SEASTAR QUALITY
CONFERENCE 2023

When you think of “Software Quality Engineering” - what comes to your mind? Typically, one’s mind gets clouded with words like automation, continuous testing, automated quality gates, CI/CD, observability, SonarQube, DORA metrics, SRE, and so on.

While all these things that appear to the mind are important, is organizational investment in tooling and tech enough to deliver quality software?

Have a look at some famous quotes by Jerry Weinberg.
Quality is value to some person. And value means what they are willing to sacrifice or pay to achieve it.
No matter what they tell you at first, it is always a people problem.
No matter how chaotic it sounds, everyone is only trying to help.

Problems with the quality of the software typically mean the software is in trouble. Weinberg’s three quotes mentioned above give us some idea of why software gets in trouble. And also, a way to think about minimizing those troubles. Engineering solutions for software quality are just a tiny part of the big scheme of things when it comes to delivering quality software.
To minimize the problems around software quality, it is important to understand what quality really means in the software-building context. To build software products and deliver them on time without compromising on quality, it is important to understand the notions of quality and the relationship between them. At the same time, it is also important to understand how to bring all the decisions about quality into the consciousness of everyone involved in software building.
This hands-on practical training is designed around “Quality Conscious Software Delivery” - an award-winning framework developed by Lalit Bhamare (EuroSTAR Best Paper 2022 award) which emphasizes the importance of software testing as a cognitive and social activity.

Lalit believes that investing in testing education for the whole team, socializing testing craft in the team, and using that learning to foster the quality mindset, enabling people and processes to support quality work at every stage is the way to go forward.

In this highly interactive two-day workshop, participants will learn the four stages of the QCSD framework i.e. Enable, Engage, Execute and Evaluate for quality-conscious software delivery.

Participants will learn how to step up their game and enable the whole team testing to support whole team quality -- through the exercises, discussions, and experiments -- and succeed with it. Lalit will share his experiments around succeeding with QCSD, the challenges he faced and how did he overcome them.
Join Lalit and sail with him in what he calls an “intellectual voyage”.

Participants will learn below topics with practical hands-on in the workshop:
Understanding quality in the context of software delivery
Understanding through exercises, why problems around quality happen
Interactional expertise for effective communication and social skills as a tester
How to set up and run "QX - Quality Experience Session" by collaborating with Design/UX teams
How to set up and run "Testability Sessions" by collaborating with Programmers and Architects
How to set up and run "Product Coverage Sessions" by collaborating with POs, Programmers, and cross-functional teams
How to establish "Quality Criteria" on team/business unit/org level
How to create a context-driven automation strategy for your project
How to use exploratory testing, automated checks, and DevOps capabilities to create "continuous discovery and continuous feedback" loops

Key takeaways:
Takeaway 1
How to "Enable" - people and project for quality (mindset, skills, critical thinking, and culture)
Takeaway 2
How to "Engage" people - for quality through pairing, collaboration, risk storming, continuous testing, etc.
Takeaway 3
How to "Execute" and "Evaluate"- for quality with clean and testable code, improving testability, skilled testing with an effective strategy, automating checks, continuous discovery, and continuous feedback through monitoring and
alerts etc.

Intended audience: whole team

Software continues to revolutionize the world, impacting nearly every aspect of our work, family, and personal life. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are playing key roles in this revolution through improvements in search results, recommendations, forecasts, and other predictions.

AI and ML technologies are being used in platforms for digital assistants, home entertainment, medical diagnosis, customer support, and autonomous vehicles. Testing practitioners are recognizing the potential for advances in AI and ML to be leveraged for automated testing—an area that still requires significant manual effort. Tariq King will introduce you to the world of AI for software testing.

Learn the fundamentals behind autonomous and intelligent agents, ML approaches including Bayesian networks, decision tree learning, neural networks, and reinforcement learning. You’ll discover how to apply these techniques to common testing tasks such as identifying testable features, generating test flows, and detecting erroneous states.

Come and train your first artificial brain on how to test software!

Key takeaways from Tariq's tutorial:
- Foundations of AI and Machine Learning (ML)
- Applications of AI/ML to Software Testing
- Practical Approaches, Tools, and Techniques for AI-Driven Testing

More testers are gravitating towards using exploratory testing and context driven testing techniques in their organizations. However, as testers start to embrace these testing methodologies, they are uncovering questions in their implementation.
With the help of some cool robots, we will explore the various aspects of testing including test planning, test design, test execution, and test reporting from the exploratory testing mindset. Testers who attend this session will leave understanding how to implement exploratory testing concepts through all the phases of test planning, design, execution, and reporting and feel confident returning to their organizations to implement their changes.

Learning Objectives:
• How the various aspects of the testing cycle (Test Planning, Design, Execution and Reporting) are different in Exploratory Testing than they are in traditional testing.
• How to implement Exploratory Testing concepts through the various aspects of the testing cycle.
• How to prepare their organizations for the shift from more traditional testing to Exploratory Testing.
• How to deal with resistance to Exploratory Testing techniques.

