Traditional QA methodologies have to shift in today’s world where the fast pace of technology demands higher quality. I will talk about how DevOps and QA can help each other in building better quality software. This can be done via tools such APM using synthetic monitoring and process changes around CICD using automated testing at every step of the delivery and deployment cycle. I will also touch on how QA team members can develop skills to tackle these new technologies and pace of delivery. I will also present real examples from my previous two companies where I helped transform the QA and DevOps teams.

This will be a case study that will walk the participants through a real life transformation journey. It will cover all elements of testing in a very large and complex multi-year, multi-goegraphic transformation program with special focus on integrating testing in a scaled agile and Kanban environment, How to ensure quality and structure testing teams, automation, reporting, program governance etc.

Darshan Dave is an executive leader, strategist, coach and mentor with over 25 years of proven experience in as a trusted advisor and transformation strategist, incubating next generation products and services and accelerating growth. He has global experience with fortune 500 organizations. Worked in UK, Germany, India and USA. Leading global strategy, business units, product management, digital and quality engineering, departments and complex large-scale programs. His has domain experience in financial services, capital markets, investments management, banking, etc. and insurance, healthcare, etc. He is an accomplished speaker and has presented at various forums like CIO Summit, analyst briefings, customer meets, Universities, QAI, Quest, Testrek, etc.

Teams in the Dojo work in “hyper sprints” with abbreviated ceremonies, so a 6-week challenge would consist of 12 sprints — and all the learning that entails, includes test automation pair programming, and CICD. The fast-paced Dojo environment enables teams to recognize old habits and replace them with newer, more effective Agile habits with continuous exploration of new ways of coding with a CICD mindset.

Over 30 years of Engineering leadership in Software & Systems Development, Infrastructure, Quality Engineering, Agile Transformations, Process Improvement, DevOps, & Project Management.

Steve Halzel joined Sungard Availability Services as Senior Director of Infrastructure Engineering in 2016. He has led transformations of the engineering organizations and companies that include delivering new product to market, streamlining development operations, driving enterprise class quality while achieving consistency, scalability and sustainable profitability.

Steve has a unique blend of Fortune 500 and early stage companies, primarily in the data storage and systems infrastructure space. He is an accomplished senior technology executive with a proven track record of successfully delivering enterprise class products to market on time with predictability, generating revenue growth from inception to $250 million in products & services. Steve’s strength is execution and delivery while implementing the appropriate amount of process to build world class organizations for repetitive success.

Steve is responsible for driving the modernizing and transformation of the legacy infrastructure to a Software Defined Data Center by building consistent, scalable and reusable architectures for SGAS services in both the private and public clouds. He is also driving the delivery of the highest levels of hardware agnostic automation to drive lifecycle, quality, operational efficiency and rapid time-to-delivery, while implementing an end to end agile DevOps practice.

Steve has built and led global teams of over 300 people while fostering teamwork, collaboration, innovation, and continuous improvement. He has a passion for excellence, continuous learning and customer satisfaction for today & tomorrow's needs. While Steve can roll up his sleeves when he has to, he enjoys technically leading and inspiring talented people to do great things!

Steve is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst where he earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. He holds 1 patent in "Instantiating Virtual Appliances" and 1 patent pending in "Unified Test Automation System". Steve is also a graduate of Latin School.

Oftentimes, enterprises, startups jump into the market to solve customer problems. Come and explore some field-tested techniques, shared by an industry veteran.

Sameer has spent over two decades in various roles within the IT industry and has grown into an agile consultant and coach. He has been closely associated with the local (Atlanta) and global agile community. Formerly the Program Manager for PMI Atlanta Agile forum and the global PMI Agile Community of Practice (CoP) Knowledge Management lead,

He is recognized for his contributions towards the 5th edition of PMBOK and on Council lead for the Agile Community of Practice.

Project decisions are needed fast and accurately, what is your organization doing to ensure speed while keep customers engaged.

Pepe Valiente is an experienced Offering Manager who has worked on a range of large and complex projects in multiple industries and countries. He has undertaken lead business and technical roles, managing teams with highly talented individuals, delivering value immediately for the organizations he has collaborated with.  

He is currently leading the Growth Platform for the Digital Growth and Commerce organization, focusing on data initiatives to improve the user journey and drive revenue, adoption and engagement through best in class experiences for IBM products.  

Mr. Valiente has an industrial engineering degree at ITESO University (in Mexico) and a MBA at Eseune Business School (in Spain). He is certified as PMP(r) and PMI-ACP(r), Senior Project Manager by IBM, and holds an Executive Certificate in Leadership and Management by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  

You can follow him on Twitter @jfvaliente

The presentation contains 5 parts:

Requirement analysis
Acceptance test driven development
Feature branching approach
Writing autotests to reproduce a problem instead of creating a bug in BTS
Fail fast approach

Evgeny has more than ten years of experience in test management, automation testing, and release management, mainly on complex projects in the telecommunication, financial, and online entertainment industries. Previously his experience as a test manager at Innova Distribution (one of the most famous game publishing companies in Russia) and as a QA Team Lead at EPAM Systems gave Evgeny a unique perspective in test automation process development.

