Federation Chapter.

Des Moines Area Quality Assurance Association (DAQAA) Supporter | daqaa.org The mission of the Des Moines Area Quality Assurance Association is to be a network of QA professionals sharing best practices, processes, and methods in the QA information technology disciplines. DAQAA will facilitate the exchange of knowledge, new ideas, and techniques for the purpose of educating its members. We hold a meeting on the second Wednesday of each month to discuss relevant topics in QA and testing.

IIBA Chicagoland Chapter Supporter | www.chicago.iiba.org The Chicagoland Chapter of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA®) works to build awareness of the business analyst profession and to promote the ongoing development of individual practitioners. With the changing face of today’s business organizations and IT departments, the Business Analyst (BA) performs a role crucial to the success of the dynamic business cycle of planning, implementing, and managing change within companies of all sizes and in every industry. Our meetings are conducted 9 months of the year on the first Wednesday evening of the month at a variety of sites around the Chicagoland area.

Twin Cities Quality Assurance Association (TCQAA) Supporter | cqaa.org TCQAA is a local Twin Cities non-profit organization dedicated to the proliferation of knowledge of software testing and process. We dedicate ourselves and our resources to the promotion of software testing techniques, tools, processes, and technologies and the advancement of software testing as a profession. Located in the metropolitan area of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, TCQAA has been supporting software organizations and information technology professionals since 1986. TCQAA’s vision is to disseminate and promote quality assurance concepts, principles and practices in information technology across all industries.

St. Louis Quality Assurance Association (STLQAA) Supporter | stlqaa.org The mission of the St Louis Quality Assurance Association (STLQAA) is to provide a place and time to gather with colleagues of software quality and testing in the greater St. Louis area. Our goal is to provide a regular forum to present the latest trends in the industry, to meet and share experiences and knowledge, and to connect with like-minded professionals.

QAI Global Community - QAI Federation Supporter | qaiusa.com/qai-global-community The QAI Global Institute was founded on the premise of having an association of IT professionals who shared knowledge and experiences in order to broaden and strengthen the recognition of the IT practitioner and IT industry. Since then, the Institute has created a worldwide network of IT professionals, developed over the past 25 years, resulting in relationships with world–class industry leaders. The QAI Global Community includes regional Chapters that focus their attention towards providing local professionals with resources to promote their continued pursuit of knowledge and skill building.

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Managing Risk in Agile ProjectsBy Moss Drake and Philip Lew

Introduction

With the ongoing movement towards using Agile development methodologies, depending on how success and failure are defined, the word is still out on whether or not Agile is more successful than other development methods. One thing is known, that heavy risk management methods don’t get along with Agile.

Each software project model is designed with an eye to limiting specific risks within the project. Waterfall, for example, is designed with an emphasis on setting a fixed process, scope and requirements. Agile projects, on the other hand, try to reduce the risk of delivering the wrong thing by stressing value and functionality over completeness of scope.

Still, Agile projects can have many risks, including:- Myopia, focusing on following customer needs rather than big picture- Team-based delivery, failing to synchronize within a system- Homespun solutions, failing to follow corporate “best practices”

Short feedback cycles, collaborative development and an emphasis on working software are supposed to reduce uncertainty by delivering value often. Unfortunately, even agile projects have been known to fail. As Kent Beck says in XP Explained, “The basic problem of software development is risk.” There are many unknowns. The goal of risk management is to expose those unknowns and actively work to reduce them.

To do this, we use a common quadrant based risk assessment paradigm of Knowns & Unknowns. Let’s examine some agile project risks and how to mitigate them.

“As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”Donald Rumsfeld, US Secretary of Defense 2002

In the quote Rumsfeld sounds like a typical consultant breaking the playing field into four quadrants. Let’s examine each quadrant and explore ways to mitigate risks.



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Known Knowns

Let’s start with Known/Knowns; the simplest scenario. The team knows the risks and can practice classic risk management with an agile twist. Typical risk management involves making a list of the risks, prioritizing by severity and working to mitigate them. Determining the priority of the risks involves ranking by likelihood and impact.

Impact = Likelihood (%) * Severity (0 - 3) For an agile risk management process, limit the risk list to a handful of the highest impact risks. Use them to prioritize the backlog or make them explicit during sprint planning.

