This document provides an overview of a presentation titled "Team Leadership: Telling Your Testing Stories" given by Bob Galen. The presentation discusses using stories and storytelling techniques to effectively communicate as a test leader. It covers story models from books like "The Story Factor" and "The Leader's Guide to Storytelling". The document outlines techniques like developing 30-second elevator pitches and commercials, connecting stories to goals and values, and establishing psychological safety for feedback. The goal is to help testers tell compelling stories that build trust and motivate others.
Team Leadership: Telling Your Testing StoriesTechWell
It used to be that your work and results spoke for themselves. No longer is that the case. Today you need to be a better collaborator, communicator, and facilitator so that you focus your teams on delivering value. Join Bob Galen to explore the power of the story, one of the most effective communication paradigms. You can tell stories that create powerful collaboration. You can tell stories that communicate product requirements and customer needs. You can tell stories that inspire teams to deliver results. And you can tell stories that explain your value and successes to your customers and stakeholders. Explore basic storytelling techniques, specific techniques for framing stories for software testing activities, and test leadership storytelling that energizes and guides your teams. Take time to practice telling your stories—and become a much better storyteller and leader within your testing efforts.
Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward a fairly efficient and effective adoption. However, these teams often get “stuck” and begin to regress or simply start going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from his experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen examines essential patterns—the thinking models of mature agile teams—so you can model them within your own teams. Along the way, you’ll examine patterns for large-scale emergent architecture, relentless refactoring, quality on all fronts, pervasive product owners, lean work queues, providing total transparency, saying No, and many more. Bob also explores why there is still the need for active and vocal leadership in defending, motivating, and holding agile teams accountable.
Bob Galen - Differentiating Ourselves & Demonstrating Value - EuroSTAR 2010TEST Huddle
EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference 2010 presentation on "Moving Beyond The Status Quo – Differentiating Ourselves and Demonstrating Value" by Bob Galen. See more at: http://conference.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/past-presentations/
Summary
Advanced planning techniques that deliver on promise of empirical evidence based predictability and improve organizational Agility.
Outline
Two things are certain about estimates:
Estimates are always wrong
You will spend more time estimating that you should have otherwise used to do the work instead.
Agile Manifesto Values and Principles do not, not even once, mention “estimates” any where. Yet rapid adoption of estimation techniques labeled as “Agile Estimation” techniques puzzle me. In my experience as practitioner, advisor and coach : I have experienced very limited benefits from estimating and often find that estimates create more harm than good. There are however legitimate business concerns that need active management. Estimates hinder real business agility by servicing temporary comfort through plausible but highly improbable plans.
Following is outline of my talk:
Opening and Introduction
So you think you can estimate: Overview of estimating biases with references to current research in software context.
Anchoring
Impact of irrelevant and misleading information
Temporal distance : The further out in future you estimate the more optimistic your estimate
Relative Size estimation is prone to Directional bias and Assimilation Effect
Sequence reference bias: Biases introduced depending on number sequence used for story pointing
Recollection bias (flawed memory)
Motivational bias
Exposure to biases is unavoidably high and there is no escaping it.
Estimates anchor benefits - Why estimates make me frown?
Applicability of Story point estimates.
Story points are applicable only in fully cross-functional teams that can move a request from Business to Production all by itself. Or in Scaled contexts where teams are fully cross-functional feature teams. In all other cases story points are inapplicable.
In applicability in scaled context with many dependent teams
Introduction to cycle time
How to gather empirical evidence in non-ideal contexts? - Single team
What happens in multi-team environment where teams are cannot be fully cross-functional and have shared dependencies?
I will share principles via case-study where I used cycle time measurements and dependency management board to actively develop empirical cycle time evidence to track a major Game release.
Conclusion
Q&A
Note: This 45 minute talk is fast paced and assumes that participants are sound on their fundamentals.
Best Practices for Effective Website Testing & Optimization (Webinar)Monetate
Watch the webinar: http://monetate.com/webinar/best-practices-for-effective-website-testing-optimization/
Not all website testing tools are created equal. Bryan Eisenberg, bestselling author and recognized authority and pioneer in online marketing, will discuss best practices in website optimization that any website testing solution must support.
Bryan, who recently published his “Website Testing & Optimization Buyer’s Guide for the Enterprise,” will be joined by Carlos Del Rio, Director of Conversion Analysis & Digital Strategy at Unbounce, and Monetate’s Adam Figueira, who will present case studies from the different tools that Bryan reviewed and help explain the difference between self-service and full-service website testing and optimization.
Team Leadership: Telling Your Testing StoriesTechWell
It used to be that your work and results spoke for themselves. No longer is that the case. Today you need to be a better collaborator, communicator, and facilitator so that you focus your teams on delivering value. Join Bob Galen to explore the power of the story, one of the most effective communication paradigms. You can tell stories that create powerful collaboration. You can tell stories that communicate product requirements and customer needs. You can tell stories that inspire teams to deliver results. And you can tell stories that explain your value and successes to your customers and stakeholders. Explore basic storytelling techniques, specific techniques for framing stories for software testing activities, and test leadership storytelling that energizes and guides your teams. Take time to practice telling your stories—and become a much better storyteller and leader within your testing efforts.
Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward a fairly efficient and effective adoption. However, these teams often get “stuck” and begin to regress or simply start going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from his experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen examines essential patterns—the thinking models of mature agile teams—so you can model them within your own teams. Along the way, you’ll examine patterns for large-scale emergent architecture, relentless refactoring, quality on all fronts, pervasive product owners, lean work queues, providing total transparency, saying No, and many more. Bob also explores why there is still the need for active and vocal leadership in defending, motivating, and holding agile teams accountable.
Bob Galen - Differentiating Ourselves & Demonstrating Value - EuroSTAR 2010TEST Huddle
EuroSTAR Software Testing Conference 2010 presentation on "Moving Beyond The Status Quo – Differentiating Ourselves and Demonstrating Value" by Bob Galen. See more at: http://conference.eurostarsoftwaretesting.com/past-presentations/
Summary
Advanced planning techniques that deliver on promise of empirical evidence based predictability and improve organizational Agility.
Outline
Two things are certain about estimates:
Estimates are always wrong
You will spend more time estimating that you should have otherwise used to do the work instead.
Agile Manifesto Values and Principles do not, not even once, mention “estimates” any where. Yet rapid adoption of estimation techniques labeled as “Agile Estimation” techniques puzzle me. In my experience as practitioner, advisor and coach : I have experienced very limited benefits from estimating and often find that estimates create more harm than good. There are however legitimate business concerns that need active management. Estimates hinder real business agility by servicing temporary comfort through plausible but highly improbable plans.
Following is outline of my talk:
Opening and Introduction
So you think you can estimate: Overview of estimating biases with references to current research in software context.
Anchoring
Impact of irrelevant and misleading information
Temporal distance : The further out in future you estimate the more optimistic your estimate
Relative Size estimation is prone to Directional bias and Assimilation Effect
Sequence reference bias: Biases introduced depending on number sequence used for story pointing
Recollection bias (flawed memory)
Motivational bias
Exposure to biases is unavoidably high and there is no escaping it.
Estimates anchor benefits - Why estimates make me frown?
Applicability of Story point estimates.
Story points are applicable only in fully cross-functional teams that can move a request from Business to Production all by itself. Or in Scaled contexts where teams are fully cross-functional feature teams. In all other cases story points are inapplicable.