Now at Wayfair, he applies his experience and expertise to do whatever is required to deliver the highest quality product possible. Evgeny is a frequent speaker at QA/Dev/Agile conferences in the US and Europe and an author for international test and QA publications."

Continuously changing digital landscape & competition is driving enterprises to reconsider ‘Idea to Launch’ cycle time. While Agile/DevOps techniques create more value for the business, and faster than traditional methods; companies don’t benefit if practices are inconsistently implemented across the development, testing and delivery cycle.

Ashish shares his experience of Digital Quality Transformation journey with specific focus on Machine Learning & BOTs. He explains the transformation approach to build Quality across full agile software development life-cycle from inception to delivery.

1. As business & technology leaders drive Digital transformation, QA organization needs to be the ‘Quality Advocate’

2. Implementing Digital QualityTransformation fueled with Machine Learning & BOTs

Ashish Nirgudkar is a Management Consultant at Cognizant Business Consulting practice. He has been in the IT Industry for more than 17 years with diverse global experience with multiple Fortune 500 companies within the technology, telecommunications, and retail domains. His specialties include Digital Transformation, Agile Coaching, Machine Learning & Analytics, IT Strategy & Governance, Process/Quality Consulting, Program Management, Organization Strategy and Governance Dashboard/Metrics. He holds multiple software certifications – QAI-CSTE, QAI-CMST, Scrum Alliance – CSM and Scaled Agile – Program Consultant (SPC) and is a regular blogger on Agile Transformation and Software Quality.

Automated tests need to be designed so that they are resilient to change if they are going to be of use in an agile environment where the target application is constantly changing and there is little time to spend on test maintenance.

Description:

Building automated tests that are reliable and resistant to change is no easy endeavor. Anyone who has tried over the long haul knows this. I've been on all sides of the test automation problem, as a test tool user, an automated testing consultant and as test tool developer. With over 30 years of experience in the field, I have accumulated a lot of techniques and examples to share that will help participants deal with common automation problems such as timing, latency and rapid pace of application change. The presentation includes discussion of the following: Choosing the right tests to automate, Using object definitions, Building reusable steps, Designing tests that are smaller in scope, Implementing retry loops, Generating expected results at runtime and Building startup and recovery into the test framework.

Brian Le Suer is the CEO of Zeenyx Software, a company dedicated to building next generation testing solutions. He is a founding partner of Star Quality, a New England based firm specializing in consulting and training for SQA and automated testing. Brian served as Executive Vice President of R&D for Segue Software, where he built a world class engineering team and played a key role in a successful IPO. His earlier career experience includes various roles as a SQA engineer, technical writer and technical trainer.

How many of us are running masses of testing, consuming resources and generating mountains of data? Are we actually extracting insightful risk insight for decision makers? Can we agree that the approach should change, dramatically?

In this talk Amir Rozenberg, AVP product at SauceLabs, will offer a different view of continuous testing. We’ll discuss ongoing evaluation of what really needs to be tested and when. We’ll then discuss growing a sustainable, lean test suites that are modular, scalable and produce predictable outcomes. Last, what are the key elements that would reflect the risk insight that your decision makers need.

Amir Rozenberg is a thought leader in the space of agile quality methodologies. Currently as AVP of product at Sauce Labs, he leads the quality in DevOps product vision and implementation. Previously at Perfecto, he led the core product strategy and other initiatives such as real user condition testing, accessibility, security, audio and conversational interfaces, AI/ML, IoT and medical devices etc. In addition, Amir led successful synergies with Microsoft, SmartBear, Blazemeter, Neotys etc., to optimize value delivery to the market. Prior to Perfecto, Amir led the mobile production monitoring solution at Compuware.

“The job of QA is not just to do testing — it’s to build quality in.”

How often have you heard that sentence? And how often has it been followed up with solid practices for actually building quality in?

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is one of the foundational practices of high-quality product development. Popularized nearly 20 years ago, TDD is an important skill for high-quality software development. If you want it to be easier to build high-quality code, then you need to understand TDD.

In this hands-on session, we’ll learn by doing. Richard will facilitate a coding dojo, a safe place to learn and practice the skills of test-driven development. We’ll mob program together on a coding kata — an easy programming problem — to learn TDD, refactoring, clean code, code smells, and more — all in the pursuit of technical agility, business agility, and a great product that people love. To follow along, bring your laptop and development environment. We recommend Java and IntelliJ IDEA.

Richard Kasperowski is an author, teacher, speaker, and coach focused on team building and high-performance teams. Richard is the author of two books: High-Performance Teams: The Foundations and The Core Protocols: A Guide to Greatness, as well as the forthcoming book High-Performance Teams: Core Protocols for Psychological Safety and Emotional Intelligence. He leads clients in building and maintaining high-performance teams that get great results using the Core Protocols, Agile, and Open Space Technology. Richard created and teaches the course Agile Software Development at Harvard University, and he co-teaches the Spark! fellowship at University. Learn more and subscribe to Richard’s newsletter at www.kasperowski.com