CAST 2022: Full Schedule

8:00am PST

Registration and Breakfast

Monday November 7, 2022 8:00am - 9:00am PST
Ballroom Atrium - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Meal, Breakfast

9:00am PST

Beyond Infinity - A Tester's Dilemma

A Survey of Test Design Ideas

Isn't the eternal problem: so many tests, so little time?? Let's explore, evaluate, and practice using a variety of methods for generating test ideas. From traditional test design techniques to heuristics, sampling from taxonomies and checklists, and incorporating other creative schemes, let's make and run some tests! Along the way we'll shake out some biases, slash some redundancies, enhance some old standbys and even sprinkle in some quick repurposing -- all to help you find the quality detractors you're looking for with less wasted time and effort.

Hands-on: we'll work with multiple targets, but feel free to bring an application as well.

Speakers

Dawn Haynes

Hello, my name is Dawn and I'm a software tester. It's not my fault, I was born that way. As a lifelong seeker of knowledge and experience with software and testing (35+ years in IT), I work with testers and teams around the world to elevate testing as a discipline, and target quality... Read More →

Monday November 7, 2022 9:00am - 10:30am PST
Merengue - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Tutorial

9:00am PST

Test Automation 101 for coders

Setting up your test automation environment from scratch can be time-consuming and an annoyance. This tutorial starts with a 1-hour challenge. I will set up a test automation framework with Selenium and Cucumber in less than one hour. All code is open source so you can easily join in.
This tutorial is designed for Testers and Developers who have programming skills and want to get started with test automation. You will get insights into how easily and quickly you can set up your test automation framework with open-source tools such as Selenium and Cucumber. You will learn about the basics of building your test automation framework. In one day it is very difficult to get every detail but you will be able to use the presented open-source framework in your project and know how to extend it. This tutorial is for people already familiar with the basics of using an IDE such as IntelliJ (or Eclipse.). The used archetype is available in kotlin and java.

Speakers

Boris Wrubel

Boris Wrubel has dedicated himself to software testing with focus on test automation in agile projects for over ten years. His professional experience ranges from large-scale projects in the banking and telecommunications industries to the municipal sector.Alongside these projects... Read More →

Monday November 7, 2022 9:00am - 10:30am PST
Tango A -2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Tutorial

9:00am PST

Usability for everyone: Are you excluding some users from accessing your website?

Fifteen percent of the world's population (over 1 billion people) live with disabilities yet it is often a missed part of our testing process. Our websites and applications should be built and tested to ensure that as many users as possible can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with it. Understanding these diverse users and the different ways they interact with our applications can make a better, more robust, product. In this session we will learn the different ways that users interact with your site while also learning the basics of accessibility. We will learn how to assess the accessibility of a component or page, how to use accessibility testing tools and how to interpret the results. Additionally we will learn practical manual tests that will help you quickly audit the usability or your application.Familiarity with HTML, CSS, and browser inspect tools is helpful, but not required.

Speakers

Cordellia Yokum

Cordellia Yokum based in Baltimore and currently Test Lead at SaksOff5th.com. She has over 10 years of development and testing experience on everything from e-commerce, to complex products like Airtable, to large higher education websites. She is focused on solving problems before... Read More →

Monday November 7, 2022 9:00am - 10:30am PST
Samba - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Tutorial

10:30am PST

Break

Monday November 7, 2022 10:30am - 10:45am PST
Ballroom Atrium - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Meal, Break

10:45am PST

Beyond Infinity - A Tester's Dilemma Part 2

Speakers

Dawn Haynes

Monday November 7, 2022 10:45am - 12:00pm PST
Merengue - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Tutorial

10:45am PST

Test Automation 101 for coders Part 2

Speakers

Boris Wrubel

Monday November 7, 2022 10:45am - 12:00pm PST
Tango A -2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Tutorial

10:45am PST

Usability for everyone: Are you excluding some users from accessing your website? Part 2

