Lecture Series

For the time being, the KWSQA is continuing to offer KWality Talks online for free via Zoom.

Register: Online at our KWality Talk Page, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email.

Location: Online

Time: The meeting starts between 11:55 am and 12:00 pm, a waiting room might be enabled if you arrive prior to this time. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Rob Bowyer

Topic:

The core of a test is the same regardless if it is a scripted test intended to be run manually, an Exploratory test that is performed in a less structured manner, or if it is an automated test that will run the exact same way every single time.

In this session, we will explore the core of a test. We’ll have an opportunity to discuss our interpretation of a test and what makes a good one.

The session will be interactive, so if you have strong opinions on what a “test case” is, then this session is for you.

Bio: 

Over the past 20+ years, I have been helping individuals and teams develop software in a rapid and cognitive manner. As a coach and leader, my main focus is on mentorship and enabling individuals to succeed.

As a Software Tester, my experience is in a wide variety of domains, including healthcare, mobile, education and municipal.

Currently, I am teaching software quality and testing topics at Conestoga College.

For the time being, the KWSQA is continuing to offer KWality Talks online for free via Zoom.

Register: Online at our KWality Talk Page, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email.

Location: Online

Time: The meeting starts between 11:55 am and 12:00 pm, a waiting room might be enabled if you arrive prior to this time. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Facilitator: Lisa Crispin

Topic:

Please join us for a virtual Lean Coffee style meeting! Lean Coffee is a structured discussion technique where participants propose and then vote on topics to cover. There is no agenda defined in advance. This is a great way to connect and interact with your fellow software quality enthusiasts!

Bio: 

Lisa Crispin is the co-author, with Janet Gregory, of three books: Agile Testing Condensed: A Brief Introduction, More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team, Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams; the LiveLessons Agile Testing Essentials video course. She and Janet co-founded the Agile Testing Fellowship, which offers “Holistic Testing: Strategies for agile teams” live training course both remotely and in-person. Lisa was voted by her peers as the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person at Agile Testing Days in 2012. She is co-founder with Janet of Agile Testing Fellowship, Inc. and is happily available for training and consulting. Please visit www.lisacrispin.com, www.agiletestingfellow.com, and www.agiletester.ca for more. Contact Lisa on Twitter as @lisacrispin, and LinkedIn, https://www.linkedin.com/in/lisa-crispin-88420a/.

For the time being, the KWSQA is continuing to offer KWality Talks online for free via Zoom.

Register: Online at our KWality Talk Page, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email.

Location: Online

Time: The meeting starts between 11:55 am and 12:00 pm, a waiting room might be enabled if you arrive prior to this time. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Rob Richardson

Topic:

Unit tests? Integration tests? Mocks? Stubs? Fakes? How does this apply to the web? Let’s look at all the ways you can test a web app and demo all the tools you’d use. We’ll live-code most tests to show you exactly what makes a good testing strategy. You’ll leave with a GitHub repo you can use to keep learning or fork and use in your own PWAs.

In this code-focused test, we enumerate the types of tests we’d do: unit, integration, end-to-end, API, and others. We then show how you’d write a test in each. In this talk I demo Mocha, Chai, Karma, Cypress, Supertest, and others. Attendees leave with the GitHub repo of both the app and all the tests to continue learning or fork and use in their own work.

Bio: 
Rob Richardson is a software craftsman building web properties in ASP.NET and Node, React and Vue. He’s a Microsoft MVP, published author, frequent speaker at conferences, user groups, and community events, and a diligent teacher and student of high quality software development. You can find this and other talks on his blog at https://robrich.org/presentations and follow him on twitter at @rob_rich.

For the time being, the KWSQA is continuing to offer KWality Talks online for free via Zoom.

Register: Online at our KWality Talk Page, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email.

Location: Online

Time: The meeting starts between 11:55 am and 12:00 pm, a waiting room might be enabled if you arrive prior to this time. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speakers:

• Jenna Zhang
• Dan DeAuraujo
• Darren Conley
• Eugene Sokol
• Lauren Weber
• Rashmi Priya
• Richard Martin

Topic:
In the past couple of years, the world has witnessed firsthand that change is the only constant in life. Perhaps the best mindset one could have today is forging change, which reminds us of the independence, self-sufficiency, and resilience of the hunter-gatherers, who were “absolutely confident that they could get food from their environment when needed.” This was due to their discovery of different food sources and their knowledge of hundreds of plants, which allowed them to survive even when the environment had substantial changes, such as droughts and floods.

