With the deadline fast approaching for PNSQC’s Call for Abstracts, a panel of testing leaders shared their ideas for potential paper topics, based on industry trends. Get inspired, get brainstorming, and get writing after reviewing this webinar.
In anticipation of this year’s PNSQC 3-day event in October, moderator Phil Lew assembled a panel of testing professionals — Alan Ark, Howard Chorney, Lee Copeland, and Anna Royzman — to speak about new concepts, pose questions they’d like to hear answered, and encourage people to submit an abstract to the conference, as it is a great opportunity for quality testers to get their voices heard and experience recognized by peers.
Some background about PNSQC
- It is the oldest software quality conference in North America, now in its 32nd year.
- The annual conference is held in Portland, Oregon.
- It is put on by a nonprofit organization run by volunteers, and focusing on the quality practitioner.
- Most of the papers are by people describing their own experiences, with a big focus on problems encountered, and how they’ve solved them.
- The lineup includes a wide range of topics and speakers — everything from automation and distributed teams, to measuring quality and user experience functionality guiding testing — with something for every skill level.
- Speakers submit 5-page papers, so it’s a hybrid between an academic conference and a commercial one. Papers are published and distributed in print and digitally.
And now the panel
Alan Ark, expert in automated testing, especially Selenium
- What are the latest trends in automation?
- What are the hottest tools and how are they being used? Tools like Selenium are for web-facing, and for Angular there’s the testing tool Protractor. But how do Angular 2 tools compare to Angular 1?
- How are the roles among dev, QA, and agile being blurred within a team?
- Parting words of wisdom on the paper process for PNSQC presenters: You will have multiple reviewers for your paper, and a lot of support. As someone who’s presented multiple times, Alan stresses that people want to hear what projects you’ve worked on, and what lessons you’ve learned.
Howard Chorney, technical director of Soasta
- Putting the abstract process in historical context, Howard says: Writing a paper isn’t scary, but an advantage. Writing a paper means you have something to base your presentation deck off of. It used to be required for every conference, and you’d be picked based on the paper. And it’s only 5 pages, so not intimidating.
- Performance engineering topic of particular interest: Performance needs to start at the beginning and work all the way through; how have you “moved to the left” on a project?
- Addressing code review tools used for performance, what results do you get by checking code for performance before it even goes into the build?
- What tools do you use for performance tests, including cloud-based?
- What challenges come up, and how did you resolve them?
- What is the analysis and reporting process like after you write a test, so you can report back?
- What industry tools for analysis do you use and why?
- E-commerce is a multi-billion dollar industry, and requires properly modeling user behavior in designing performance tests; how are you moving performance to the left through proper design?
- Parting Rule of Thumb: Allocate resources and release them!
Lee Copeland, SQE, author of A Practitioner’s Guide to Software Test Design
- Testers’ challenges with being agile, rather than just doing agile; so many have adopted the theories, but don’t understand the philosophies. Agile, done well, changes a whole organization, from job titles and how people work, and the management style. What are you trying to gain by “going agile”? Learning the benefits you can get.
- How do you test for usability? Comparing what is with what ought to be, when usability is an unknown?
- What’s different in testing for wearable or mobile, what are the new tools or techniques, and what problems are emerging? Wearables are a new field. Not every tester needs to learn about it, but if you do, you will be a niche, and in demand.
- How do we design systems to run on the cloud? How do we test for it? Are there specific test cases that we have in cloud-based systems that don’t exist anywhere else?
- What’s the testers’ role in the lean startup cycle?
- We now have to think about personal branding within the changing industry; how do we go about establishing ourselves as a different kind of tester?
- What are testers’ experiences in teams and collaborating?
- How do we design and test for security?
- What does the dev-ops movement mean for testers?
- What is the effect that certification has had on an organization, or the effect adopting a standard has had? What’s the situation before and after? Did it get better? What did you learn?
Anna Royzman, functional testing director and context-driven scholar
- Tell your leadership experience — how did you change your environment, your team dynamic, how did you get whole team to care about quality, or one person to care about process, and how did you get people to work well together? We’ll benefit from success stories by our peers and how they changed their company or team for the better.
- Testing education: There is a lot of info on the web. And a lot of fake info on the web. Fake standards. People use these metrics as a guide and never change. But that’s not how testing works. There is always something new or different. Devops. Lean. Kanban. New processes or concepts mean there are new values and it is up to the tester to teach other people on the team, and to stress the importance of testing these new systems, because developers will claim they don’t make mistakes with these new systems, but that isn’t the case. Testers need to be part of the system, and explain what value testing adds to the end process. What’s your experience with this?
What are the additional benefits to presenting at PNSQC?
Free admission to conference, access to colleagues as reviewers who support and guide you through the paper-writing process, and networking with peers about topics that interest you and help you with professional development.
Submit your abstract now, and we’re looking forward to seeing you in Portland in October!
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