In applicability in scaled context with many dependent teams
Introduction to cycle time
How to gather empirical evidence in non-ideal contexts? - Single team
What happens in multi-team environment where teams are cannot be fully cross-functional and have shared dependencies?
I will share principles via case-study where I used cycle time measurements and dependency management board to actively develop empirical cycle time evidence to track a major Game release.
Conclusion
Q&A
Note: This 45 minute talk is fast paced and assumes that participants are sound on their fundamentals.
Best Practices for Effective Website Testing & Optimization (Webinar)Monetate
Watch the webinar: http://monetate.com/webinar/best-practices-for-effective-website-testing-optimization/
Not all website testing tools are created equal. Bryan Eisenberg, bestselling author and recognized authority and pioneer in online marketing, will discuss best practices in website optimization that any website testing solution must support.
Bryan, who recently published his “Website Testing & Optimization Buyer’s Guide for the Enterprise,” will be joined by Carlos Del Rio, Director of Conversion Analysis & Digital Strategy at Unbounce, and Monetate’s Adam Figueira, who will present case studies from the different tools that Bryan reviewed and help explain the difference between self-service and full-service website testing and optimization.
Working from Home - Should You Offer It?Talent Point
Working from home is something many people are interested in. But is it a good idea to offer it to your tech teams? And do they even want it? We investigated.
CIO Leadership: What We Can Learn from History to Drive Success in Today's Cl...Jim Vaselopulos
Each year magazines and pundits suggest that the role of the CIO is changing. In a time where we have seen vendor consolidation, the pace of new technologies slow and business growth stagnate - does the CIO role really need to change again? Why does it feel as though IT still has trouble keeping up with demand? What can we learn from history to help us cope with the increasingly technical demands of our employees, customers and marketplaces?
Objectives of this presentation:
* How to stay ahead of your customer
* How to stay relevant to your business
* How to build a forward-thinking, solution-oriented culture in IT
* How to manage costs and still be innovative
* How to mitigate risk and make safe technology bets
* How to be the victor and not the victim
The Product Backlog drives the work of Scrum teams, but keeping the backlog fresh and useful is often a continuing challenge. Is your product backlog healthy, and what are some ways to keep it that way that you can use right away?
Philly ETE - Are Your Developers Bull$h!tt!ng You? And why that's the wrong q...Bonnie Aumann
Bonnie Aumann is an agile project manager and customer advocate for Algorithmics. Her ETE 2010 talk is entitled "Are your developers BS'ing you?" In this talk, she tries to cut through the potential blame game and IT culture issues by practicing rapid feedback and response, and Agile techniques.
Test Automation in Agile: A Successful ImplementationTechWell
Many teams feel that they are forced to make an either/or decision when it comes to investing time to automate tests versus executing them manually. Sometimes a “silver bullet” tool is purchased, and testers are forced to use it when there may be a better option; other times unskilled team members are designated the automation engineers; and often there is a lack of good guidance on what to automate. These pitfalls cause product owners to de-prioritize those tasks when there’s a better way. Melissa Tondi shares how test teams should evaluate automated tools, both open source and commercial; areas to be aware of when traditional manual testers transition to automation engineers; and recommended priorities for automating tests. By streamlining automation tasks in your project and incorporating these recommendations, you’ll find that your automation intersection becomes a clearly marked thruway to a successfully released product.
Be a Hiring Machine: A Strategic Interview GuideGravityPeople
About GravityPeople
GravityPeople is a leading recruitment outsourcer providing direct-hire and hourly recruiting services. Established in 1998, GravityPeople has been serving the San Francisco Bay Area Technology community for over decade. Now with a national focus, GravityPeople provides strategic technical recruiting services to clients across North America.
Just completed your college? looking for a job . just go to http://letsgetplaced.com and we help you get the perfect job.
at Let's get placed we train you for the interviews, group discussions, tests and anything you might need to get employed.
Seven Deadly Habits of Dysfunctional Software ManagersTechWell
As if releasing a quality software project on time were not difficult enough, poor management of planning, people, and process issues can be deadly to a project. Presenting a series of anti-pattern case studies, Ken Whitaker describes the most common deadly habits—and ways to avoid them. These seven killer habits are mishandling employee incentives; making key decisions by consensus; ignoring proven processes; delegating absolute control to a project manager; taking too long to negotiate a project’s scope; releasing an “almost tested” product to market; and hiring someone who is not quite qualified—but liked by everyone. Whether you are an experienced manager struggling with some of these issues or a new software manager, take away invaluable tips and techniques for correcting these habits—or better yet, for avoiding them altogether. As a bonus, every attendee will receive a copy of Ken’s full-color 7 Deadly Habits comic.
The Challenges of BIG Testing: Automation, Virtualization, Outsourcing, and MoreTechWell
Large-scale testing projects severely stress “normal” testing practices. This can result in a number of less than optimal results. A number of innovative ideas and concepts have emerged to support industrial-strength testing of large and complex projects—some successful and others not so successful. Hans Buwalda shares his experiences and the strategies he's developed over the years for large testing on large projects. He describes the possibilities and pitfalls of outsourcing test automation. Learn how to design tests specifically for automation, and how to successfully incorporate keyword testing. The automation discussion will include virtualization and cloud options, how to deal with numerous versions and configurations common to large projects, and how to handle the complexity added by mobile devices. Hans’ information is based on his nineteen years of worldwide experience with testing and test automation involving large projects with test cases executing continuously for many weeks on multiple machines.
Are you continually testing software the same old way? Do you need fresh ideas? Are your hum-drum tests not finding enough defects? Are your tests too slow for today’s fast-paced lifecycles? Then this workshop will help you spice things up, improve your testing, and get things done. Rob Sabourin outlines more than 150 different ways to test your software to quickly and efficiently expose relevant problems. Each is illustrated with custom artwork and explained with real world examples. Testing is examined from several perspectives—agile and otherwise. What objectives should our testing focus on? How can we design powerful tests? When does it make sense to explore different risks? Can tests be reused, repurposed, or recycled? How does automation fit in? When does checking make sense? Which static techniques are available? What about non-functional testing? “Test evangelist” Rob provides a lively, entertaining, and informative view of software testing.
Security Testing for Testing ProfessionalsTechWell
Today’s software applications are often security-critical, making security testing an essential part of a software quality program. Unfortunately, most testers have not been taught how to effectively test the security of the software applications they validate. Join Jeff Payne as he shares what you need to know to integrate effective security testing into your everyday software testing activities. Learn how software vulnerabilities are introduced into code and exploited by hackers. Discover how to define and validate security requirements. Explore effective test techniques for assuring that common security features are tested. Learn about the most common security vulnerabilities and how to identify key security risks within applications and use testing to mitigate them. Understand how to security test applications—both web- and GUI-based—during the software development process. Review examples of how common security testing tools work and assist the security testing process. Take home valuable tools and techniques for effectively testing the security of your applications going forward.
On traditional projects, testers usually join the project after coding has started—or even later when coding is almost finished. Testers have no role in advising the project team early regarding quality issues but focus only on finding defects. They become accustomed to this style of working and adjust their mental processes accordingly. On agile projects, where testers must collaborate closely with customers and programmers throughout the development lifecycle, their focus changes from finding defects to preventing them. Janet Gregory shares ways to change the tester’s mindset from How can I break the software? to How can I help deliver excellent software?—a critical mental shift on agile projects. Another aspect of the mindset change is learning how to test early and incrementally. Janet uses examples to help you understand how effective this mindset change is—and how you can apply it on your agile projects.
