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DevOps

EuroSTAR Huddle Deep Dive: Agile

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It has been twenty years since seventeen software developers met at a resort in Snowbird, Utah and since then Agile has become the dominant form of developing software.  At EuroSTAR Huddle, we will be acknowledging this with our just announced EuroSTAR Huddle Deep Dive: Agile week. Taking place from 22-26 March, the EuroSTAR Huddle Deep Dive will feature seven speakers, all experts on Agile who will guide you through all things Agile.

So at EuroSTAR Huddle we have invited seven highly regarded experts on Agile and software testing. Over the course of one week they will share their expertise with you across seven live events.

During the week we have some of the best minds on Agile. We have two new events in two AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions.  First off is Lisa Crispin, a leading expert and author of numerous Agile books. She will be taking part in an  on Testing in Continuous Delivery. Also taking part in another AMA is Bob Galen who will be exploring Testing in Agile Context. Both events give you the chance to put your questions to these Agile experts with a wealth of experience in Agile.

But there is more! We will also have live presented events with practical takeaways that you can apply with your team. Gitte Ottosen will be sharing her thoughts on Quality in Agile and in particular what it means for your customer. Derk-Jan de Grood will also explore quality focusing on built in quality and how quality is organised at the team level. Speaking of teams in Agile Selena Delesie will be joining the Deep Dive week to demonstrate how you can super-charge your agile team and create Agile super teams. Mia Johannsson will explore the four key cornerstones of Agile QA and its importance in the software development process. Finally moving from teams to the user level, Hanna Dernbrant is going to explore what it is like to move from Waterfall to DevOps and what experiencing that sort of change can be like.

With this great quality (no pun intended) of speakers and minds on Agile, the EuroSTAR Huddle Deep Dive: Agile week is not to be missed. Plus there will be blogs throughout the week on all things Agile. Make sure to join us there.

Continuous Testing Is Not Automation

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Many people confuse continuous testing with test automation. That makes sense, because you cannot do continuous testing without automated tests. But, it’s much more.

There are four basic questions you can ask to see if your automation is truly continuous:

  1. Are your tests automated in real time?
  2. Are they included as part of your continuous integration (CI) pipeline?
  3. Do you allow them, alone, to determine that a version of code can move to the next step in the process?
  4. Are performance and security tests included in questions 1,2, and 3?

If you cannot say yes to all four questions, then you are not doing continuous testing.

So, how do you go from automated tests to continuous testing?

First, try to run your test suite back to back. If it takes more than a minute or two for each test to run, you need to look at the tools you are using for automation. Are you able to automate in real time without a complex abstraction layer for the testers? Are you using a third party that is inherently slower than an open source tool? Your answers might indicate that your automation tools do not support continuous testing.

continuous testing in automationThe other reason tests could be slow is if they all originated from your regression suite and thus are all end-to-end UI tests. In this case, you will need to adjust how you have applied the testing pyramid to ensure you reduce the number of tests, so that more is done at the API and component level.

Second, look at the failed tests to see if different tests failed in both runs. If a test passes in one run and fails in the next, then you might have flaky tests, which again can be solved by refining your testing approach, as well as evaluating your testing framework for good coding practices.

Flaky tests could also be caused by dependencies on data or downstream systems that are not reliable. In these cases, you should pull out all the data conditioning into its own suite of tests, or find a more reliable way to inject data, like via a test data management tool or through APIs directly. You also might need to leverage a service virtualization tool to replace unreliable or unavailable systems.

Third, integrate the suite with your CI tool. You could start with deconstructing your suite of tests so that you have multiple suites running at different points of the process, each building on so that coverage increases. You will also need a dashboard so teams can see the results of the tests and gain confidence that a failed test is truly a defect.

Finally, integrate performance and security tests into this process. You can follow the same steps as above, because the tool, approach, and CI integration may all have to be addressed.

Continuous testing has a higher-level maturity than automated testing that could require a totally different way of working. The result is a fast feedback loop for developers—and a faster path to production.

Learn more about continuous testing and automation at EuroSTAR Online this November:

 

From Rags to Riches: Turning Your Test Automation Into a Cinderella Story

Surviving and Thriving in the Automation Jungle

Continuous Delivery in 4 months for 15 Teams and their 1 Monolith

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Epam blog author imageAuthor: Adam Auerbach, VP, Co-Head of Cloud and DevTestSecOps Practice at EPAM Systems

 

10 things you’ll learn in DevOps, Quality & AI [Webinar Series]

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Join our May Test & Quality webinar series with our 3 testing experts, on 3 hot topics

Quality for DevOps teams with Rik Marselis

‘Deliver business value with the right quality at speed’. That’s what organizations ask of their IT teams. To achieve this, cross-functional IT teams need to work closely together. The DevOps culture is the enabler for this way of high-performance IT delivery, using an automated CI/CD pipeline to deliver at speed. But how do you deliver value with the right quality using DevOps?

Rik shares approaches, practical examples and concise explanations, to enable teams to implement quality engineering practices.

What You’ll Learn

  1. Deliver business value with the right quality at speed
  2. Incorporate quality engineering in the cross-functional teams
  3. Automate everything – as long as it is useful

SAVE MY SPOT

Agile Testing with Leanne Howard

COVID-19 has made us all look at the world in a different way, and many of us have been forced to change. We have all heard about websites crashing; the rise in hacking; apps not being accessible to everyone, and the strains on IT services. This all points to getting the cost of quality model right, and a higher focus on our customers’ needs.

Leanne will share experiments that you can try to accelerate your testing whilst still maintaining high quality and customer focus.

What You’ll Learn

  1. Some simple experiments to try
  2. Accelerating testing whilst maintaining quality
  3. How to focus on what the customer needs, now and into the future

SAVE MY SPOT

Quality and AI-based Systems with Adam Leon Smith

Looking to improve the quality of AI-based systems?

AI is a complex topic and is the biggest technical renaissance to impact testing for at least two decades. Adam will talk about intrinsic quality issues with AI, challenges in testing AI-based systems, and new techniques and methods.

He will also cover emerging AI-enhanced testing tools that are yet to get much coverage.

What You’ll Learn

  1. Key quality issues with AI
  2. Testing challenges with AI
  3. New ways of testing AI
  4. New tools that you won’t have heard of

SAVE MY SPOT

The Test & Quality Webinar Series is the latest series of online talks brought to you by EuroSTAR Conferences. For 2020, we will be taking the entire EuroSTAR Software Testing & Quality Conference online. See more details about the incredible talks you can attend.

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