Seb Rose, Continuous Improvement Lead, SmartBear

Everything looks solvable if you ignore most of the complications. Many things look impossible if you’re stuck in the weeds. The current fashion for low/no code solutions heralds the cyclical return to looking for solutions that require softer skillsets. When is this appropriate and when is it a recipe for disaster?

Steve McNickle, Business Director EMEA, HeadSpin and Sai Kodali, QA Lead at Philip Morris International

As organisations race to deploy mobile and web applications with market-leading features, there is the continual challenge to assure a fluid, performant digital engagement with their consumers. This is particularly so with interactive or media-rich applications, those utilising 3rd party SDK and API components, and those with a global reach. Many new opportunities are also arising due to new technologies such as 5G, which also bring additional variations that will affect customer experience.

We will investigate the challenges and associated automated approaches to exploit the opportunities with the desired consumer engagement.

Sudeep Chatterjee, Head Of Qa And Testing, London Stock Exchange

DevOps is a goal for many organisations to achieve the vision of reducing end to end product development cycle time and to deliver value to business and customers faster. With advanced development practices and tools, organisations have successfully achieved CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Development) but CT (Continuous Testing) remains elusive. In this talk, I would explain how low code test automation solutions can help reach the CI/CD/CT objectives.

Amir Shaked, SVP R&D, PerimeterX, Tel Aviv, Israel

Building and maintaining a five 9s system isn’t just about the tools and technologies. Development culture has a big part in how you keep a system available while scaling it up and supporting more features, users, and locations.

A healthy learning culture, supporting the development, not repairing mistakes, and identifying weak points is another tool in the engineering toolbox.
In this talk, we will discuss how to create a learning culture using debriefs, what to avoid, and how to instil change in an engineering organization.

Thomas Lavin, Product Manager, mabl

As an industry, we understand that effective test automation is a key enabler – or inhibitor to – realizing the potential of DevOps. Automation is critical to innovating with speed and quality, and we’ve spent innumerable hours of engineering effort on sophisticated test automation suites. But, very few of us are happy with the results.

In this session, the mabl speaker will share how low-code platforms enable entire teams to shift testing left and integrate automated tests directly into your pipelines. The speaker will also share a set of strategies to overcome traditional challenges with test automation throughout the DevOps pipeline. In the end, you’ll have a foundation for an efficient and effective testing strategy and an understanding of the technology needed to be successful.

Giovanni Asproni, Principal Consultant at Zuhlke Engineering Ltd

Mob Programming (aka. Ensemble Programming) is a software development approach where the whole team works on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and at the same computer.

In this talk I’ll share some lessons learned (warts and all) on how my team and I used mob programming to deliver successfully, and to very high quality standards (zero defects in production, so far) one of the backend systems used by the NHS COVID-19 app.

In particular, I’ll explain why and how we did that in a context that included:

• High stakes—failure would be reported in all newspapers.
• Very short deadlines.
• A Geographically distributed team with members who didn’t know each other before the project.
• Limited specific knowledge within the team of some of the technologies we had to use.
• Some hard security and accessibility constraints for the system.

Panel Moderator: Colin Deady, Agile Lead, PPS
PANELLISTS: Seb Rose, SmartBear; Gaurav Mathur, HeadSpin; Steve McNickle, HeadSpin; Sai Kodali, Philip Morris International; Sudeep Chatterjee, London Stock Exchange; Amir Shaked, PerimeterX; Thomas Lavin, mabl; Giovanni Asproni, Zuhlke Engineering Ltd; Sabrina Bruce, Host Agile World Show; Karl Smith, Host Agile World Show; Peter Maddison, Xodiac Inc.