Hybrid Security Analysis: Bridging the Gap between Inside-Out and Outside-InTechWell
With the rising adoption of the cloud and the mobile revolution, software security is more important and complex than ever. The efforts of developers and testers are frequently disconnected, wasting time and reducing effectiveness. Arthur Hicken describes how hybrid security analysis bridges the gap between static analysis and penetration testing by detecting security vulnerabilities with unprecedented accuracy—and few false positives. Testers receive an instant assessment of where security attacks actually penetrated the application. Unlike traditional penetration testing, this pinpoints where attacks really succeeded—not just areas that may be vulnerable to attack. Hybrid analysis involves running penetration attack scenarios against existing functional test scenarios, monitoring the back-end to determine whether security is actually compromised, and correlating source code with the failed tests so you can trace each error to a particular requirement. Learn the drawbacks of static analysis and penetration testing—and how to turn these drawbacks into strengths.
When agile development first gained popularity, agile meant collocated teams, including testers, programmers, analysts, and customers who were expected to perform many functions. As agile methods have spread and expanded, many organizations with globally-distributed teams are facing challenges with their agile deployment. Having worked with many such teams, Janet Gregory has observed ways that testers in agile teams can be very productive while delivering a high-quality software product and working well with the rest of the team. In this interactive session, Janet shares her experiences and offers opportunities for all participants to discuss their specific issues and potential solutions. Whether your distributed team is scattered across time zones, has individuals working remotely from home, or is part of an offshore outsourced project, you’ll take away methods and tools to help develop open communication, deal with cultural differences, and share data and information across the miles.
Reports of the Death of Testing Have Been Greatly ExaggeratedTechWell
Have you heard? It’s all over the social media. We are the “last generation of testers.” Testing is dead. No more classical testing—too much inflexible process. Context driven? That is a code phrase for do whatever. Agility? Developers do testing, and testers become developers. DevOps? Development and operations join forces—and test is not in the picture. And, companies don’t test anymore—they outsource. Ruud Teunissen believes we must save the indispensable craft of testing. Non-functional tests require special skills; new paradigms like cloud and mobile must be explored and tested; Enterprise-to-enterprise integration tests become more vital as systems grow larger and more complex. And who’s going to do that testing? Testing skills are needed to work effectively and efficiently in these new contexts. Learn to save the testing skills within your organization and do what you’ve always done best—save the day by preventing defects from going live.
Cutting-edge Performance Testing on eCommerce WebsitesTechWell
Having problems with your website’s performance? Does it take too much time and effort to determine the cause of a particular page’s poor performance? Would you like to find the root cause of client-side issues in an automated way? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this session is for you. At GSI Commerce, an eBay company, Ron Woody manages a large team of performance engineers working on nearly nearly 100 eCommerce websites. Ron and his team have developed cutting-edge approaches for automating client- and server-side performance testing. Learn the specific approaches Ron’s team uses today for pre-release performance tests, production performance management, and website optimization. Find out the ways they’ve automated cross-browser performance testing—and analysis—to increase productivity and efficiency. Covering these and additional topics Ron shares a toolkit of performance testing ideas and approaches your team can use to ensure optimal application performance and a better user experience.
Working from Home - Should You Offer It?Talent Point
Working from home is something many people are interested in. But is it a good idea to offer it to your tech teams? And do they even want it? We investigated.
CIO Leadership: What We Can Learn from History to Drive Success in Today's Cl...Jim Vaselopulos
Each year magazines and pundits suggest that the role of the CIO is changing. In a time where we have seen vendor consolidation, the pace of new technologies slow and business growth stagnate - does the CIO role really need to change again? Why does it feel as though IT still has trouble keeping up with demand? What can we learn from history to help us cope with the increasingly technical demands of our employees, customers and marketplaces?
Objectives of this presentation:
* How to stay ahead of your customer
* How to stay relevant to your business
* How to build a forward-thinking, solution-oriented culture in IT
* How to manage costs and still be innovative
* How to mitigate risk and make safe technology bets
* How to be the victor and not the victim
The Product Backlog drives the work of Scrum teams, but keeping the backlog fresh and useful is often a continuing challenge. Is your product backlog healthy, and what are some ways to keep it that way that you can use right away?
Philly ETE - Are Your Developers Bull$h!tt!ng You? And why that's the wrong q...Bonnie Aumann
Bonnie Aumann is an agile project manager and customer advocate for Algorithmics. Her ETE 2010 talk is entitled "Are your developers BS'ing you?" In this talk, she tries to cut through the potential blame game and IT culture issues by practicing rapid feedback and response, and Agile techniques.
Test Automation in Agile: A Successful ImplementationTechWell
Many teams feel that they are forced to make an either/or decision when it comes to investing time to automate tests versus executing them manually. Sometimes a “silver bullet” tool is purchased, and testers are forced to use it when there may be a better option; other times unskilled team members are designated the automation engineers; and often there is a lack of good guidance on what to automate. These pitfalls cause product owners to de-prioritize those tasks when there’s a better way. Melissa Tondi shares how test teams should evaluate automated tools, both open source and commercial; areas to be aware of when traditional manual testers transition to automation engineers; and recommended priorities for automating tests. By streamlining automation tasks in your project and incorporating these recommendations, you’ll find that your automation intersection becomes a clearly marked thruway to a successfully released product.
Be a Hiring Machine: A Strategic Interview GuideGravityPeople
About GravityPeople
GravityPeople is a leading recruitment outsourcer providing direct-hire and hourly recruiting services. Established in 1998, GravityPeople has been serving the San Francisco Bay Area Technology community for over decade. Now with a national focus, GravityPeople provides strategic technical recruiting services to clients across North America.
Just completed your college? looking for a job . just go to http://letsgetplaced.com and we help you get the perfect job.
at Let's get placed we train you for the interviews, group discussions, tests and anything you might need to get employed.
Seven Deadly Habits of Dysfunctional Software ManagersTechWell
As if releasing a quality software project on time were not difficult enough, poor management of planning, people, and process issues can be deadly to a project. Presenting a series of anti-pattern case studies, Ken Whitaker describes the most common deadly habits—and ways to avoid them. These seven killer habits are mishandling employee incentives; making key decisions by consensus; ignoring proven processes; delegating absolute control to a project manager; taking too long to negotiate a project’s scope; releasing an “almost tested” product to market; and hiring someone who is not quite qualified—but liked by everyone. Whether you are an experienced manager struggling with some of these issues or a new software manager, take away invaluable tips and techniques for correcting these habits—or better yet, for avoiding them altogether. As a bonus, every attendee will receive a copy of Ken’s full-color 7 Deadly Habits comic.
The Challenges of BIG Testing: Automation, Virtualization, Outsourcing, and MoreTechWell
Large-scale testing projects severely stress “normal” testing practices. This can result in a number of less than optimal results. A number of innovative ideas and concepts have emerged to support industrial-strength testing of large and complex projects—some successful and others not so successful. Hans Buwalda shares his experiences and the strategies he's developed over the years for large testing on large projects. He describes the possibilities and pitfalls of outsourcing test automation. Learn how to design tests specifically for automation, and how to successfully incorporate keyword testing. The automation discussion will include virtualization and cloud options, how to deal with numerous versions and configurations common to large projects, and how to handle the complexity added by mobile devices. Hans’ information is based on his nineteen years of worldwide experience with testing and test automation involving large projects with test cases executing continuously for many weeks on multiple machines.