As mentioned, agile project management has some built-in risk management. Short development cycles keep known issues from spinning out of control. You can think of this built-in risk management as the safety bumpers on a bowling lane -- you know they are there but would rather not bump up against them.

Additionally, plan to make risk management explicit. There are several ways to integrate risk management into your agile development cycles. Writing a team charter that explicitly includes risk management practices helps to raise awareness and visibility. Using rolling release planning will ensure that the project avoids rabbit holes and maintains the minimum features.

Known Unknowns

The next quadrant contains the Known/Unknowns. These are the risks you known you don’t know. Face it, not every team knows everything about software development. In some cases the team knows their limitations and have the ability to go for outside help. Ways to overcome Known/Unknowns could be by training existing staff, hiring new staff, outsourcing the development to experts, or working with a service or partner to provide the new functionality.

One example of this might be security. Security is usually a place where it’s better to an existing library or service over writing your own code. For example, a team that needs to provide secure access to a website might be able to learn enough from StackOverflow on implementing OAuth2. This is both learning and using security as a commodity as provided by Google or another OAuth2 server. Once the unknown has become known, if it’s still a risk it can be added to the prioritized risk list of Known/Knowns.

Unknown Knowns

The Unknown/Knowns sector covers things that the team doesn’t know they need to know, but other people know. An example of this might be customer usage and availability metrics. A team working on a new website might not know what tools are available for tracking site uptime. They might not even know that they need to capture this information or how to integrate it in the site. This is perhaps the scariest quadrant for some teams -- they have to push outside their comfort zones and ask for help.

To overcome Unknown/Knowns -- expose yourself. Only by showing work will you discover what you have overlooked. Methods for doing this are collaboration with other teams, presenting the project with other departments or even sharing in public. If the project allows, consider turning to crowdsourcing the problems or take to twitter to learn what you don’t know. In this area, as you learn from others you can decide whether to add these now-known risks to the risk list.

Unknown Unknowns

Finally, the fourth quadrant lists the Unknown/Unknowns. These are risks that nobody knows. This is where agile shines. Just like a scientist expanding knowledge of the physical world, or an explorer creating a map, agile provides a framework for experimenting and exploring the system. Several ways to experiment are to create prototypes, develop wireframes and try other low-effort, short-cycle activities to test theories and learn the unknowns.

Some questions asked in this area might be: Will customer want our service? How will they use our site? Do we even have customers? How can we integrate our two in-house systems? Methods for experimentation can be spikes, MVPs, proof of concepts or A/B testing. Eric Ries in “The Lean Startup” offers many ways that teams can use experimentation to explore create their products. As the team learns from the experiments they can fill out the map, moving the risks to Known/Unknowns or to Known/Knowns.ConclusionUltimately the goal is to migrate the unknowns into the Known/Known quadrant. By using a variety of strategies teams can help to expose unknown risks inherent in the project and move them into a manageable zone. Once the risks are known, the highest impact risks can be addressed within an agile framework.

About the Authors

Moss DrakeMoss Drake is a developer and project leader at Astra Practice Partners (a subsidiary of Moda Health) in Portland, Oregon. He has been developing software for over 30 years, focusing on solutions in healthcare and insurance. During that time, he’s managed 100’s of projects and reviewed 1000’s of requirements. WIth degrees in both Computer Science and English, Moss brings a unique blend of expertise to the table. With his passion for collaborative management practices, he was an early adopter of agile development methods. Moss has spoken at numerous conferences including PNSQC and Techwell.

Philip LewPhilip Lew is the CEO at XBOSoft, a software QA and software testing services company that works with clients to deliver products to market faster and with higher quality; an ever-increasing challenge as software becomes more complex and platforms increase. As a Corporate Executive, Development Manager, Product Manager and Software Engineer, Philip has managed teams to tackle broken processes, develop solutions to difficult problems, and coached others be leaders, managers and experts. He leverages his academic background in operations research and computer science combined with hands on work experience in programming, predictive modeling and algorithm development to work with clients and colleagues around the world. For his hobbies, he rides a bicycle, and travels the world to quench his thirst for exploration and learning.

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