Inspired by that, we propose to approach our test automation strategy in a hunter-gatherer-like style, an approach that is resourceful, collaborative, flexible – organized, but not too rigid. Several of us automation enthusiasts wish to share with you our thoughts & perspectives on this, including topics around how to achieve a D2L style of test automation ecosystem, how to embrace lessons learned from the past to guide our vision as we advance, and how to get there from our present progress collaboratively.

Bio: 
We are a group of Test Developers from D2L who are passionate about test automation. We have various levels of expertise and experiences, with almost a century of combined testing experience. Like a lot of other companies, D2L doesn’t have a centralized QA team, so we are all from different Scrum/Dev teams, responsible for different parts of the D2L products.

For the time being, the KWSQA is continuing to offer KWality Talks online for free via Zoom.

Register: Online at our KWality Talk Page, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email.

Location: Online

Time: The meeting starts between 11:55 am and 12:00 pm, a waiting room might be enabled if you arrive prior to this time. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Kenzie Woodbridge

Topic:

N

You have found a secret room in the castle! You gain 26 xp.

You enter a large interior space with stone walls and a high stone ceiling. Torches flicker in wall brackets. A large self-referential tapestry hanging on the north wall shows a guild workshop full of happy weavers busily weaving the very tapestry in which they are depicted. There are exits to the east, west, and south.

Linden, another player, is here. Gwyrian, another player, is here.

say Hi

You say “Hi”

Gwyrian says “Hey! Do you want to explore this area together?”

Linden attacks you with a critical hit from their sword!

You are dead!

Other people: sometimes difficult to work with and often impossible to predict. In your technical or documentation project, how can you get the right people interested and involved? How can you keep those people happily engaged until the work is done? Is there anything you can do to prevent griefing… err, “interpersonal difficulties” from causing delays? And why do some people seem to thrive in an environment with poor documentation and how can you encourage them to participate in effectively documenting everything anyway?

In this talk, I’ll explore ways to accomplish these aims, using strategies drawn from “Player Type Theory”. For 20 years, this theory has been employed by game designers to encourage stable long-term play communities in online multiplayer games. These are strategies that I have used successfully in my workplace and they can work for you too.

Bio: 
Kenzie works at the British Columbia Institute of Technology, as a Senior Systems Analyst, Web Developer, Knowledge Strategist, and Community Manager. Kenzie has a passion for communication, continuous iterative improvement, and for systemic solutions to systemic problems. Kenzie has previously spoken at PSEWeb, BCNET, Write the Docs, the International Conference on Communication & Media Studies, the Association of Internet Research Conference, Bifrost Conference for Leaders in Tech, DevOpsDays events in various locations, Craft Conf, Accento, and STC InterChange, and completed a Master’s degree in Professional Communication by writing their thesis on prosocial community within Minecraft multiplayer servers.

Kenzie is awesome and you totally want to be their friend (offer of friendship void where local laws do not permit, not guaranteed in all circumstances, skill-testing questions required).

For the time being, the KWSQA is continuing to offer KWality Talks online for free via Zoom.

Due to unforeseen circumstances the November 30th KWality Talk has been rescheduled for December 7th, we apologize for any inconvenience and hope that you can still join us!

Register: Online at our KWality Talk Page, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email.

Location: Online

Time: The meeting starts between 11:55 am and 12:00 pm, a waiting room might be enabled if you arrive prior to this time. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Ian Douglas

Topic:
Postman has been known for years as an API testing tool, but it does SOO much more. The API builder in Postman will generate a lot of tooling for your team, including documentation, mock servers, server-side and client-side code snippets, and so much more. Teams can share environments, fork and merge changes with one another, as both a web application or desktop application. This workshop will dive into many of these features, starting with the API builder, and explore tools like Swagger/OpenAPI imports, and focus mainly on mock servers using some example RESTful and GraphQL APIs to get teams started with their work.

Bio: 
I am a long-time open-source developer, educator, manager and mentor. I encourage everyone around me to share their collective knowledge, and am a strong champion of diversity in the tech industry. When I’m not working, I’m live-streaming about career advancement and interview preparation, tinkering with 3D printing or IoT projects, or telling dad jokes on Twitter.

As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our daily lives, we are making our 2022 KWality Talks available online for free.

Register: Online Using Eventbrite, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email

Location: Online

Time: The meeting starts between 11:55 am and 12:00 pm, a waiting room might be enabled if you arrive prior to this time. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Denis Carignan and Abhishek Gupta

Topic:
A brief background of PLATO will be presented in the early half of the session, and a discussion of PLATO’s accessibility testing services will take place in the second half.

