All Sessions
Workshop Day · 28th May
Testing in the Cloud From All Four Corners of the World!
This full-day workshop is tailored for individuals with a background in scripting or automation, focusing on cloud-based testing using Python. Participants will engage in hands-on activities to develop practical skills in creating and deploying test agents and data in a cloud environment. The workshop will guide participants through the process of writing a simple test agent in Python to send traffic to a centralized REST API. Attendees will then create 10,000 random test objects for offline data testing and learn to spin up server instances in the AWS cloud using Python. The climax of the session involves deploying the test agent and data across cloud instances worldwide, aiming to generate simultaneous test traffic to a single REST API. This collective effort will test the REST API under a consistent and intense traffic load. The workshop is designed to be interactive and collaborative, fostering a hands-on learning experience.
Improving your Test Automation Code
In this half-day workshop, we’ll have a look at a number of tests we all could (and probably will) have written. First, we will perform a thorough code review on them, and then we’ll improve the code by applying fundamental object-oriented programming principles. As we go along, we’ll see our test code grow in readability and maintainability, while learning to recognize, apply and explain to other concepts like (de-)serialization, encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism, abstraction and (some of) the SOLID principles. We’ll also discuss when and were not to apply these concepts, because like so many things in life, it’s all about finding the right balance.
Data Driven Decisions to Model User Behaviour
In this half-day workshop, by applying a testing mindset to the process, you will take your decision making to the next level. You’ll explore how to use whatever data you must build better models of your customers and their behaviours. We’ll dive into how all of this can help you to prioritise where to test. Let’s learn how we can use what we have available to us to make better decisions.
Make a fearless start with security testing
In this half-day workshop, learn about the most common security vulnerabilities according to the OWASP top 10. How do these common vulnerabilities work and why do bad actors want to exploit them? Learn to design applications that an unskilled bad actor can’t crack. Support your team in making the right decisions throughout the application life cycle. And, of course, testing the security of applications. Learn how to security-test forms, find known vulnerabilities in dependencies, test API authorization, and more. To be able to do all these things you need knowledge about common vulnerabilities and the various types of tools that can detect them. In this workshop, you get hands-on experience with various tools that can help you get started with security testing the next working day. This workshop would not be complete without talking about test automation. Your test automation probably also has vulnerabilities! Are these vulnerabilities a problem? How do you make sure your test automation is safe?
Let’s build a Continuous Quality Assurance Strategy around your CI/CD pipeline
This half-day workshop will show that building a Test Strategy in DevOps is not only about Test Automation, but how built-in-quality can be achieved in all steps of the SW development, within and outside of your CI/CD pipeline. What is the goal of your testing? What quality aspects are more and what are less important for your domain? What are the major risks? What testing steps should be included in a Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery pipeline, and where to focus with Exploratory Testing? How to utilise the new QA opportunities available by applying DevOps practices? Don’t just string together existing manual processes! – in this workshop, we will use simple, collaborative tools to design something better!
Identifying your customer: Test reporting at all level
In this half-day workshop, you’ll learn how to create test reports which build trust, show progress and indicate the products quality. The more that testing happens, the more reports are created. We’ve all been there at one point or another, filing test reports away and wondering if anyone actually reads them. The primary reason that reports aren’t read? Information overload. The consumer gets overwhelmed having to find and process key information. The result? They just stop consuming it and confidence is lost. Often resulting in weekly status update meetings, so they feel like they’re back in control again. To avoid this, I’ve identified the needs of the primary consumer of your report (aka customer). As a tester, you are well versed in getting to know your customer, thinking like them, empathising and making sure their needs are satisfied. So let’s utilise that super power and put it to good use when creating reports.
Emotion Recognition in Voice: Building and Testing AI Models with Open Source Tools
This half-day workshop will bring you into the fascinating world of AI as we embark on a journey to develop an emotional recognition system from scratch, using Python and open-source models like Llama and Mistral. This hands-on workshop is designed to guide participants through the intricacies of building and testing language models, culminating in the creation of a fully automated testing pipeline.
