Tony Grout, Head of Agile Transformation, Lloyds Banking Group

When your mission is to go at extreme speed,  what are the things you need to think of most? Tony talks about the mistakes he’s seen, the mistakes he’s made and the critical success factors he now engineers into any high velocity software delivery organisation.

Donald Firesmith, Principal Engineer, Client Technical Solutions, Software Solutions Division, Software Engineering Institute (SEI), USA

Testing philosophies are the small number of very general, fundamentally different ways of approaching testing. Most testers fall into one – or at most two – of these camps and know little about the others. Similarly, there are a very many testing types, and most testers regularly perform – or are even aware of – a relatively small percentage of them. This presentation introduces the attendees to these testing philosophies and types so that they are aware of and can appreciate the true breadth of testing.

Colin Deady, Test Manager, Capita IT Professional Services

Your team is using (or thinking about using) Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) and is having various degrees of success. Maybe your Scenarios are too convoluted and business interest in BDD is waning? Perhaps software is still failing the test of acceptance? Or, maybe everything is great but your team is clamouring to further improve.

In this case study we will look at how a team moved to BDD, and then re-invented both BDD and themselves to successfully deliver working software to their client first time, every time with zero known defects eight releases in a row.

Dan Humphrey, Principal Technical Consultant, Planit Test Management Solutions

Docker has been gaining traction in DevOps circles for some time, but in recent months it seems like everyone is scrambling to build tools around this exciting technology. Dan looks at the benefits for software development and test teams, and demonstrates the usage of Docker in testing and test automation.

Valéry Raulet, Chief Technology Officer, Testhouse

Visual Studio Online (VSO) is the evolution of Team Foundation Server for the Cloud. VSO is an ALM solution for the management of Microsoft-based software development. However, recent improvements in VSO 2015 will open the door to integrating other tools across the ALM lifecyle.

Our presentation will outline a scenario where you might wish to develop a Java project using Eclipse, build using Jenkins, deploy using Ant and run automated tests using Selenium. This is now possible thanks to the multiple integration points in VSO.

Clemens Reijnen, Sogeti

Release Cycle times increase more and more due to optimized agile development practices. Teams are getting close to the DevOps dream. A common blocker to move forward are often the infrastructure needs. Fast and flexible provisioning of environments is often blocked by procurement cycles, datacenter and support limitations.

In this session Clemens will look at the measurements to take, supported by real life experiences. So that the testing activity isn’t the one that blocks teams from getting to the DevOps dream.

Dot Graham, Dorothy Graham Consulting

A number of ideas in test automation seem very sensible at first glance, but contain pitfalls and problems that can be avoided. Dot Graham describes five of these “intelligent mistakes.” (1) Automated tests will find more bugs quicker! But automation doesn’t find bugs, tests do. (2) Spending a lot on a tool must guarantee great benefits. But good automation does not come “out of the box” and is not automatic. (3) Let’s automate all of our manual tests. This may not give you better (or faster) testing and will miss out on some benefits. (4) Tools are expensive so we have to show a return on investment. This is not only surprisingly difficult but may actually be harmful. (5) Because they are called “testing tools”, they must be tools for testers to use. But making testers become test automators may be damaging to both testing and automation.

Adam Knight, Teradata - RainStor

A case study looking at the unique challenges facing my team in testing a data storage product, through its evolution into an established Big Data application. I will examine the techniques and approaches that have helped to tackle these within the time-box constraints of a successful Agile adoption.

Raji Bhamidipati, Senior Test Engineer, NewVoiceMedia

When we hear the words “pairing in development”, the first thought that comes to my mind is that it refers to developers pairing during their pair programming sessions.  We have now expanded this to dev/test pair testing and also started pairing as testers on features being developed in our team. We have found that our testing quality had greatly improved since then. After a little analysis we identified some of the key reasons for this; this presentation shares our positive experience on pairing as testers.