PLATO is a software testing and technology services company trusted by clients around the world. In addition to providing our clients the highest quality service, PLATO was created to solve two pressing problems: high unemployment of Indigenous youth and Canada’s shortage of tech professionals. Since launching, we’ve done that and much more. To date, PLATO has trained and employed over 200 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people in meaningful technology careers, impacting over 60 communities and injecting over $10 million in salaries into the Indigenous economy. Hear from Denis Carignan, Executive VP Indigenous Impact & Innovation of PLATO, about our start, why Indigenous representation in tech is so important and where we plan to go from here.

Our years of expertise as a testing organization have allowed us to observe trends emerge and the demand for accessibility grow. In order to enhance and expand our accessibility services, PLATO built an Accessibility Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) where testers can obtain training in accessibility testing and become certified. Abhishek Gupta, who oversees PLATO’s accessibility practice, will talk about the value of our accessibility testing service and how we’ve integrated it into PLATO’s train-and-employ model.

Bio: 
Denis Carignan is a member of Pasqua First Nation in Treaty Four (Saskatchewan) and the EVP Indigenous Impact & Innovation of PLATO Testing. Since joining PLATO in 2016, Denis has become a national voice promoting Indigenous reconciliation and creating opportunities for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people to pursue successful careers in technology. In his role as President, Denis provides strategic direction on the organization’s management and growth and leadership on Indigenous issues. He is also critical in the development, maintenance, and growth of partnerships with Indigenous communities across the country. Denis has over 20 years of experience in executive management with the Government of Canada and has worked extensively with Indigenous organizations in Western and Atlantic Canada. Denis volunteers his time serving on the Board of Directors for two national charities—Imagine Canada and the Governor General’s Canadian Leadership Conference.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/denis-carignan-3034a083/

Abhishek is a QA evangelist who is passionate about quality assurance and testing at all levels of the organization. He is currently the Director of Service Delivery, Ontario, and also leads Web Accessibility TCoE at PQA. Abhishek is PMP and has played key roles throughout his career in positions like Service Center Manager, Delivery Manager, QA Portfolio Manager, and led Managed Services Testing Teams spread across the globe. Abhishek loves to train and coach teams in software testing and its principles.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhishek-gupta-pmp/

As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our daily lives, we are making our 2022 KWality Talks available online for free.

Register: Online Using Eventbrite, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email

Location: Online

Time: The meeting starts between 11:55 am and 12:00 pm, a waiting room might be enabled if you arrive prior to this time. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Ian Howlett

Topic:
Company’s certainly love the idea of Shifting Left and folks in the Testing community love it, too. Getting it in place is another story altogether. When Testing teams traditionally come from a space at or near the end of the Software Development Lifecycle, how do you push those cultural changes left? How do you influence leaders in organizations to adopt potentially new or modified processes to build a shared ownership of quality?

I want to go over my experience in start-ups, consultancies and enterprise organizations at how you Lead From Quality. Techniques that have worked, that haven’t and ways to try and speak the language of Sales, Product and Engineering to evangelize good quality-focused initiatives.

Bio: 
I have been in the tech industry for more than 15 years. I worked for the first ten years of my career in various roles at CIBC starting as a co-op developer and ending off as a Manager in the Capital Markets Technology group. I went on to manage Testing and Engineering teams in the start-up community in Kitchener and now find myself running the Test Engineering practice at Innosphere where we provide consultancy services for organizations across North America.

As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our daily lives, we are making our 2022 KWality Talks available online for free.

Register: Online Using Eventbrite, Zoom link will be included in registration confirmation email

Location: Online

Time: Stream will start at approximately 11:55 am. Meeting starts at 12:00 pm. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Neil Price-Jones

Topic:
Many people ask why they would bother looking at a model for testing. Why add the expense and effort to implement a model when the current process works and all the testing is proceeding well (save for those few nasty bugs that made it out to production and cost us several customers and a lot of good will).

Join us for a brief overview of the TMMi model; three reasons why you might want to consider a model with associated ROI; and a way of implementing the identified improvements. We will consider the process used to evaluate one organisation and the results obtained from that evaluation and what they are doing now.

Bio: 
Neil Price-Jones has 35 years-experience in Software Quality Assurance in Financial, Utilities, Health Care, Retail, and Software Development including test automation and test management. Most recently he has supplied Maturity Assessments to Health Care, Quality Assurance Management to High Risk Utilities projects, and consulting on the implementation of Quality Assurance to companies looking to improve their Process Maturity.

In 1993, Neil founded NVP Software Testing to provide Quality Assurance Assessments, Coaching, Consulting, Management, and Training. He has made presentations to many software quality organizations including the ASQ, ISACA, KWSQA, MoT, PMAC, PMI, SWOSQG, and TASSQ and at Software Conferences in Canada and the United States (QUEST, TesTrek, & StarCanada).