RSVP Today! Topic: Collaboration with Lansing Area Software Testers (LAST) Have you got a tough problem at work that you haven't been able to solve yet? Feel like you could use some fresh perspectives? Then this is the meeting for you! This month KWSQA teams up with LAST to provide a unique collaborative test clinic. Bring your toughest testing problems to share and draw on the talent and experience of two regions of software quality professionals! We will provide a video conference link and an ...

Speaker: Samantha Campbell RSVP Today! Topic: Making the Web a Little More Accessible Accessibility is so much more than adding ALT tags to images. It should be a consideration in all of our digital interactions - writing an email, making a visual presentation, posting a tweet, or coding a website. This session will go over the current state of web accessibility. Not just what you are required to do under AODA, but how you think about all digital interactions. Some food for thought: Have you ev...

Speaker:  Maciek Konkolowicz RSVP Today! Topic: Modern software delivery requires quality and agility at levels of speed which break the sound barrier. Unfortunately, not all teams come prepared with battle plans, and equipment for a fair fight. Listen to Commander Maciek "IceMan" Konkolowicz describe the journey which took his group of inexperienced manually focused team members, and converted them into "the best of the best..in test". Maciek will focus on the process and tools which en...

Speaker: Matthew Middleton RSVP Today! Topic: Michael Bolton calls software testing “Applied Epistemology.” To me, this suggests that those who wish to practice the art and science of testing need to study broadly, to better understand the contexts in which they work. In this presentation, I’ll be discussing the need for generalists versus specialists, why I think cross-pollination is critical to the testing community as well as the other communities we interact with, and some examples of ...

Speaker: Sarah McKenna RSVP Today! Topic: At a Web scraping company covering 3,000 (and growing) websites, staying on top of changes to scripts and target third party sites was a constant struggle until we started logging each http call and response to an easily queried nosql db and built real time error analytics and error handling. Was not expensive or particularly hard yet made a huge impact on overall quality. Bio: Passionate quality evangelist with 20 years experience leading QA i...

Speaker: Lauren Weber RSVP Today! Topic: The quotation “A problem well stated is half-solved” is from American inventor and businessman Charles Kettering [1]. This axiom can be applied to defect reporting, especially when defects are complex, hard to reproduce, or cross several layers of software. A defect report that is complete and accurate can help development correct a problem faster, with fewer log gathering and test-fix cycles, resulting in better quality software delivered faster. I...

Speaker: Lee Manchur RSVP Today! Topic: Effective test automation requires using the same principles and practices as “real” software development, but often QA teams are expected to write and maintain their own test automation frameworks without a development background. With this in mind, we asked our company's developers to take a hard look at our automated test architecture, and were amazed at the efficiencies they found! This presentation will explore developer-initiated ideas for func...

Speaker: Andrea Connell RSVP Today! Topic: NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn launched in 1997, and orbited the ringed planet continuously for thirteen years until the mission ended in 2017. Throughout this time, the Mission Sequencing Subsystem team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed software used to design and validate the spacecraft’s science activities. As we learned more about the Saturn system and as the spacecraft aged, software changes were needed. Automating tests for softwa...

Speaker: Phil Kirkham RSVP Today! Topic: As the sole exploratory tester in a company with multiple projects going on I had to work out how to work efficiently and to make teams aware of how I could help them. The current Agile literature didn't seem to fit in with my particular needs so after some trial and error we came up with a plan where teams asses the size of the testing 'bucket' they think they will need. My talk will explain the challenges that we had and the plan we came up with t...

Speaker: Michael Larsen RSVP Today! Topic: Accessibility makes it possible for those with various disabilities to access information and services. Inclusive Design focuses on making choices so that software and services are usable by as many people as possible. They are distinct but complementary facets of software development and delivery, and they are difficult to add to software after the fact. Making software Accessible using Inclusive Design principles at the start, or as early as pos...