Are you continually testing software the same old way? Do you need fresh ideas? Are your hum-drum tests not finding enough defects? Are your tests too slow for today’s fast-paced lifecycles? Then this workshop will help you spice things up, improve your testing, and get things done. Rob Sabourin outlines more than 150 different ways to test your software to quickly and efficiently expose relevant problems. Each is illustrated with custom artwork and explained with real world examples. Testing is examined from several perspectives—agile and otherwise. What objectives should our testing focus on? How can we design powerful tests? When does it make sense to explore different risks? Can tests be reused, repurposed, or recycled? How does automation fit in? When does checking make sense? Which static techniques are available? What about non-functional testing? “Test evangelist” Rob provides a lively, entertaining, and informative view of software testing.
Security Testing for Testing ProfessionalsTechWell
Today’s software applications are often security-critical, making security testing an essential part of a software quality program. Unfortunately, most testers have not been taught how to effectively test the security of the software applications they validate. Join Jeff Payne as he shares what you need to know to integrate effective security testing into your everyday software testing activities. Learn how software vulnerabilities are introduced into code and exploited by hackers. Discover how to define and validate security requirements. Explore effective test techniques for assuring that common security features are tested. Learn about the most common security vulnerabilities and how to identify key security risks within applications and use testing to mitigate them. Understand how to security test applications—both web- and GUI-based—during the software development process. Review examples of how common security testing tools work and assist the security testing process. Take home valuable tools and techniques for effectively testing the security of your applications going forward.
On traditional projects, testers usually join the project after coding has started—or even later when coding is almost finished. Testers have no role in advising the project team early regarding quality issues but focus only on finding defects. They become accustomed to this style of working and adjust their mental processes accordingly. On agile projects, where testers must collaborate closely with customers and programmers throughout the development lifecycle, their focus changes from finding defects to preventing them. Janet Gregory shares ways to change the tester’s mindset from How can I break the software? to How can I help deliver excellent software?—a critical mental shift on agile projects. Another aspect of the mindset change is learning how to test early and incrementally. Janet uses examples to help you understand how effective this mindset change is—and how you can apply it on your agile projects.
Hybrid Security Analysis: Bridging the Gap between Inside-Out and Outside-InTechWell
With the rising adoption of the cloud and the mobile revolution, software security is more important and complex than ever. The efforts of developers and testers are frequently disconnected, wasting time and reducing effectiveness. Arthur Hicken describes how hybrid security analysis bridges the gap between static analysis and penetration testing by detecting security vulnerabilities with unprecedented accuracy—and few false positives. Testers receive an instant assessment of where security attacks actually penetrated the application. Unlike traditional penetration testing, this pinpoints where attacks really succeeded—not just areas that may be vulnerable to attack. Hybrid analysis involves running penetration attack scenarios against existing functional test scenarios, monitoring the back-end to determine whether security is actually compromised, and correlating source code with the failed tests so you can trace each error to a particular requirement. Learn the drawbacks of static analysis and penetration testing—and how to turn these drawbacks into strengths.
When agile development first gained popularity, agile meant collocated teams, including testers, programmers, analysts, and customers who were expected to perform many functions. As agile methods have spread and expanded, many organizations with globally-distributed teams are facing challenges with their agile deployment. Having worked with many such teams, Janet Gregory has observed ways that testers in agile teams can be very productive while delivering a high-quality software product and working well with the rest of the team. In this interactive session, Janet shares her experiences and offers opportunities for all participants to discuss their specific issues and potential solutions. Whether your distributed team is scattered across time zones, has individuals working remotely from home, or is part of an offshore outsourced project, you’ll take away methods and tools to help develop open communication, deal with cultural differences, and share data and information across the miles.
Reports of the Death of Testing Have Been Greatly ExaggeratedTechWell
Have you heard? It’s all over the social media. We are the “last generation of testers.” Testing is dead. No more classical testing—too much inflexible process. Context driven? That is a code phrase for do whatever. Agility? Developers do testing, and testers become developers. DevOps? Development and operations join forces—and test is not in the picture. And, companies don’t test anymore—they outsource. Ruud Teunissen believes we must save the indispensable craft of testing. Non-functional tests require special skills; new paradigms like cloud and mobile must be explored and tested; Enterprise-to-enterprise integration tests become more vital as systems grow larger and more complex. And who’s going to do that testing? Testing skills are needed to work effectively and efficiently in these new contexts. Learn to save the testing skills within your organization and do what you’ve always done best—save the day by preventing defects from going live.
Cutting-edge Performance Testing on eCommerce WebsitesTechWell
Having problems with your website’s performance? Does it take too much time and effort to determine the cause of a particular page’s poor performance? Would you like to find the root cause of client-side issues in an automated way? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this session is for you. At GSI Commerce, an eBay company, Ron Woody manages a large team of performance engineers working on nearly nearly 100 eCommerce websites. Ron and his team have developed cutting-edge approaches for automating client- and server-side performance testing. Learn the specific approaches Ron’s team uses today for pre-release performance tests, production performance management, and website optimization. Find out the ways they’ve automated cross-browser performance testing—and analysis—to increase productivity and efficiency. Covering these and additional topics Ron shares a toolkit of performance testing ideas and approaches your team can use to ensure optimal application performance and a better user experience.
Building Hyperproductive Agile Teams: Leveraging What Science KnowsTechWell
The key impediments that prevent many organizations from ever realizing the promise of agile and lean aren’t rooted in processes or tools. The impediments stem from the organization’s leaders. Sharing an interdisciplinary overview of the most compelling science and research in the aspects of team performance, Michael DePaoli shows that it is largely ignored. Michael presents a holistic model for building lean/agile teams that combines what science knows enables teams to achieve that elusive state of “flow.” He describes the key external forces—safety for learning, team formation, team tasking, the motivational system, and leadership style—that affect an agile team’s ability to achieve flow. Learn the basics of this model and how Michael is applying it with clients today. Use this model to build your teams and drive agile at scale while evolving the broader organization to harness the promise of agile and lean product development.
Have you ever delivered software to testing only to receive unexpected feedback regarding quality issues of interoperability, reliability, usability, or testability? Or worse, delivered to customers a product that fully met its specifications but generated complaints and calls for urgent fixes? Substantial time and effort can be saved by understanding—before coding begins—the important quality factors a software system must have. Join Dawn Haynes to explore quick and effective ideas for defining quality factors for your software. Dawn demonstrates how to create a checklist—using general heuristics, standards, and your own research—to employ as a source of specific quality requirements for your projects. By adding these to your requirements gathering process, you will better develop detailed designs and code. Going beyond the basics, Dawn explains how to reduce reliability and/or security vulnerabilities, increase efficiency, and implement quality factors like testability and maintainability. Steer your code to acceptance rather than to rework.
Creative Techniques for Discovering Test IdeasTechWell
Feel your testing’s stuck in a rut? Looking for new ways to discover test ideas? Wonder if your testers have constructive methods to discover different approaches for testing? In this interactive session, Karen Johnson explains how to use heuristics to find new ideas. After a brief discussion, Karen has you apply and practice with a variety of heuristics. Need to step back and consider some of your testing challenges from a fresh perspective? This workshop explores the use of the CIA’s tool—the Phoenix Checklist—a set of intentionally designed context-free questions to help you look from a fresh perspective at a problem or challenge. Karen reviews the use of the fun and useful tool of brainstorming and variations on brainstorming that you can use with your team. Come join a session designed to explore creative ways to strengthen your approach to testing.
