Lecture Series

As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our daily lives, we are making our 2021 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: Laveena Ramchandani

Topic:
I have heard from other senior testers around the world that they know of data science teams but no testers testing the models, how do we have enough confidence what is produced is good enough? A model is a statistical black box, how to test it so we understand its behaviours to test is properly. Main aim would be to help inspire testers to explore data science models. I’d like to share how I explored the world of data science when testing a model and how we can apply that if we find ourselves in this situation. It is an emerging area for testers and exciting. I’d like to invite you to my talk where, we will go through my journey of discovering data science model testing and find the following takeaways useful not just for testing a data science model but day to day testing too.

Takeaway:
1. Have a better understanding of what data science is.
2. Know how we can test models.
3. Know what existing skills we already have that we can apply in a data science team.
4. Leave with resources to help our teams’ better structure itself to have confidence in the data produced.
5. We’ll look at what did or didn’t work

Bio: I am an experienced Testing Consultant with a comprehensive understanding of tools available for software testing and analysis. I am an energetic, technical-minded professional seeking a position as a Product Experience Analyst. I would really like testers out there to get involved with data science testing as there is a lot of opportunity and a great area to bring testing in. My aim is to provide valuable insights that have high technical aptitude, and unyielding commitment to work. Being able to inspire more individuals out there in the world be a great achievement.

As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our daily lives, we are making our 2021 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: Raj Subrameyer

Topic:

When I started my career in IT, I faced several obstacles. Some of them include lack of motivation and guidance, high self-doubt, and low self-esteem, and having to apply for 1293 jobs during the 2008 recession. Yes, I said that right. Since then, I have discovered different strategies that have transformed my life from having an entry-level job to building a six-figure business. I have helped numerous people get a job and be successful under any circumstances. So how did an average software tester like me make this dramatic transformation?

Come join this talk where I reveal all my secrets to help you discover your dream job, and become hugely successful. I will share various tips, tricks, and tools related to finding your dream job, cracking interviews, exponentially increasing your salary, becoming a rockstar at work, and building your personal brand. In the new era we live in, success is all about how you differentiate yourself from your competition and impact your lives and others. So, if you are at the forking point of your career, feel stuck, and want practical strategies to become the leader you want to be, this is your chance. Join my talk and get inspired.

Session Takeaways

• Different ways to identify your dream career and work towards it.
• How to be successful at work.
• Strategies to set us miles apart from our competition and get the career growth we deserve.

Bio: Raj Subrameyer is an international keynote speaker, author, and tech career coach who helps people to land their dream job and become successful leaders. He has helped countless individuals discover their zone of genius and leverage it to live a life that they love. He is a sought-after speaker at various conferences and has been featured in numerous podcast and publications, including Authority Magazine, Thrive Global, Addicted2Success and The Good Men Project. He is also the author of the new book – Skyrocket Your Career. In his spare time, he loves traveling with his family and discovering new experiences which includes craft beer. You can connect with him on twitter @epsilon11, or his website www.rajsubra.com.

As the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact our daily lives, we are making our 2021 KWality Talks available online for free.

Location: Online via this Zoom meeting link

Register: Here

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

Speaker: Josh Grant

Topic: PyTest is an excellent test tool and library for use with Python. I want to talk about the awesome parts of it. In this talk, I’ll discuss some of these awesome parts including

• How to write and run some basic tests using Pytest – without any messy overhead
• What are fixtures and how to use them
• The Pytest-selenium plugin and what it provides to help with browser-based testing.

Bio: Josh Grant is a Solution Architect at Sauce Labs. He’s been with Sauce since 2018 and been working in test automation since 2010. He’s worked on building Selenium-based test frameworks in Java and Protractor, API test frameworks in Python and CI systems with Jenkins. As a Solution Architect at Sauce Labs, he’s helped customers big and small with their test frameworks and test approaches in a variety of languages and settings. He’s also into big ideas and beautiful food. He’s based in Toronto.

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

Location: Online, will be posted on our YouTube channel

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

Speaker: Mahesh M

Topic: We have often heard testing teams complaining that they have to wait for days or months to get a test environment, and this becomes a pain when they have to test something to meet deadlines. Depending on external teams for a testing environment is painful; we transitioned and built a testing team which was capable of building their own infrastructure and environments for all testing activities. In this talk I will outline how we did this, and how the entire process was automated based on requirements from the testing team.

Bio: I have never run away from challenges and have always embraced challenges with open arms, since I believe challenges are what can shape a person and provide the opportunities to grow. My journey spanning many years has taken me across various companies like Accenture, Sony, Ellucian providing me an opportunity to learn, contribute and grow.

I have played various Leadership roles on many large-scale engagements across various companies. I have been involved in leading various testing operations and engagements.

Have Managed Challenging and Critical engagements which demanded building, managing, and nurturing high performance, result-oriented teams to support delivery and contribute towards the success of the organization.

I have always enjoyed various opportunities, challenges, success, failures that were thrown at me in my career and have received them equally. Each of them has taught me one or the other lesson and made me only stronger.