Conference Day · 29th May
(KEYNOTE) Cultivating Culture in the Code Trenches: Navigating the Human Maze
Cultivating a positive culture within the tech industry, focusing on the challenges and strategies in team dynamics, leadership, and personal growth has been the intricate journey of Kristoffer Nordström, who in this keynote, brings a wealth of experience from a role in software testing and project management, offering insights into the complexities of building and nurturing teams and organisations in this field. The keynote will delve into the nuances of team and organisational development, highlighting what practices to adopt and what pitfalls to avoid. It will cater especially to budding testers and engineers, offering guidance on professional growth in the absence of strong leadership
Empowering Testers: Unveiling the Backstage Internal Developer Portal for Testers
Backstage is a powerful and open-source developer portal framework developed, offering a centralized platform for developers to access a wealth of tools, services, and knowledge, streamlining development workflows and enhancing productivity. In this talk with Alex, you’ll see how to Improve tester’s performance by creating golden paths with a pre-architected testing stack that provide clear examples on what and how to write tests.
Have you lost your mind(set)?
In testing, maintaining an open and flexible mindset is crucial, even in the face of distractions and unexpected events. In a live interactive demonstration with the audience, we will demonstrate how easily your mindset can be manipulated and how to break free from its limitations. Your state of mind not only affects your own behaviour, but also that of those around you, including your team. Therefore, you can utilize your behaviour to enhance team communication and productivity. In this talk with Linda, gain insight into identifying when your mindset has been manipulated, and knowing when to act and what to do, to “manipu-help” yourself (or others!) into a positive mindset.
It’s not the future, it’s a reality: Quality Engineering (QE) augmented with GenAI
The world of quality engineering (QE) and software testing is constantly evolving, and the emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence is radically changing the way these tasks are performed. In this talk, Javier will show how innovation in generative artificial intelligence applied to the field of QE and software engineering is a reality, and how it helps to accelerate and optimise testing activities at different levels such as: requirements, test case generation and automation scripts.
Breaking the illusion: No true CI/CD without Test Data
‘Breaking the Illusion: No True CI/CD Without Test Data’ addresses the critical challenge of incorporating high-quality test data into CI/CD pipelines, which is crucial for transforming the aspiration of full automation into a tangible reality. In this talk, Ana will emphasize how integrating Test Data Management into the CI/CD pipeline effectively solves this issue, providing reliable and quality test data essential for software development success. She’ll focus on how TDM not only improves quality, efficiency, and speeds up the implementation of CI/CD processes, but also represents a strategic investment leading to significant return on investment.
Why Testers don’t get Credit Cards
During a sync-call with an AI-automation tool vendor who was trying to ‘make it’ in the testing market, some interesting epiphanies happened. They were a funded start-up, their target audience; testers. Exciting, cutting edge technology that would help testers reliably automate repetitive tasks away. They were saying all the right things and none of the ‘replacing testers’-things… However, they weren’t finding profitable ground. Testers were overly critical, often requesting conflicting things. Most importantly, though, they didn’t have credit cards to pay for the tool, even if they were convinced. In this talk, Beren will explore why this is a problem and how to do something about it.
Building for Excellence: Test Design Patterns for Sustainable Automation Systems
Let’s take a deep dive into the most effective software design patterns applied to software test automation. Test automation is crucial for ensuring quality and efficiency in the software development process. However, the implementation of automated tests can be challenging due to the complexity and variability of software systems. A reason why it is important to apply software design patterns in test automation to enhance maintainability, scalability, and test efficiency. In this talk, Toni will discuss various design patterns and explore how they can be applied in test automation, and provide a detailed explanation of how we can apply SOLID principles to test development, as well as some of the most common design patterns.
Revolutionising QA with AI: From Manual to Intelligent Automation
Let’s go on an exploration of the crucial role of artificial intelligence (AI) in redefining quality assurance (QA) practices, showing AI’s ability not only to automate, but also to significantly improve the test case generation process, thus presenting a formidable challenge to the conventional wisdom of experienced QA practitioners. In this talk with Diego will take you through the evolution of Testing, the application of AI in QA and the engineering prompts for QA, as well as leaving you with some tricks for QA.
