Topics & Presenters
- 101 – 301 Guide to Mobile Testing – Joe Larizza & Eran Kinsbruner
- Agility Over Agile – Kevin Malley
- Black Box Accessibility Testing: A Heuristic Approach – Albert Gareev
- Communication in Testing – Is it still necessary? – Neil Price-Jones
- Feedback and its importance in delivering high quality software – Kenneth De Souza
- Looking Beyond the Titles – The role of an agile tester – Graeme Harvey & Christie Felker
- My Life as a Practice Manager – Erik Davis
- Quality as a Continuum, Not a Check-Mark – Val Neekman
- Show It!: Better Testing through Visual Communication – Jess Lancaster
- Testing the Internet of Things – Regg Struyk
- Thin Slicing the Technology Adoption Life Cycle – Kent Richmond
- Why Getting Good Test Data is Hard, and What to Do About It – Tina Fletcher
Details for each presentation below:
101 – 301 Guide to Mobile Testing – Joe Larizza & Eran Kinsbruner
Great News – Your first Mobile Project has arrived! 
- You have been aware that your marketing team was evaluating a mobile offering. Are you prepared? Likely not.
- Been to busy with day-to-day issues to give much thought to mobile testing – avoidance strategy has worked well until today
But now you need to prepare and all eyes are on you …
This presentation will walk you through the basic QA Roadmap to leverage when you get back to the office:
- New mobile reality
- QA/Dev Test Vision
- Agile Testing/Shift Left
- Test Automation As a Shift Left Enabler
- Single user performance
- Action Plan
- Test Automation
- Regression Testing
Agility Over Agile – Kevin Malley
Does following someone else’s defined process make you Agile, maybe but it doesn’t mean you have any agility. If a situation comes up and you immediately look to a process for the answer your agility is minimal at best. On the other hand if a situation arises and you and ideally your peers spring into action and collaborate on devising and implanting a solution this is the agility we need. However there is a fine line between functional sustained agility and dysfunctional toss it at the wall and see what sticks.
About a year ago I took a job on a new team in a large company that had no process strings to the rest of the company, no legacy software to deal with, no technology ties and the full support of senior management to get the job done. But the team specifically said they were not agile, even though they practiced a form of scrum had organized teams into small groups, defined a definition of done and held bi-weekly demos and retros. They focused on an end goal and doing everything possible to remove barriers as they came up. Not once were you allowed to use a reason of it should be this way because that’s how Agile or scrum does it. We did what was right for the team and the product at the time.
Did we make all the right decisions, of course not, but we did make a decision. Looking back there are somethings we said we will never do again but we did a lot of really great things too. Building a product from a vision to a fully functional deployed cloud based app in a year is no small task. Especially when there was no code, no people and no hardware to speak of.
The presentation will walk the audience through an intense year of building a team, building a product including the necessary infrastructure to deploy it on and working through the issues that arose along the way, with the focus on product quality and what was and continues to be done to improve product quality.
Black Box Accessibility Testing: A Heuristic Approach – Albert Gareev
In United States and parts of Canada, Accessibility is the hot topic because of the laws (Section 508, AODA) and compliance deadlines that are coming up. Businesses are struggling in attempts to meet the compliance requirements both “in the letter and in the spirit”. It is indeed tricky, especially for the Web Accessibility.
Often, software developers find themselves unfamiliar with the requirements model, given by Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Product owners find concept of holistic accessibility conflicting with feature-driven delivery approach. Testers are getting lost, too – there are no clear expected results they are used to verify.
In the presentation and workshop, author provides practical and effective heuristic methods of accessibility testing regardless of availability of detailed requirements. In agile team, testers will also be able to contribute to accessible design and development.
Presentation includes overview of the following:
- Special needs that require accessibility
- Assistive technologies
- Accessibility of Web Elements
Accessibility Testing techniques include coverage of the following:
- Accessible Scanning
- Accessible Reading
- Accessible Navigation and Operation
Communication in Testing – Is it still necessary? – Neil Price-Jones
There has been a proliferation of methods of communication in the last few years. Companies use 
multiple methods to update their employees and project members with both company and project information. As recipients of the information and generators of the results on which decisions are taken, testers are at the nexus of many information flows. They need to be able to juggle all this information, do their work and still generate valid information. The presentation will discuss the best methods of this deluge; still allow work to be completed and provide valid results. Good and bad examples will be provided.
Feedback and its importance in delivering high quality software – Kenneth De Souza
Broadly, feedback comes in three forms: appreciation, coaching and evaluation. Often the receiver
wants to hear one type of feedback, while the giver actually means something else. In your testing career, you will need to understand how to give and receive feedback, from bug reports to discussing quality with executives. Ken will share his experiences of the feedback process during various points in his software development career.