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

Location: Online via this Zoom meeting link

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

Speaker: Amal JEMAIYA

Topic: A Tester’s first time in Testing is like a human’s first time in the wild.

We are naturally inquisitive creatures, so when we are unsure of the best way forward, we grit our teeth and have the gumption to never stop asking questions.

When I first started in testing, big five questions came on my mind and it was by building answers for them that i understood how to get into it:

1- What’s out there?
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Metaphysics: what is the wild (testing domain) made of? What is the nature of whatever it is that exists? This includes everything from requirements, test cases, tools.. Before I started really testing, I passed a period only analysing other tester’s work. In this section I will illustrate how an analysis period can be beneficial for a tester.

2- How do I know what I know?
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Epistemology: How do I acquire knowledge? And how can i be sure of what I know? In this section I will illustrate how integrating testing communities offers important advantages to members, in fact a tester does not only need technical skills that they can learn individually, but also and most importantly needs to create links with different people regardless of the domain they work on.

3- What should I do?
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Ethics: what is right? What is wrong? What is the best way for testing? Hold on tight! Testing gets a whole lot trickier when we begin to ask about right and wrong actions, and does that change under certain circumstances?

4- What actions are permissible?
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Politics: How should testers be organised? What rights and responsibilities should testers have? Or not have? in this section I’ll illustrate how some wrong managerial practices of the distribution of power and resources may lead to lack of knowledge sharing, deep ignorance, lose of self esteem, and even worst, people leave their jobs if they don’t feel valued. I’ll also illustrate how communities of practice are essential to any agile organisation.

5- What can Testing be like?
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Aesthetics: what can be considered as good, attractive, efficient and an example to follow? Is it really in the eye of the beholder? This person deals with notions of efficiency and quality. In this section I will illustrate how culture, society and organisations influence our perception and understanding of these concepts.

Bio: Amal JEMAIYA is a software test and validation engineer in automotive domain, working with Primatec engineering. She is constantly participating in testing community activities. Amal studied Electronic systems and communication engineering and got specialized in Microelectronic systems and circuits. Her attention to details is the reason why she chose to be in Testing: “Testing is about caring for each detail that may affect the user”.

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

Location: Online via this Zoom meeting link

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

Speaker: Matt Heusser

Topic: A lot of test education is PowerPoint. Yet we know that a disproportionate number of testers are tactile learners. We learn by doing, which is what makes many of us so good at exploration and discovery. This class involves actual testing. Participants are immersed in a simulation that includes time pressure, uncertainty, and conditions of ambiguity with evolving requirements. After sharing our bugs, we reflect on what we have learned, discuss as a group, then provide enough instructors’ notes for others to run the exercise with their own teams. We’ve been working on this simulation for a few years. We use it for job interviews and in training. Come learn how to demonstrate the value of testing, teach everyone some important lessons in testing, and maybe even learn a thing or two yourself.

Bio: As Managing Director of Excelon Development, Matt Heusser is arguably the single most prolific writer on software testing who is also a practitioner. The lead editor of “How To Reduce the Cost of Software Testing”, Matt is a co-author on “Save Our Scrum”, and was lead organizer of The Workshop on Self-Education in Software Testing, the Workshop on Teaching Test Design, and the Workshop on Technical Debt. His black-belt testing challenge inspired the Miagi-Do School of Software Testing in 2009.

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

Location: This online meeting has ended

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

Speaker: Nicola Gordon and Ioan Matei

Topic: Software performance issues can often be attributed to large or growing resource queues. The primary goal of this presentation will be to enable participants to identify and reduce queuing bottlenecks in their application.

We’ll touch on Little’s Law, show visuals of what this looks like conceptually, and view some graphs that illustrate how queuing manifests as end user response, and CPU usage. By now, our audience will know that us performance engineers are a little obsessed with graphs. But hold onto your seats fellow testers – check out the hockey stick effect and the graphs that solve the mystery – it’ll blow your mind!

Bio: Nicola Gordon is a performance engineer at D2L. Software performance KPIs are her North Star, but check out the trenches on any given day and you’ll find she loves to read a good graph, to tackle a good performance mystery, and to find creative solutions to complex performance challenges. For this presentation, Nicola will be joined by Ioan Matei, her colleague at D2L who is also a performance engineer.

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

Location: Online via this Zoom meeting link

Time: Stream will start at approximately 11:45 am. Meeting starts at 12:00 pm. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Speaker: Mark Weiss

Topic: If it’s said a picture is worth a thousand words, could a screenshot detect a thousand defects? This is a talk around a much lesser known type of test automation. This testing goes by many different names, but one of the most common is Visual Differential Testing, or Visual Diff for short. It is the act of using screen captures and comparisons to find unexpected changes. In this talk, we’ll follow Mark Weiss’ experiences exploring Visual Diff testing of a web app. We’ll start the journey from its very beginning. What caused him to explore Visual Diff testing? Why’d he build his own framework? What are the pitfalls of doing so? This will be done by going through each iteration of his homegrown implementation and seeing the many mistakes and the many wins it has provided. By the end, you’ll hopefully know if Visual Diff testing is right for you and be able implement a version of it while avoiding many costly mistakes.