Building a Team Backlog: The Power of RetrospectivesTechWell
“Inspect and adapt” is one of the basic tenets of continuous improvement, and agility in general. Holding retrospectives is one of the core processes that allows teams to look back and reflect on their progress. However, over time, teams may focus only on the product work and lose interest in their own improvement as a team. Kanchan Khera and Bhuwan Lodha believe that one approach to solving this problem is to bring the rigor, structure, and discipline we use for maintaining healthy product backlogs to team improvement by creating a “team backlog”—items the team needs to do to improve itself. The team backlog introduces three keys to successful and sustainable team improvement—a structured framework, visibility of its impact, and creative ways for building the backlog. Just as a healthy backlog is the basis for a great product, so a healthy team backlog helps create great teams.
The nature of exploration, coupled with the ability of testers to rapidly apply their skills and experience, make exploratory testing a widely used test approach—especially when time is short. Unfortunately, exploratory testing often is dismissed by project managers who assume that it is not reproducible, measurable, or accountable. If you have these concerns, you may find a solution in a technique called session-based test management (SBTM), developed by Jon Bach and his brother James to specifically address these issues. In SBTM, testers are assigned areas of a product to explore, and testing is time boxed in “sessions” that have mission statements called “charters” to create a meaningful and countable unit of work. Jon discusses—and you practice—the skills of exploration using the SBTM approach. He demonstrates a freely available, open source tool to help manage your exploration and prepares you to implement SBTM in your test organization.
Seven Keys to Navigating Your Agile Testing TransitionTechWell
So you’ve “gone agile” and have been relatively successful for a year or so. But how do you know how well you’re really doing? And how do you continuously improve your practices? And when things get rocky, how do you handle the challenges without reverting to old habits? You realize that the path to high-performance agile testing isn’t easy or quick. It also helps to have a guide. So consider this workshop your guide to ongoing, improved, and sustained high-performance. Join seasoned agile testing coach Bob Galen as he share lessons from his most successful agile testing transitions. You’ll explore actual team case studies for building team skills, embracing agile requirements, fostering customer interaction, building agile automation, driving business value, and testing at-scale stories of agile testing excellence. You’ll examine the mistakes, adjustments, and the successes—so you’ll learn how to react to real-world contexts. Leave with a better view of your team’s strengths, weaknesses, and where you need to focus to improve.
Does your approach to Performance Management ‘Sing’ or ‘Sting’?Pivot Software
Does your approach to Performance Management ‘Sing’ or ‘Sting’?
How to focus on practices that create meritocracies,
and avoid being seduced by the technology.
http://www.pivotsoftware.com/ebook2/
Ultimate guide to interviewing for studentsInterviewBull
Tips and advice from graduate recruiters on how to sell yourself and what not to do at interview!
This is the ultimate guide to interviewing for students and recent graduates.
107 - It's not easy starting new: career transitioning to product, starting ...ProductCamp Boston
ProductCamp Boston is the world's largest and most exciting
crowd-sourced one-day event for product people. It's
organized by and for product managers, product marketers and
entrepreneurs, so attendees get the most out of the day.
Attendees learn about and discuss topics in product
management and product marketing, product discovery,
product development & design, go-to-market, product strategy
and lifecycle management, and product management 101,
startups, and career development.
www.ProductCampBoston.org
Balancing the Crusty and Old with the Shiny and NewTechWell
In his journeys, Bob Galen has discovered that testing takes on many forms. Some organizations have no automated tests and struggle to run massive manual regression tests within very short iterative releases. Other organizations are going “all in”―writing thousands of acceptance tests in Gherkin. The resulting imbalance in their testing approaches undermines an organization’s efficiency, effectiveness, and delivery nimbleness. Bob shares ideas to bring balance to testing. He explores the choices: manual vs. automated testing, designed and scripted test cases vs. exploratory tests, and thoroughly planned test projects vs. highly iterative reactive ones. Bob describes how to balance traditional test leadership with an iterative and whole team view to add value. And finally, he explores the balance of the gatekeeper vs. leading the collaboration with stakeholders to find the right requirements that solve their problems. Take away a strategic approach to structure your testing and a renewed understanding of how testing fits into a healthy and balanced culture.
You’ve “gone agile” and have been relatively successful. So, how do you know how well your team is really doing? And how do you continuously improve your practices? When things get rocky, how do you handle the challenges without reverting to old habits? You realize that the path to high-performance agile testing isn’t easy or quick. It also helps to have a guide. So consider this workshop your guide to ongoing, improved, and sustained high-performance. Join Bob Galen and Mary Thorn as they share lessons from their most successful agile testing transitions. Explore actual team case studies for building team skills, embracing agile requirements, fostering customer interaction, building agile automation, driving business value, and testing at-scale—all building agile testing excellence. Examine the mistakes, adjustments, and the successes, and learn how to react to real-world contexts. Leave with a better view of your team’s strengths, weaknesses, and where you need to focus to improve.
We all know the feeling. The creeping sense of doom that our project is falling apart. The growing horror as we watch it unravel despite all our best laid plans. The moment of terror when we realize it’s well and truly dead.
All of us—whether we make launch plans or business plans, product plans or go-to-market-plans—have at least one skeleton in our closet. And it was most likely put there by one of these plan killers: poor alignment with corporate strategy, bad metrics or lack of understanding of the market.
Fortunately, this issue of Pragmatic Marketer provides practical tools and tips for addressing all three.
First, Bill Thomson walks us through creating a strategic product plan. Robert Boyd and our own Jon Gatrell talk about key metrics—how to measure everything from overall organizational strength to individual sprints. And finally, weaving it all together, is a real-life look at how Hubspot ensures its product launch plans succeed.
There are bone-yards full of good ideas that collapse during planning and execution. In this issue we help ensure your project isn’t one of them.
Happy reading,
Rebecca Kalogeris, Editorial Director
Seven Keys to Navigating Your Agile Testing TransitionTechWell
So you’ve “gone agile” and have been relatively successful for a year or so. But how do you know how well you’re really doing? And how do you continuously improve your practices? When things get rocky, how do you handle the challenges without reverting to old habits? You realize that the path to high-performance agile testing isn’t easy or quick. It also helps to have a guide. So consider this workshop your guide to ongoing, improved, and sustained high-performance. Join Bob Galen and Mary Thorn as they share lessons from their most successful agile testing transitions. Explore actual team case studies for building team skills, embracing agile requirements, fostering customer interaction, building agile automation, driving business value, and testing at-scale—all building agile testing excellence. Examine the mistakes, adjustments, and the successes, and learn how to react to real-world contexts. Leave with a better view of your team’s strengths, weaknesses, and where you need to focus to improve.
Do you ever feel you have lost confidence in your own abilities? Why does this happen? Isabel Evans spends a lot of time painting. Someone once commented, “Why are you doing this, when you are not very good at it?” And gradually she stopped drawing and painting, after being intimidated by a conventional vision of what good art should look like. At the same time, she experienced a parallel loss of confidence in her professional abilities. Attempting creative pursuits like drawing and painting is essential to cognitive, emotional, creative abilities and she began to understand the correlation between her creative activities and her confidence. Making errors, being wrong, failing – that is a generous gift we receive when we practice outside our skill level. By staying in a comfort zone and repeating successes, we stagnate. As Isabel started to create again she thought “I don’t feel good at it, I do feel good doing it” The difference was that she was learning, having ideas and the act of re-engaging with failure, together with the comradeship of friends and colleagues, including at Women Who Test, Isabel has regained her confidence in her professional abilities, and been able to reboot her career and joy. Join Isabel to share a journey from self-perceived failure, to recovery and renewed learning.
Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization TechWell
The DevOps movement is here. Companies across many industries are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, IT organizations have been staffed with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding to stay relevant and add greater value to the business. DevOps really starts with testing. Join Adam Auerbach as he explains what DevOps is and how it relates to testing. He describes how testing must change from top to bottom and how to access your own environment to identify improvement opportunities. Adam dives into practices like service virtualization, test data management, and continuous testing so you can understand where you are now and identify steps needed to instill a DevOps testing culture in your team and organization.
Test Design for Fully Automated Build ArchitectureTechWell
Imagine this … As soon as any developed functionality is submitted into the code repository, it is automatically subjected to the appropriate battery of tests and then released straight into production. Setting up the pipeline capable of doing just that is becoming more and more common and something you need to know about. But most organizations hit the same stumbling block—just what IS the appropriate battery of tests? Automated build architectures don't always lend themselves well to the traditional stages of testing. In this hands-on tutorial, Melissa Benua introduces you to key test design principles—applicable to organizations both large and small—that allow you to take full advantage of the pipeline's capabilities without introducing unnecessary bottlenecks. Learn how to make highly reliable tests that run fast and preserve just enough information to let testers and developers determine exactly what went wrong and how to reproduce the error locally. Explore ways to reduce overlap while still maintaining adequate test coverage. Take back ideas about which test areas could benefit from being combined into a single suite and which areas could benefit most from being broken out altogether.
System-Level Test Automation: Ensuring a Good StartTechWell
Many organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems later on. As a leader, how can you ensure that your new automation efforts will get off to a good start? What can you do to ensure that your automation work provides continuing value? This tutorial covers both “theory” and “practice”. Dot Graham explains the critical issues for getting a good start, and Chris Loder describes his experiences in getting good automation started at a number of companies. The tutorial covers the most important management issues you must address for test automation success, particularly when you are new to automation, and how to choose the best approaches for your organization—no matter which automation tools you use. Focusing on system level testing, Dot and Chris explain how automation affects staffing, who should be responsible for which automation tasks, how managers can best support automation efforts to promote success, what you can realistically expect in benefits and how to report them. They explain—for non-techies—the key technical issues that can make or break your automation effort. Come away with your own clarified automation objectives, and a draft test automation strategy to use to plan your own system-level test automation.
Build Your Mobile App Quality and Test StrategyTechWell
Let’s build a mobile app quality and testing strategy together. Whether you have a web, hybrid, or native app, building a quality and testing strategy means (1) knowing what data and tools you have available to make agile decisions, (2) understanding your customers and your competitors, and (3) testing your app under real-world conditions. Jason Arbon guides you through the latest techniques, data, and tools to ensure the awesomeness of your mobile app quality and testing strategy. Leave this interactive session with a strategy for your very own app—or one you pretend to own. The information Jason shares is based on data from Appdiff’s next-gen mobile app testing platform, lessons from Applause/uTest’s crowd, text mining hundreds of millions of app store reviews, and in-depth discussions with top mobile app development teams.
Testing Transformation: The Art and Science for SuccessTechWell
Technologies, testing processes, and the role of the tester have evolved significantly in the past few years with the advent of agile, DevOps, and other new technologies. It is critical that we testing professionals evaluate ourselves and continue to add tangible value to our organizations. In your work, are you focused on the trivial or on real game changers? Jennifer Bonine describes critical elements that help you artfully blend people, process, and technology to create a synergistic relationship that adds value. Jennifer shares ideas on mastering politics, maneuvering core vs. context, and innovating your technology strategies and processes. She explores how new processes can be introduced in an organization, what the role of organizational culture is in determining the success of a project, and how you can know what tools will add value vs. simply adding overhead and complexity. Jennifer reviews critically needed tester skills and discusses a continual learning model to evolve your skills and stay relevant. This discussion can lead you to technologies, processes, and skills you can stake your career on.
We’ve all been there. We work incredibly hard to develop a feature and design tests based on written requirements. We build a detailed test plan that aligns the tests with the software and the documented business needs. And when we put the tests to the software, it all falls apart because the requirements were changed without informing everyone. Mary Thorn says help is at hand. Enter behavior-driven development (BDD), and Cucumber and SpecFlow, tools for running automated acceptance tests and facilitating BDD. Mary explores the nuances of Cucumber and SpecFlow, and shows you how to implement BDD and agile acceptance testing. By fostering collaboration for implementing active requirements via a common language and format, Cucumber and SpecFlow bridge the communication gap between business stakeholders and implementation teams. In this workshop, practice writing feature files with the best practices Mary has discovered over numerous implementations. If you experience developers not coding to requirements, testers not getting requirements updates, or customers who feel out of the loop and don’t get what they ask for, Mary has answers for you.
Develop WebDriver Automated Tests—and Keep Your SanityTechWell
Many teams go crazy because of brittle, high-maintenance automated test suites. Jim Holmes helps you understand how to create a flexible, maintainable, high-value suite of functional tests using Selenium WebDriver. Learn the basics of what to test, what not to test, and how to avoid overlapping with other types of testing. Jim includes both philosophical concepts and hands-on coding. Testers who haven't written code should not be intimidated! We'll pair you up to make sure you're successful. Learn to create practical tests dealing with advanced situations such as input validation, AJAX delays, and working with file downloads. Additionally, discover when you need to work together with developers to create a system that's more easily testable. This tutorial focuses primarily on automating web tests, but many of the same concepts can be applied to other UI environments. Demos and labs will be in C# and Java using WebDriver. Leave this tutorial having learned how to write high-value WebDriver tests—and stay sane while doing so.
DevOps is a cultural shift aimed at streamlining intergroup communication and improving operational efficiency for development and operations groups. Over time, inclusion of other IT groups under the DevOps umbrella has become the norm for many organizations. But even broadening the boundaries of DevOps, the conversation has been largely devoid of the business units’ place at the table. A common mistake organizations make while going through the DevOps transformation is drawing a line at the IT boundary. If that occurs, a larger, more inclusive silo within the organization is created, operating in an informational vacuum and causing operational inefficiency and goal misalignment. Sharing his experiences working on both sides of the fence, Leon Fayer describes the importance of including business units in order to align technology decisions with business goals. Leon discusses inclusion of business units in existing agile processes, benefits of cross-departmental monitoring, and a business-first approach to technology decisions.
Eliminate Cloud Waste with a Holistic DevOps StrategyTechWell
Chris Parlette maintains that renting infrastructure on demand is the most disruptive trend in IT in decades. In 2016, enterprises spent $23B on public cloud IaaS services. By 2020, that figure is expected to reach $65B. The public cloud is now used like a utility, and like any utility, there is waste. Who's responsible for optimizing the infrastructure and reducing wasted expenses? It’s DevOps. The excess expense, known as cloud waste, comprises several interrelated problems: services running when they don't need to be, improperly sized infrastructure, orphaned resources, and shadow IT. There are a few core tenets of DevOps—holistic thinking, no silos, rapid useful feedback, and automation—that can be applied to reducing your cloud waste. Join Chris to learn why you should include continuous cost optimization in your DevOps processes. Automate cost control, reduce your cloud expenses, and make your life easier.