Charting the Way: Tester as Master, AI as Apprentice
Experience of implementing AI-based tools and assets in a global QA office. What can we improve with AI? This talk with Alejandro is about how AI does not replace the tester but empowers their capabilities and improves service quality. He’ll discuss how AI has been implemented and taught through a real case, comprising of two visions, one of the team running the service as a provider (NTT DATA) and the other of the customer managing the final delivery (Allianz). Alejandro will show you how to approach and get through the challenges of AI in testing.
(KEYNOTE) The Great Liberation – Software Quality Management in the Age of AI
The pace at which we are incorporating “artificial intelligence” into software testing is unprecedented and presents multiple ethical and technology challenges for the testing industry. As “AI” firms disband their ethics teams and commercial adoption outpaces the regulatory environment, the importance of quality systems couldn’t be higher. Through this keynote, Keith will explore the difficulty of testing networks and algorithms we don’t fully understand, how to refocus your test approach to adapt to AI tools, and a path forward for the testing industry to stay relevant when we need good testing more than ever.
How Testing is Evolving in DevOps
Can we be the same testers in a DevOps organisation, as in the past? Is that enough if we know test automation, exploratory testing, and many aspects of Shift Left, or are there any new aspects, concepts, and techniques that a tester shall be aware of? Are we able to Shape testing with the current competencies, or do we need more? In this talk, Szilard will recap on what is DevOps, describing the wall of confusion and the DevOps collaboration to break it. He will introduce what testing and QA activities we can do in each step of the Plan, Code, Build, Test, Deploy, Release, Operate, Monitor stages of a development value stream.
Smart Shift-Left Testing: How UX, Development and Testing can take advantage of each other
The pharmaceutical sector is heavily regulated, with testing being a crucial part to ensure patient safety when using medical devices. Efficiency in testing strategies is vital for maintainability, reducing team costs, and enhancing product quality simultaneously. Raquel Vilas, head of software testing activities at Instruments Development & Lifecycle Management of Diagnostic Grifols and current leader of a major UX project, will share how to implement a smart shift-left testing strategy. This strategy integrates UX considerations into the SW development lifecycle to improve product quality while increasing the efficiency of the testing teams.
From 0 to Hero. How to implement Performance Testing with K6
Dive into the world of performance testing with this talk on K6! Victore will explore how to develop projects from scratch and the benefits, demonstrating it with a real case study. From the conceptualisation of K6 in 2020 to its current leadership, you will learn best practices and strategies to optimise your testing. Discover how K6 can transform your projects and maximize system performance. Join Victor for an exciting and educational experience with this talk that will elevate your performance testing skills to the next level.
(MASTERCLASS) How to Create a Quality Strategy which works
Identifying a goal, conversing with stakeholders, Conversing with teams facing challenges, brainstorming, identifying themes & their initiatives, visualizing progress, measuring success is sometimes not so easy. In this masterclass, Maryam will take you through the above aspects and show you examples of roadmaps I she created and how to better visualize the roadmap for stakeholders.
Revolutionise bug management with La Cucaracha’s dance of AI and automation
Do you know what La Cucaracha is? Born from a hackathon and fuelled by AI technology, by comparing bug report content with team contexts and ownership, it automatically assigns bugs to the most suitable team, boosting efficiency and accelerating issue resolution. Join Anaïs in her talk to gain insight into lessons learned from executing a successful hackathon and understanding the inner workings of La Cucaracha. How AI not only provides solutions but also support during solution development, as demonstrated by the GPT API and GitHub Copilot. We will also explore the integration with Slack, JIRA and Amplitude, which further streamlines the bug management process.
Front-end Performance testing & Microservices: How to achieve fast and fluid User Experience with Google Core Web Vitals
Google Core Web Vitals (CWV) are metrics that measure the speed and responsiveness of web pages. They are important for online stores like Isabelle’s company because they affect the user experience of a website and its ranking in Google search results. In her talk, Isabelle will show how to mobilise DevOps microservices teams to continuously test and monitor CWV. She will also share real-world examples of a microservice team’s testing and monitoring process. Join her talk to learn how to improve your website’s front-end performance and boost your Google ranking!