Tutorial Outline:
• Defining Context Driven and Exploratory Testing
• The Exploratory Testing Approach
o Test Strategies
o Test Plans
o Test Execution
o Reporting & Metrics

People sometimes suggest that the mission of testing is to compare the product to its specification — and therefore, if you don't have a specification, you can't test.

Imagine you've been given something to evaluate: a product, or a feature, or an API. Perhaps all you've got is a vague statement, or a couple of claims about what it should do. Perhaps there are some examples of intended behavior, expressed in the form "Given", "When", and "Then". Maybe you've been given a written document that describes a product or a feature — and when you look at it, you find out that the description is inconsistent, or out of date, or incomplete. Can you still test?

Of course, you can.

The real job of testing is to reveal the status of the product: to learn about it, to understand what it really does, to identify problems that might threaten its value, and to describe what you've learned. Although advance knowledge about the product might help, specifications, requirements documents, whiteboard sketches, and verbal descriptions are essentially rumors, wishes, or dreams until we've tested. The tester cannot simply depend on maps or descriptions; the tester must evaluate them skeptically, compare them to the product, challenge them, — or, sometimes, produce them when they are not already there.

In this class, we'll all see a product for the first time. We'll experience normal and necessary confusion, and through testing and map-making, and we'll feel the confusion lifting. We'll practice producing descriptions and representations of the product that will help us to find bugs that matter.

Key takeaways from Michael's tutorial:

- Testing any product well requires us to learn the product — which in turn requires us to test the product.
- Testing early on is messy and confusing; this is natural and normal; the mess and the confusion lift.
- No two products are alike, so the process of learning a product is always different to some degree. But there are systematic ways to organize the process of learning. 

The Problem Being Addressed

Rob Sabourin observes that, today, many software testers are challenged to quickly identify product quality concerns amidst turbulent project contexts. Business, technology, and organizational factors change frequently. Testers are forced to continuously adapt, to think on their feet, and to provide stakeholders, team members and even system users, with meaningful feedback about quality concerns, and operational readiness.

There are many different test automation technologies which can facilitate the control and observation of software. Rob notes that, among his customers, test automation technologies are mainly limited to implementing automated verification checks, as part of regression suites, in continuous integration and deployment processes.

This tutorial will address the problem of how test automation tools, methods, and techniques can be effectively used to facilitate, and improve the efficiency of, exploratory testing.

Tutorial Content

Rob will share insights about his assertion that “not all test automation is regression testing”. Exploratory testing involves the design, and execution, of tests as the testers learns about the system. Rob will share examples of how he has used test automation during charter driven, session based, exploratory testing. Delegates will see how test automation tools enable control, and improve observation, of systems.

Exploratory testing can also benefit from automation in test design. In this tutorial Rob will share many examples how test design can be automated with various tools and scripts. Rob will provide a couple of automated test design exercises for delegates to gain some hands-on experience. Delegates will use tools available on the internet and also create a couple of basic Python scripts.

Examples shared will include exploratory testing of:
 Reconnaissance charter of a Microservice Architecture using a Rest API
 Claims testing charter of an Internet Search Engine – SevaSearch vs Google
 Dynamic analysis charter of network traffic actual versus billed via a major American
internet service provider.

Rob will share test charters, findings, scripts, and deliverables as well as comment on the effectiveness of automation to support the exploration.

“When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower.”
― Alexander Den Heijer


The success of an organization is highly dependent on the teams and driven by managers at different levels. The role of a manager in the development of teams is underrated. A bad manager can destroy a good team and a great manager can lift any mediocre team to greater heights. With so much focus on technical skills, the managers hardly receive any training or coaching to hone their managerial skills. Instead of learning through a systematic process, the managers are left in the wild to discover the ways to handle teams.

This workshop helps the managers – both new and experienced to understand the fundamentals, participate in exercises to discover insights and plan the journey to become a great manager. If you have a hard time managing the team, recently handed the ‘manager’ designation or want to learn the secrets to great management, this workshop is for you.



Intended Audience

• First time managers worried about the right way to manage teams
• Experienced managers interested in systematic learning about management
• Anyone interested in building high performing teams

Workshop Outline

1. Welcome to the Managerial Battleground
Becoming a manager has its own set of challenges for both the manager and the teams.
Let us understand the problems before we start thinking about solving them:

- What problems do you face as a manager?
- What problems do you face with your manager?


2. The Great Manager Expectations
All of us have worked with excellent managers and bad managers as well.
Let us understand what makes them good/bad and how we can meet the expectations from great managers:

- Types of Managers
- Attributes of Successful Managers


3. Managerial Skills Development
Once we are aware of what makes a great manager, it is time to work on the skills.
We will focus on the:

- Five rituals of leadership
- Development of high-performance teams
- Different roles of a manager


4. Resources
Learning is a continuous activity, and we will discuss multiple resources to continue our managerial journey even after the workshop:

- The rules of management
- Eight rituals of leadership
- Competency framework


KEY TAKEAWAYS:
Know the problems for today’s managers
Understand the skills of great managers
Beware of the traps in management
Build high performing teams