Transform Test Organizations for the New World of DevOpsTechWell
With the recent emergence of DevOps across the industry, testing organizations are being challenged to transform themselves significantly within a short period of time to stay meaningful within their organizations. It’s not easy to plan and approach these changes considering the way testing organizations have remained structured for ages. These challenges start from foundational organizational structures and can cut across leadership influence, competencies, tools strategy, infrastructure, and other dimensions. Sumit Kumar shares his experience assisting various organizations to overcome these challenges using an organized DevOps enablement framework. The framework includes radical restructuring, turning the tools strategy upside down, a multidimensional workforce enablement supported by infrastructure changes, redeveloped collaborations models, and more. From his real world experiences Sumit shares tips for approaching this journey and explains the roadmap for testing organizations to transform themselves to lead the quality in DevOps.
The Fourth Constraint in Project Delivery—LeadershipTechWell
All too often, the triple constraints—time, cost, and quality—are bandied about as if they are the be-all, end-all. While they are important, leadership—the fourth and larger underpinning constraint—influences the first three. Statistics on project success and failure abound, and these measurements are usually taken against the triple constraints. According to the Project Management Institute, only 53 percent of projects are completed within budget, and only 49 percent are completed on time. If so many projects overrun budget and are late, we can’t really say, “Good, fast, or cheap—pick two.” Rob Burkett talks about leadership at every level of a team. He shares his insights and stories gleaned from his years of IT and project management experience. Rob speaks to some of the glaring difficulties in the workplace in general and some specifically related to IT delivery and project management. Leave with a clearer understanding of how to communicate with teams and team members, and gain a better understanding of how you can be a leader—up and down your organization.
Resolve the Contradiction of Specialists within Agile TeamsTechWell
As teams grow, organizations often draw a distinction between feature teams, which deliver the visible business value to the user, and component teams, which manage shared work. Steve Berczuk says that this distinction can help organizations be more productive and scale effectively, but he recognizes that not all shared work fits into this model. Some work is best handled by “specialists,” that is people with unique skills. Although teams composed entirely of T-shaped people is ideal, certain skills are hard to come by and are used irregularly across an organization. Since these specialists often need to work closely with teams, rather than working from their own backlog, they don’t fit into the component team model. The use of shared resources presents challenges to the agile planning model. Steve Berczuk shares how teams such as those providing infrastructure services and specialists can fit into a feature+component team model, and how variations such as embedding specialists in a scrum team can both present process challenges and add significant value to both the team and the larger organization.
Pin the Tail on the Metric: A Field-Tested Agile GameTechWell
Metrics don’t have to be a necessary evil. If done right, metrics can help guide us to make better forward-looking decisions, rather than being used for simply managing or monitoring. They can help us identify trade-offs between options for what to do next versus punitive or worse, purely managerial measures. Steve Martin won’t be giving the Top Ten List of field-tested metrics you should use. Instead, in this interactive mini-workshop, he leads you through the critical thinking necessary for you to determine what is right for you to measure. First, Steve explores why you want to measure something—whether it’s for a team, a portfolio, or even an agile transformation. Next, he provides multiple real-life metrics examples to help drive home concepts behind characteristics of good and bad metrics. Finally, Steve shows how to run his field-tested agile game—Pin the Tail on the Metric. Take back this activity to help you guide metrics conversations at your organization.
Agile Performance Holarchy (APH)—A Model for Scaling Agile TeamsTechWell
A hierarchy is an organizational network that has a top and a bottom, and where position is determined by rank, importance, and value. A holarchy is a network that has no top or bottom and where each person’s value derives from his ability, rather than position. As more companies seek the benefits of agile, leaders need to build and sustain delivery capability while scaling agile without introducing unnecessary process and overhead. The Agile Performance Holarchy (APH) is an empirical model for scaling and sustaining agility while continuing to deliver great products. Jeff Dalton designed the APH by drawing from lessons learned observing and assessing hundreds of agile companies and teams. The APH helps implement a holarchy—a system composed of interacting organizational units called holons—centered on a series of performance circles that embody the behaviors of high performing agile organizations. Jeff describes how APH provides guidelines in the areas of leadership, values, teaming, visioning, governing, building, supporting, and engaging within an all-agile organization. Join Jeff to see what the APH is all about and how you can use it in your team and organization.
A Business-First Approach to DevOps ImplementationTechWell
DevOps is a cultural shift aimed at streamlining intergroup communication and improving operational efficiency for development and operations groups. Over time, inclusion of other IT groups under the DevOps umbrella has become the norm for many organizations. But even broadening the boundaries of DevOps, the conversation has been largely devoid of the business units’ place at the table. A common mistake organizations make while going through the DevOps transformation is drawing a line at the IT boundary. If that occurs, a larger, more inclusive silo within the organization is created, operating in an informational vacuum and causing operational inefficiency and goal misalignment. Sharing his experiences working on both sides of the fence, Leon Fayer describes the importance of including business units in order to align technology decisions with business goals. Leon discusses inclusion of business units in existing agile processes, benefits of cross-departmental monitoring, and a business-first approach to technology decisions.
Databases in a Continuous Integration/Delivery ProcessTechWell
DevOps is transforming software development with many organizations adopting lean development practices, implementing continuous integration (CI), and performing regular continuous deployment (CD) to their production environments. However, the database is largely ignored and often seen as a bottleneck in the DevOps process. Steve Jones discusses the challenges of database development and why many developers find the database to be an impediment to the CD process. Steve shares the techniques you can use to fit a database into the DevOps process. Learn how to store database code in a version control system, and the differences between that and application code. Steve demonstrates a CI process with SQL code and uses automated testing frameworks to check the code. Steve then shows how automated releases with manual gates can reduce the stress and risk of database deployments while ensuring consistent, reliable, repeatable releases to QA, UAT, and production.
Mobile Testing: What—and What Not—to AutomateTechWell
Organizations are moving rapidly into mobile technology, which has significantly increased the demand for testing of mobile applications. David Dangs says testers naturally are turning to automation to help ease the workload, increase potential test coverage, and improve testing efficiency. But should you try to automate all things mobile? Unfortunately, the answer is not always clear. Mobile has its own set of complications, compounded by a wide variety of devices and OS platforms. Join David to learn what mobile testing activities are ripe for automation—and those items best left to manual efforts. He describes the various considerations for automating each type of mobile application: mobile web, native app, and hybrid applications. David also covers device-level testing, types of testing, available automation tools, and recommendations for automation effectiveness. Finally, based on his years of mobile testing experience, David provides some tips and tricks to approach mobile automation. Leave with a clear plan for automating your mobile applications.
Cultural Intelligence: A Key Skill for SuccessTechWell
Diversity is becoming the norm in everyday life. However, introducing global delivery models without a proper understanding of intercultural differences can lead to difficulty, frustration, and reduced productivity. Priyanka Sharma and Thena Barry say that in our diverse world, we need teams with people who can cross these boundaries, communicate effectively, and build the diverse networks necessary to avoid problems. We need to learn about cultural intelligence (CI) and cultural quotient (CQ). CI is the ability to relate and work effectively across cultures. CQ is the cognitive, motivational, and behavioral capacity to understand and respond to beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviors of individuals and groups. Together, CI and CQ can help us build behavioral capacities that aid motivation, behavior, and productivity in teams as well as individuals. Priyanka and Thena show how to build a more culturally intelligent place with tools and techniques from Leading with Cultural Intelligence, as well as content from the Hofstede cultural model. In addition, they illustrate the model with real-life experiences and demonstrate how they adapted in similar circumstances.