Bio: Mark Weiss is a Senior Test Developer obsessed with making testing simpler. With a background in Computer Science and over 11 years of software development experience, Mark has developed, tested, and supported software from all facets of the software life cycle. Mark’s ability to learn a product through and through and understand how people use it, has allowed him to excel in his career. He’s passionate about automating the simple things and diving head first and figuring out the complex things. With an intuitive and creative mind, he’s always looking for new challenges and inventing new tools to make testing better.

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Speaker: Sue Johnston

Topic: Does your organization rely on heroes to complete your products and projects? Fueled by pizza, coffee and who knows what else, they work all hours, flat out, giving 110% to meet that critical release date. Sometimes they do it week after week. It isn’t pretty. It isn’t smart. And it isn’t agile.

In this session, you’ll explore ideas that aim to prevent that unsustainable and costly scenario and create environments where people can contribute their best work without extraordinary measures.

In her work as a trainer of agile practitioners, Sue has a view of agile life through the eyes of Testers, Scrum Masters, Team Leads, Agile Coaches, Product Owners and other technical professionals. She sees a pattern that gets in the way of team productivity, effective work and project success. It’s the gap between the expectations organizational leaders hold – or were sold – and what’s possible under the circumstances. (Twice the work in half the time, anyone?)

Changing those circumstances is the role of agile leaders. While few still believe, “install Scrum, fill up Jira and you’re agile,” there remains an apparent belief that agility is the responsibility of the development teams, alone. For everyone else, it’s business as usual and that leads organizations to to demand and reward heroic behaviour, which leads to quality slips, burnout and interpersonal drama.

In this session, as an agile leader, you’ll examine this challenge and explore what you might do about it. We’ll create some realistic expectations, based on the patterns of effective teamwork.

Bio: Sue Johnston helps you talk so people listen, listen so people talk and change the world one conversation at a time. After a career as a reporter, she moved to corporate communication, where she was involved in large scale change initiatives and technology implementations (including an early Extreme Programming project) at two of Canada’s financial services giants. She came to believe the crucial communication in organizations is the interaction between people. A professional coach since 2003, Sue has trained hundreds of people in coaching and facilitation techniques. Her workshops are accredited by ICAgile. Based in Waterloo, Ontario, she is the author of “Talk To Me: Workplace Conversations That Work,” the founder of It’s Understood Communication and a partner in Leanintuit. She has lots of letters after her name, but what really matters are letters like this: “Sue is the coach you want to learn from!” You can learn more about Sue and her work at https://itsunderstood.com.

Time: Doors open at approximately 11:30 am. Announcements and discussion start at approximately 11:50 am. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Lunch: provided on a first-come, first-served basis

Location: University of Waterloo, William G. Davis Computer Research Centre, Room DC1302

Maps and directions: See https://uwaterloo.ca/about/how-find-us/maps-and-directions

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Speaker: Jeff Kosciejew

Topic: Using the game “Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes”, we’ll explore and highlight the importance and impact solid teamwork, communication, and creating & developing a shared language, can have on any project or product. Likely different from any other workshop, this really dives into the importance of creating the conditions for success when working with others. This is an interactive session will directly involve a small group actively participating with other observing. However there will be multiple rounds to allow anyone and everyone who wants to participate. And in doing so, we’ll get to see the impact this has on the success of the activity.

Bio: Jeff combines his practical experience in delivering projects and building products from a range of industries with a passion for helping people thrive and grow. He excels at teaching complicated ideas and thrives when facilitating any size of team or group, at all levels of an organization. He combines coaching, mentoring, and teaching to meet people where they are today, and help them along their journey to achieve results that are important and meaningful to them. He employs a diverse range of approaches, techniques, and practices from a variety of frameworks and methods to help make meaningful impacts on the outcomes of work. Taking a systems-thinking approach, Jeff has a proven track record in helping individuals, teams, and organizations identify and implement improvements, not to create great outcomes, but rather to help nudge and evolve the environment where great outcomes are inevitable. Jeff has taught a Project Management module at college, designed, developed, and delivered workshops for small to enterprise companies, and consulted at all levels throughout organizations as an Agile Coach, Product Owner, Scrum Master, and Business Analyst. He’s got a number of industry certifications, but finds his actual experience to be more valuable and meaningful. Jeff finds it amusing to write about himself in the third person.

Time: Doors open at approximately 11:30 am. Announcements and discussion start at approximately 11:50 am. Meeting ends at approximately 1:00 pm.

Lunch: provided on a first-come, first-served basis

Location:
University of Waterloo,
William G. Davis Computer Research Centre,
Room DC1302

Maps and directions: See https://uwaterloo.ca/about/how-find-us/maps-and-directions