Speakers

Cordellia Yokum

Monday November 7, 2022 10:45am - 12:00pm PST
Samba - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Tutorial

12:00pm PST

Lunch

Monday November 7, 2022 12:00pm - 1:00pm PST
Ballroom Atrium - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Meal, Lunch

1:00pm PST

Beyond Infinity - A Tester's Dilemma Part 3

Speakers

Dawn Haynes

Monday November 7, 2022 1:00pm - 2:15pm PST
Merengue - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Tutorial

1:00pm PST

Test Automation 101 for coders Part 3

Speakers

Boris Wrubel

Monday November 7, 2022 1:00pm - 2:15pm PST
Tango A -2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Tutorial

1:00pm PST

Usability for everyone: Are you excluding some users from accessing your website? Part 3

Speakers

Cordellia Yokum

Monday November 7, 2022 1:00pm - 2:15pm PST
Samba - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Tutorial

2:15pm PST

Break

Monday November 7, 2022 2:15pm - 2:30pm PST
Ballroom Atrium - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Meal, Break

2:30pm PST

Beyond Infinity - A Tester's Dilemma Part 4

Speakers

Dawn Haynes

Monday November 7, 2022 2:30pm - 3:30pm PST
Merengue - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Tutorial

2:30pm PST

Test Automation 101 for coders Part 4

Speakers

Boris Wrubel

Monday November 7, 2022 2:30pm - 3:30pm PST
Tango A -2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Tutorial

2:30pm PST

Usability for everyone: Are you excluding some users from accessing your website? Part 4

Speakers

Cordellia Yokum

Monday November 7, 2022 2:30pm - 3:30pm PST
Samba - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Tutorial

3:30pm PST

Welcome Reception

Welcome Ceremony for attendees

Monday November 7, 2022 3:30pm - 5:00pm PST
Pool Deck - 4TH FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Organizational Session, Break

5:30pm PST

CAST Test-a-thon! Sponsored by: 1-800 Contacts

You'll be using the skills you've gained from the Tutorials and helping your team find bugs in a product.

Monday November 7, 2022 5:30pm - 8:00pm PST
Pool Deck - 4TH FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Test-a-thon

8:00pm PST

Game Night

We'll have tabletop games for groups to play or hang out and confer with other attendees.

Monday November 7, 2022 8:00pm - 11:00pm PST
Pool Deck - 4TH FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Games

8:00am PST

Registration and Breakfast

Tuesday November 8, 2022 8:00am - 9:00am PST
Ballroom Atrium - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Meal, Breakfast

9:00am PST

Opening Session

Opening Session - Welcome!

Tuesday November 8, 2022 9:00am - 9:15am PST
Ovation Ballroom - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Organizational Session

9:15am PST

Making Test Reports Suck Less

Typical test reports are horrible. They rely on useless, or even harmful, metrics, pretty charts and do not provide the information needed for stakeholders to make decisions. In this keynote, Cindy will share what should be in good test reports. This will be an active hands-on session where the participants will actually test something and generate an effective test report.

You will learn about generating a test report. A test report that allows your stakeholders to immediately know about the status of the system, including the areas that were tested well, tested lightly or not tested at all. A test report that does not rely upon those pretty charts – and, preferably, does not even contain them. Cindy will explain why the charts and metrics are not just unhelpful but also potentially dangerous to include in your reports. She will share her extensive experience in changing the expectations of the stakeholders to no longer want the charts but instead to be expecting a report that contains a contextual actionable story about the value of the testing.

Speakers

Cindy Lawless

Cindy Lawless is a Senior Manager of Test Engineering at DNSFilter in Washington, D.C. and has been testing enterprise level solutions for over 15 years. She has led testing efforts from the trenches with applications focusing on Identity & Access Management (EmpowerID) and SaaS... Read More →

Tuesday November 8, 2022 9:15am - 10:00am PST
Ovation Ballroom - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Keynote

10:00am PST

Break

Tuesday November 8, 2022 10:00am - 10:15am PST
Ballroom Atrium - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Meal, Break

10:15am PST

It's all about the money, performance testing and infrastructure costs

The saying goes money rules the world, luckily in the testing field it is quality. performance testers are being exposed things like FinOps or a massive Azure bill. So let's start incorporating costs into our performance tests to make the best performance solution and the most economical solution!