The impact of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) on digital accessibility testing using automation tools
Accessibility requires knowledge of technical and legal regulations to be able to create test cases that fit the project, as well as knowledge of the different languages to identify errors and to be able to execute the test cases efficiently. Merging the potential of generative AI with the most reliable library in accessibility test automation, hiberus solves the problem of accessibility testing so that QA professionals can carry out their work in a simpler, more efficient and consistent way. In this talk, Breixo and Raul will discuss generative AI and its integration into automated digital accessibility testing.
Conference Day · 30th May
(KEYNOTE) HIGH FIBER COUNT – Weaving Quality into the Organizational Fabric
Organizational culture does not develop in a linear fashion, nor does it evolve in isolated pillars. Organizational culture is weaved together from many interwinding strands. It’s the way we recruit, the way we handle our daily meetings, the way we advertise ourselves. It’s the way we handle crisis, or change, or conflict. It’s how we design our offices and how we design our swag. It’s how we converse with each other, and how we communicate our wins and losses. This talk covers approaches, tools and strategies for effective communication and process design based on real world examples and experience. Every subject covered is backed by examples and suggestions for implementation that attend.
Data Driven Decisions in Testing
Imagine your team is in the middle of developing an important feature. The feature is worth hundreds of thousands of euros to the company and there’s a hard deadline of when this has to go out to customers. The team is working against the clock with less than a week to deliver. Suddenly a bug comes in. Your product is completely unusable for a customer. The display is totally broken. What do you do? How can you balance the risk of the time needed to investigate this issue with the hard deadline for the feature? The answer to all these questions is simple. Data. Join Heather in her talk to explore how data took decision-making process to the next level. You’ll get insights into how leveraging the data available can bring whole new perspectives on the risk your business and team need to mitigate.
Make a fearless start with security testing
Security testing can feel like a daunting task. It’s a test specialty, and often an afterthought. How do these common vulnerabilities work and why do bad actors want to exploit them? Support your team in making the right decisions throughout the application life cycle. And, of course, testing the security of applications. In this talk you’ll gain insight into security tools and when to use them.
New trends in Quality Assurance: Leveraging AI and Blockchain for Advanced Software Testing
Transformative integration of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Blockchain technology within the realm of Quality Assurance (QA) and charting a path for organisations to reach new heights of automation maturity is now upon us.. This talk with Diogo will unveil how AI is revolutionising QA through machine learning algorithms, enabling predictive analytics and intelligent test case creation that enhance the efficiency and accuracy of autonomous testing.
Test automation for long term success
It’s one thing to start automating but another to keep automating over time! Javier in his talk will discuss the motivations that usually lead us to start automating and compare them with those that motivate us to continue automating. He’ll explain the case from the beginning of the development of the Minsait test automation framework, a tool that has proven to be key to the success of test automation in this specific case, and will analyse the evolution of the automation activity until it is considered essential in this client’s projects and how he got there.
Ensuring Accuracy and Quality in Multilingual Call Transcription and Summarization
In the realm of virtual telephony, Enrique’s team introduced a feature to transcribe calls in English, Spanish, and French, further providing users with summaries and key topics. Faced with the challenge of validating this process, Enrique (QA Lead) and Kevin (QA Specialist in Linguistics) developed an innovative testing strategy. Utilising OpenAPI, Python, and Cypress, they designed tests focusing on various scenarios to assure the quality of this groundbreaking feature. Join them as they share insights and methodologies, setting new standards in the virtual telephony domain.
Test Management Is Dead: Building the Future by Managing Up
As testers, we focus on our craft, but to keep the agency and do our best work, we have to defocus and spend a significant amount of effort to manage up. Irja will share her experience and practical tips, so that testers, test leads, managers, and other practitioners will be able to apply them in their favor. This talk will help you avoid falling into the same traps Irja did because they will recognise the importance and apply the skills on time in their work.
Indicators, the road to observability and standardisation
Who hasn’t sometimes found themselves responding based on feelings or seeing progress ranging from 0% to 100% after an update of the indicators? To avoid such misinformation and uncertainty, we rely on the continuous measurement of the different stages of software development and, in particular, in the testing stages. This not only helps us to mitigate misinformation or uncertainty. In this talk, Vicente and Gerardo will show how having clear and objective measurements allow us to determine if the return oriented towards the objectives is the expected one, and all this is achieved through an automatic and continuous measurement.