Areas where this type of information will help you:
- Coaching: giving and receiving comments during test case and session-based reviews.
- Evaluation: developing relationships with various levels of management where criticism is encouraged and used to move the organization forward.
- Appreciation: helping to preserve the value of the software you are testing. Think bug reports.
Attendees will take away:
- How to give and receive feedback, by identifying the various triggers
- Ways of practicing it in a safe environment
Looking Beyond the Titles – The role of an agile tester – Graeme Harvey & Christie Felker
look at the many roles a tester on an agile team can fill, how the industry has tried to label some of them, and what we can do about it. Sometimes testers (as with other roles) get into scenarios where job titles dictate our work and responsibilities too literally. This presentation will include personal experiences and how these scenarios were handled. The goal is to inspire attendees to look beyond their own titles to see what they can do to become the testers they really want to, and can, be.
My Life as a Practice Manager – Erik Davis
I will share what I have done, what I have accomplished, and what has not worked so far in my 
attempt at managing a testing practice. I am also looking for input, feedback, and ideas from the attendees on how I could do things differently to make a larger impact. Am I going about this all wrong? Did I dilute my time too much by taking on other responsibilities?
Attendees will take away from this:
- Ideas to increase their own impact at work
- A better understanding of what an effective Practice Manager (might) look like
Software quality doesn’t only mean a product with less bugs. It really means the software delivers what the requirement asked for. That also includes performance.
This presentation will walk-through a practical use case from the requirement gathering & the design phase, all the way to 
the delivery and maintenance stage.
We also relate automation & analytic to quality of the products and the quality of life@work. (aka employee happiness).
We touch on design processes, development, integration, automation & analytic. We also use some open source projects as a reference.
Show It!: Better Testing through Visual Communication – Jess Lancaster
Testers spend a lot of time managing and communicating test information throughout the test process. As well, testers must ensure they are conveying information in a way that their audience of other testers, developers, and stakeholders understand the message. A lot of key detail can be 
lost or overlooked when testers communicate solely with written and verbal techniques. That’s where visual communication techniques like image and video come in! Testers need efficient and effective methods for sharing test information, such as test cases, test sessions, results, bugs, and test status. In this session we’ll focus on visual communication concepts, and why you as a tester should be communicating by using visual methods. Then we’ll look at some real-world visual communication tips and techniques you can use to save time, reduce confusion in your communication, and have your message land with impact!
Testing the Internet of Things – Regg Struyk
Embedded software—now being referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT)—continues to permeate almost every industry—from household appliances to heart monitors. It is estimated that there are at least a 
million lines of code in the average car. As IoT explodes from millions of devices to tens of billions in the next few years, new challenges will emerge for software testing. Security, privacy, complexity, and competing standards will fuel the need for innovative testing. Customers don’t care why your software failed in the connected chain—only that it did fail. Companies that focus on quality will ultimately be the successful brands. Learn what new approaches are required for testing the “zoo” of interconnected devices. As products increasingly connect physical hardware with applications, we must revisit old testing approaches. IoT is about analyzing data in real time, allowing testers to make quicker and more informed decisions. If IoT testing is in your future, this session is for you.
Thin Slicing the Technology Adoption Life Cycle – Kent Richmond
Thin Vertical Slicing (A.K.A Thin Slicing) is an approach to delivering software that goes hand in hand with Agile and Lean methodologies to enable short feedback loops and many other 
advantages we have learned to appreciate. Thin slicing is a simple concept, yet unintuitive to apply and often challenged by stakeholders who are concerned with quality, performance, availability and other aspects of functional and operational quality. These concerns are amplified in an environment with existing customers that have similarly high expectations of the product. By bringing together the principles of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing The Chasm and Lean principles of delivering Thin Slices, this presentation will provide a practical way of Thin Slicing these challenging projects. This approach can help align the organization to ensure continuous slices of value can be delivered to the right customers, at the right time to enable building software that quickly solves real problems.
Why Getting Good Test Data is Hard, and What to Do About It – Tina Fletcher
Why is having a high quality set of test data important when testing a new feature or product? What does “good” test data look like? Where can you get it? Why does preparing and arranging
test data often take longer than the testing itself? These are questions that I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about during my career so far as a tester and test leader. While I certainly don’t have all the answers, in this talk I’ll share some of my experiences, challenges, and lessons learned on the topic of test data while participating in various software projects. Bring your thoughts and ideas, too – let’s keep the discussion going!