This Workshop will teach the art of monitoring costs as an outcome of a performance test. This Workshop will go in-depth on how and with what tools you can monitor the costs of the cloud infrastructure on which the applications is hosted. We will go in-depth into how you can test different infrastructure setups and compare performance levels to the costs. With this hands-on workshop I will use real life examples on how different infrastructure can have an impact on performance and your Azure bill. Lastly I will show you different ways to increase your performance and saving a few dollars by incorporating things like auto scaling! When following this workshop, you will learn an industry standard approach to analyze recourse monitoring in combination with infrastructure costs. We will touch upon how you can use a performance test to validate you have the right infrastructure set-up. We will set-up an auto-scaling performance test load plan which you can utilize at your own job-environment. We use real life examples which attendees use to practice the skills you will learn during this workshop.

Speakers

Twan Koot

Hi! My name is Twan Koot and I'm 29 years old from The Netherlands. I'm a performance engineer who's passion lies in creating and improving software to achieve high performing applications. I believe in a no nonsense testing approach in which quality should be number one. Apart from... Read More →

Tuesday November 8, 2022 10:15am - 11:45am PST
Merengue - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Workshop

10:15am PST

Testing Without Requirements

"I can't test that!", proclaimed the software tester, in response to being asked to test that a software system behaves in an "acceptable" manner. This tester was Ben Simo. He was wrong. He has since changed his position on what makes acceptable requirements.

Join Ben Simo as he makes the case that we can test without requirements, and that our testing needs to cover more than what is explicitly specified. Ben will share his experience and approach to testing without and beyond any specified requirements. You'll then have an opportunity to explore some software in search of the implicit, the inferred, and the ambiguous: the desires that can help drive our testing towards useful discoveries.

Bring a computer or mobile device, or find a friend who has one.

Speakers

Ben Simo

Ben Simo is a software quality leader who has been helping make software better for over 30 years. Ben has applied his skills as a software tester, designer of testing tools, and quality coach in a variety of industries, including: healthcare, finance, defense, education, marketing, ecommerce... Read More →

Tuesday November 8, 2022 10:15am - 11:45am PST
Ovation Ballroom - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Workshop

11:45am PST

Lunch and Learn - Sponsored by: mabl

Lunch

Tuesday November 8, 2022 11:45am - 12:45pm PST
Ballroom Atrium - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Meal, Lunch

12:45pm PST

Testing a website with inclusivity

Modern web applications demand more and more challenges when it comes to developing, testing and using them, and one of those big challenges is to have a web application with an inclusive design.

The funny thing is that inclusivity can be a big word to size and rather complicated to achieve or implement in a product, and in many cases from the different perspectives of the parties involved in building the product it can be seen as a stone in the shoe, more work, difficult to achieve or simply something that does not add value, in this practical talk we will talk about that, and how we should test and develop a website to ensure that it at least has some principles of inclusive design and development, yes you read that right, some of the principles because the reality is that in some cases even with the most inclusive development we cannot be entirely inclusive to all.

We will also try to put ourselves in the shoes of the other side of the coin through practical exercises, so that we can understand the importance of creating applications with an accessible heart.

Speakers

Sergio Riveros

Electronic Engineer, extreme sportsman and lover of Colombia, with more than 10 years of experience, facing different challenges throughout my career, as software developer, software testing and leading teams. Founder of Mokana a Colombian project where we seeks to create a new Colombia... Read More →

Tuesday November 8, 2022 12:45pm - 1:30pm PST
Merengue - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Track Session

12:45pm PST

The Innovation Ninja

Organizations must be innovative to be competitive, valuable, and relevant. In many organizations today, you might be wondering how our season of widespread isolation will affect the product and service innovation in your organization. Limits can encourage and inspire creativity, but there's also proactive steps that you can take to unlock creative genius in individuals and in teams.