Turn the Lights On: A Power Utility Company's Agile TransformationTechWell
Why would a century-old utility with no direct competitors take on the challenge of transforming its entire IT application organization to an agile methodology? In an increasingly interconnected world, the expectations of customers continue to evolve. From smart meters to smart phones, IoT is creating a crisis point for industries not accustomed to rapid change. Glen Morris explains that pizzas can be tracked by the minute and packages at every stop, and customers now expect this same customer service model should exist for all industries—including power. Glen examines how to create momentum and transform non-IT-focused industries to an agile model. If you are struggling with gaining traction in your pursuit of agile within your business, Glen gives you concrete, practical experiences to leverage in your pursuit. Finally, he communicates how to gain buy-in from business partners who have no idea or concern about agile or its methodologies. If your business partners look at you with amusement when you mention the need for a dedicated Product Owner, join Glen as he walks you through the approaches to overcoming agile skepticism.
The Metaverse and AI: how can decision-makers harness the Metaverse for their...Jen Stirrup
The Metaverse is popularized in science fiction, and now it is becoming closer to being a part of our daily lives through the use of social media and shopping companies. How can businesses survive in a world where Artificial Intelligence is becoming the present as well as the future of technology, and how does the Metaverse fit into business strategy when futurist ideas are developing into reality at accelerated rates? How do we do this when our data isn't up to scratch? How can we move towards success with our data so we are set up for the Metaverse when it arrives?
How can you help your company evolve, adapt, and succeed using Artificial Intelligence and the Metaverse to stay ahead of the competition? What are the potential issues, complications, and benefits that these technologies could bring to us and our organizations? In this session, Jen Stirrup will explain how to start thinking about these technologies as an organisation.
In his public lecture, Christian Timmerer provides insights into the fascinating history of video streaming, starting from its humble beginnings before YouTube to the groundbreaking technologies that now dominate platforms like Netflix and ORF ON. Timmerer also presents provocative contributions of his own that have significantly influenced the industry. He concludes by looking at future challenges and invites the audience to join in a discussion.
SAP Sapphire 2024 - ASUG301 building better apps with SAP Fiori.pdfPeter Spielvogel
Building better applications for business users with SAP Fiori.
• What is SAP Fiori and why it matters to you
• How a better user experience drives measurable business benefits
• How to get started with SAP Fiori today
• How SAP Fiori elements accelerates application development
• How SAP Build Code includes SAP Fiori tools and other generative artificial intelligence capabilities
• How SAP Fiori paves the way for using AI in SAP apps
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
Accelerate your Kubernetes clusters with Varnish CachingThijs Feryn
A presentation about the usage and availability of Varnish on Kubernetes. This talk explores the capabilities of Varnish caching and shows how to use the Varnish Helm chart to deploy it to Kubernetes.
This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
Transcript: Selling digital books in 2024: Insights from industry leaders - T...BookNet Canada
The publishing industry has been selling digital audiobooks and ebooks for over a decade and has found its groove. What’s changed? What has stayed the same? Where do we go from here? Join a group of leading sales peers from across the industry for a conversation about the lessons learned since the popularization of digital books, best practices, digital book supply chain management, and more.
Link to video recording: https://bnctechforum.ca/sessions/selling-digital-books-in-2024-insights-from-industry-leaders/
Presented by BookNet Canada on May 28, 2024, with support from the Department of Canadian Heritage.
A tale of scale & speed: How the US Navy is enabling software delivery from l...sonjaschweigert1
Rapid and secure feature delivery is a goal across every application team and every branch of the DoD. The Navy’s DevSecOps platform, Party Barge, has achieved:
- Reduction in onboarding time from 5 weeks to 1 day
- Improved developer experience and productivity through actionable findings and reduction of false positives
- Maintenance of superior security standards and inherent policy enforcement with Authorization to Operate (ATO)
Development teams can ship efficiently and ensure applications are cyber ready for Navy Authorizing Officials (AOs). In this webinar, Sigma Defense and Anchore will give attendees a look behind the scenes and demo secure pipeline automation and security artifacts that speed up application ATO and time to production.
We will cover:
- How to remove silos in DevSecOps
- How to build efficient development pipeline roles and component templates
- How to deliver security artifacts that matter for ATO’s (SBOMs, vulnerability reports, and policy evidence)
- How to streamline operations with automated policy checks on container images
Generative AI Deep Dive: Advancing from Proof of Concept to ProductionAggregage
Join Maher Hanafi, VP of Engineering at Betterworks, in this new session where he'll share a practical framework to transform Gen AI prototypes into impactful products! He'll delve into the complexities of data collection and management, model selection and optimization, and ensuring security, scalability, and responsible use.
Encryption in Microsoft 365 - ExpertsLive Netherlands 2024Albert Hoitingh
In this session I delve into the encryption technology used in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview. Including the concepts of Customer Key and Double Key Encryption.
Observability Concepts EVERY Developer Should Know -- DeveloperWeek Europe.pdfPaige Cruz
Monitoring and observability aren’t traditionally found in software curriculums and many of us cobble this knowledge together from whatever vendor or ecosystem we were first introduced to and whatever is a part of your current company’s observability stack.
While the dev and ops silo continues to crumble….many organizations still relegate monitoring & observability as the purview of ops, infra and SRE teams. This is a mistake - achieving a highly observable system requires collaboration up and down the stack.
I, a former op, would like to extend an invitation to all application developers to join the observability party will share these foundational concepts to build on:
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
Why You Should Replace Windows 11 with Nitrux Linux 3.5.0 for enhanced perfor...SOFTTECHHUB
The choice of an operating system plays a pivotal role in shaping our computing experience. For decades, Microsoft's Windows has dominated the market, offering a familiar and widely adopted platform for personal and professional use. However, as technological advancements continue to push the boundaries of innovation, alternative operating systems have emerged, challenging the status quo and offering users a fresh perspective on computing.
One such alternative that has garnered significant attention and acclaim is Nitrux Linux 3.5.0, a sleek, powerful, and user-friendly Linux distribution that promises to redefine the way we interact with our devices. With its focus on performance, security, and customization, Nitrux Linux presents a compelling case for those seeking to break free from the constraints of proprietary software and embrace the freedom and flexibility of open-source computing.
Secstrike : Reverse Engineering & Pwnable tools for CTF.pptx
Team Leadership: Telling Your Testing Stories
1. MK
PM Tutorial
4/29/13 1:00PM
Team Leadership: Telling Your
Testing Stories
Presented by:
Bob Galen
RGalen Consulting
Brought to you by:
340 Corporate Way, Suite 300, Orange Park, FL 32073
888-268-8770 ∙ 904-278-0524 ∙ sqeinfo@sqe.com ∙ www.sqe.com
2. Bob Galen
Bob Galen is an agile coach at RGalen Consulting and director of agile solutions at Zenergy
Technologies, a North Carolina-based firm specializing in agile testing and leading agile adoption
initiatives. Bob regularly speaks at international conferences and professional groups on topics related to
software development, project management, software testing, and team leadership. He is a Certified
Scrum Master Practicing (CSC), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), and an active member of the
Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance. Bob published Scrum Product Ownership–Balancing Value from the
Inside Out, which addresses the gap in guidance toward effective agile product management. Contact Bob
at bob@rgalen.com or bob.galen@zenergytechnologies.com.