Use of physical robots for end-to-end automation of Phygital (Physical + Digital) devices
As technology advances, more and more devices are enabled to connect with humans both digitally and physically. This merging of the physical and digital world has given birth to the term ‘Phygital’, providing a unique interactive experience for us. In the physical world, testing has historically been a repetitive mechanical process but in the ‘Phygital’ world not only physical outcome, but also digital outcome is critical to the end user, making complex testing a continuous and essential requirement. Robotic Test Automation is a faculty in which robots or ‘collaborative robots’ are used to perform fully automated physical and digital end-to-end testing. Join Vinod in his talk to understand Robotic Test Automation.
(KEYNOTE) Left flank is falling! Continuous communication in the heat of battle
After taking up Viking-age battle reenactment as a hobby, Veerle noticed a parallel between medieval combat sports and software development: the winning teams are not the ones with the strongest individuals, but those who communicate most effectively. This talk will be all about the practicalities of communication within Agile teams. Do you feel like you need to wait for the retro to bring up something that bothers you? Do you think “I’m about to get fired” when your manager asks if you’ve got a minute? Hate receiving slack messages that just say ‘Hello’, to then get ghosted after you reply? Join in and learn to manage these experiences. Learn how communication can help your team to win.
A little less testing, a little more quality
How significant is software testing in the pursuit of quality, while acknowledging its limitations?Drawing from personal experiences, João, in his talk, will share how adapting to shorter release cycles and architectural changes became essential, as well as a shift in strategy towards progressively rolling out new features and a focus on developers’ practices to enhance software quality. He’ll delve into the decision-making process between testing and alternative methods. Note that this talk is not in any way against testing. It’s about how testing should be done at the right places and right time, and how sometimes you don’t need testing at all!
Mastering Automation: Unlocking Efficiency through Atomic Test Design
Big things do come in small packages, and end-to-end atomic tests are no exception. By focusing on a single feature and reducing the size of the tests, we can achieve fast, focused, and reliable feedback from our end-to-end automation tests. In this talk, Sargis will explore the advantages of atomic tests and how they can solve common problems like unreliable test results, slow tests, and hard-to-debug tests. Additionally, he’ll show real-world examples of the benefits of atomic testing through a case study that resulted in a multiple-time reduction in test suite execution time.
(MASTERCLASS) Writing Clean Tests with Playwright
We usually don’t write maintainable tests. Once a test passes, we forget about it. Then we make the ultimate insult for clean code – we duplicate it and modify it a bit. In the end, we have a pile of (maybe) passing tests that we don’t want to return to. Not today. In this masterclass, we’re going to write Playwright tests that are readable and maintainable. We’ll refactor them, introduce patterns and Page Object Model and Page Factory, and when we’re done, it will be easy to add the next tests. Our tests deserve better. Let’s make them clean and shiny.
Your problems never cease
Advisor, trouble-shooter, engineer, fixer, consultant, expert. What do these words all have in common? They are all labels used to describe people who solve problems, a core aspect of leadership and testing. Everyone has problems, either explicit or implicit problems you may not even know yet. In this talk, Russell will share the lessons he has learnt and useful techniques to help solve testing problems for you and your colleagues. He’ll show you the key skills to become a trusted problem solver no matter the problem. Attend this session and explore how the right approach to problems can help to get buy-in to the solutions and influence others in the process.
TestOps: A Journey to Story-Based Releases
Continuous deployment of small, incremental changes is achievable for everyone! Mazin’s went on a journey of implementing a robust test strategy in the public domain, leading to story-based releases. Discover how he created a development process that supports the test strategy and how it was embraced by the development teams, allowing them to release stories into production faster and with more confidence. Gain insight into how he overcame the challenges of end-to-end testing before merging a story and how he enabled isolated testing of stories in dynamic development environments, significantly reducing maintenance. Join Mazin in this talk, where you go on his journey to story-based releases.