In this interactive, engaging, inspiring, and fun chat, I'll explore creative processes and the theory/ history behind creative masterpieces. I'll share predictions and trends about an imagination revolution and the future of innovation.

I'll examine and share practical ways to flex creative muscles. Participants will actively engage in various types of creative exercises utilizing auditory, tacit, visual, and imagination in a unique and captivating virtual session. I'll challenge the innovative mind in activities to unlock the creative genius in work and life.

Speakers

Amber Vanderburg

Amber Vanderburg is a multi award winning international businessperson, keynote speaker, and founder of The Pathwayz Group. In 2016, she left her job in corporate HR to become the only female, only American, and only blonde Academy elite football coach for the Adidas Gameday Academy/Paris... Read More →

Tuesday November 8, 2022 12:45pm - 1:30pm PST
Ovation Ballroom - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Track Session

1:30pm PST

Break

Tuesday November 8, 2022 1:30pm - 1:45pm PST
Ballroom Atrium - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Meal, Break

1:45pm PST

Breadth, Depth, and Prioritization: Planning and Presenting Test Coverage

In this workshop, we will discuss different approaches for modeling test coverage across a product, and then practice techniques in mapping coverage for a real product. We will then use these models to plan test coverage, responding to different types of projects and inputs to exercise our models and understanding.

We hope we can learn together to talk about and plan test coverage that considers context and addresses immediate risks to a project. We’ll consider our choices about coverage as tradeoffs, balancing business drivers, technical risks, time, existing test automation, change, and experience.

The time you have to test is always limited, which means you can’t test (and cover) everything. Tough choices have to be made. In our workshop, can you spend your coverage budget profitably, balancing regression, exploration, and investments in documentation and automation? We’ll consider choices like this to help us think about how we prioritize our time and effort.

Learning Objectives:
Practical ways to model and depict coverage
Terminology and practice for discussing coverage and tradeoffs around coverage
Coverage as a budget - how can a limited resource be spent wisely?

Speakers

Eric Proegler

Eric Proegler is a Staff Test Instructure Engineer for Credit Karma in Oakland, California. Previously, he’s been a Senior Director of Quality Engineering, a performance testing consulting practice lead, a Testing Tools Product Manager, and the President of the Association for Software... Read More →

Stephanie Dukes

As head of Quality Engineering at Credit Karma, Stephanie has built a diverse team of engineers focused on developing and embedding quality practices, reliability tooling and security standards across the entire engineering organization, which makes up more than half of Credit Karma’s... Read More →

Tuesday November 8, 2022 1:45pm - 3:15pm PST
Ovation Ballroom - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Workshop

1:45pm PST

Hands-On with AI for Testing and Testing AI

AI/ML for testing often get a bad reputation because of overstated claims and marketing. However, it is important for software testers to get hands-on exposure to what these technology are, how they work, how they're used for testing, and the challenges with testing AI/ML based systems.

Industry practitioners, vendors and researchers are leveraging AI and machine learning (ML) to develop a new wave of test automation tools. These tools automatically explore, model, reason, learn, and test software applications. With all of the hype and marketing around AI/ML, it can be difficult to determine what this technology is really all about. What are the benefits and limitations of using AI/ML for testing? How do I get started? What tools are available? Are there additional skills I need to learn? In this workshop, you'll get hands-on with AI for software testing by training your first neural network, and developing a testing strategy that seeks to break the teachable machine. You'll play around with computer vision technologies and learn how these advances are being applied to testing problems. Lastly, you'll then take turns putting on your data scientist, ml engineering, and software testing hats to gain practical experience and insights into how AI/ML systems are trained, validated, and evaluated using ML libraries such as Tensorflow, Scikit-Learn, Pandas, and more.

Speakers

Tariq King

Tariq King enjoys breaking things and is currently the Chief Scientist at test.ai, where he leads research and development of their core platform for AI-driven testing. He started his career in academia as a tenure-track professor and later transitioned into the software industry... Read More →

Tuesday November 8, 2022 1:45pm - 3:15pm PST
Merengue - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Workshop

3:15pm PST

Break

Tuesday November 8, 2022 3:15pm - 3:30pm PST
Ballroom Atrium - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Meal, Break

3:30pm PST

Critical Role: Filling Out Your Character Sheet

The realm of software quality professionals has no standardization in title or job descriptions. The expectations of an Software Development Engineer in Test (SDET) may be the same or wildly different from an Automation Engineer or a Test Engineer. Is a Quality Analyst, Quality Advocate, Quality Assurance the same job?

Once you get hired, the guidance on growth is not a whole lot better. Competency matrices with vague and poorly defined skills seem to be the norm. So what do you actually work on to grow your career?

In tabletop roleplaying games, such as Dungeons and Dragons, you figure out who your character is, by maintaining a character sheet. A character sheet consists of high level ability scores like Dexterity that feed into specific skills such as Sleight of Hand. Let's take some lessons from this realm to think about what abilities and skills are crucial for software engineering.
Bring a pencil! Participants can expect to fill out a software engineering themed character sheet for themselves as the talk progresses. Individual contributors can use their sheet to inform which skills you want to work on and which skills to highlight in your review. Managers may run the exercise with their teams as a fun way to think about team composition.

Speakers

Curtis Pettit

Curtis graduated from Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Software Engineering where he focused on software testing. For over 15 years he has worked on teams, large and small, approaching software with a balance of exploration and automation... Read More →

Tuesday November 8, 2022 3:30pm - 4:15pm PST
Merengue - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Track Session

3:30pm PST

Death to Test Cases!

Testers from countless domains continue to share with me how their testing is bogged down by bloated and outdated test documentation requirements. In some cases, more time is spent writing (and maintaining) test docs than actually evaluating software. That sounds lopsided to me.

So let's break the mold together. Starting with a blank slate, let's explore and challenge the goals, needs, and expectations of test documentation. Then we'll compare and contrast a variety of documentation methods, while writing some tests of our own along the way. At the end of our journey, we'll evaluate our tests and consolidate our experience.

What will be your takeaway? A new test doc standard proposal? A checklist for reviewing test docs? A set of templates and examples to share? Ideas for training new testers? Maybe just reminding ourselves that there's more than one way to doc a test will be enough? I think that would be a great place to start!

Speakers

Dawn Haynes

Tuesday November 8, 2022 3:30pm - 4:15pm PST
Ovation Ballroom - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Track Session

4:15pm PST

Break

Tuesday November 8, 2022 4:15pm - 4:30pm PST
Ballroom Atrium - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Meal, Break

4:30pm PST

Anyone Can Performance Test

Performance is a non-functional requirement, and usually a tacit one. Slow performance can disrupt business activities, dilute value, and harm or ruin user experience. Performance is the net result of many difficult or impossible components to control.
Many people equate Performance Testing with Load Testing - an expensive, complicated, and time-consuming technique that requires specific skills and experience to do well. In modern development, release, and deployment contexts, its value versus effort is reduced further. Thankfully, there are other Performance Testing techniques to help explore, describe, quantify, and measure this complex, often unpredictable space and bring performance evaluation into your risk assessments and testing strategies.

During this Keynote, we’ll discuss engaging with performance requirements, talk about test strategy and how to test and measure performance, and even do some performance testing together!

Speakers

Eric Proegler

Tuesday November 8, 2022 4:30pm - 5:15pm PST
Ovation Ballroom - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Keynote

5:15pm PST

CAST Closing

Closing statements and announcements. Thanks for coming to CAST!

Tuesday November 8, 2022 5:15pm - 5:30pm PST
Ovation Ballroom - 2ND FL. Kimpton Hotel Palomar San Diego 1047 Fifth Avenue San Diego, California 92101

Organizational Session