The focus of this highly interactive online conference is on the interoperability of Agile, DevOps and Testing. They have shared environments that facilitate working together. Spurred by greater demand for excellence, these methods are more than simply adopting new tools and processes. The synergy involves building an evolving and a stable Continuous Integration (CI) Infrastructure, as well as an automated pipeline that moves deliverables from development to production to meet users’ expectations. They can work together, and the entire build process should be transparent, and it should enable and support development and operations. This transformation depends on significant changes in culture, roles & responsibilities, team structure, and tools & processes.
The four days are on Agile, Testing and DevOps’ current topics and practices the event is designed to connect a wide range of stakeholders and provide informational as well as and educational experience for all. The expert practitioners and thought leaders over these days will help you to develop your business case and build the foundation towards getting significant return on investment.
There will be sharing of practical experiences, extended knowledge-sharing presentations in the “Round Table” sessions for sharing insights and industry trends; you can put your questions directly through Slido to the presenters and panellists . This coupled with networking on online discussion groups has the scope for open-mindedness and sharing throughout the conference. There is an exhibition alongside featuring leading service providers, consultants and vendors within the areas on Software Testing, Automation, Quality Assurance, various aspects of Agile and DevOps.
“Thanks to everyone who hosted the conference and who made the last two days really enjoyable, watching and learning from the agile leaders in the community. It was great fun talking to an amazing group of experts today and taking part in a fun panel discussion with Sarah Saunders and Laveena Ramchandani.”
“Thank you to UNICOM Seminars for organising such a great fully remote conference with a lot of interaction, engagement and interesting content. It was a pleasure to speak and participate in the panel discussion too! Look forward to the next one!”
“Technology in action!! Online conference and a successful one! Well attended with lot of interactions. Great Panel discussion. Learnt different perspectives!
Kudos to Unicom”
“For the third time I will be part of the #Agile, #Testing & #DevOps Showcase. First time online and I’m very excited!”
“Great panel discussion we had! Loved it. Thanks.”
“Vivit Worldwide was proud to sponsor such a fantastic event! Thank you UNICOM Seminars!”
“Thanks. Really enjoyed been part of this superstar line up!”
“Awesome presentation with great insights on unknown facts and issues facing in Agile.”
UNICOM’s Code of Conduct & Views on Diversity
Our approach is that our events are dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity or religion. We do not tolerate intimidation, stalking, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of sessions or events, and unwelcome physical contact or sexual attention. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks, workshops, Twitter and other online media. Event participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the event without a refund at the discretion of the conference organisers. Please bring your concerns to the immediate attention of the event staff.
Diversity: In our endeavour to be the provider of knowledge to the business community, we understand that this depends on hearing from and listening to a variety of perspectives that come from people of all races, ethnicities, genders, ages, abilities, religions, sexual orientation, and military service. We welcome diverse speakers for all our events, we do not always fully achieve this goal, but it is an ongoing process.
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We are inviting speakers – thought leaders, subject experts and start-up entrepreneurs – to share their knowledge and enthusiasm about their work and vision in these three fields. Please let us know too if you would like to participate in panel sessions only. Please also get in touch if you would like to participate in the Round Table session.
We understand that successful projects are written up as “White Papers”. Please share these with us. But projects that did not achieve their targets – “Black Papers”- are of interest to us too. They can be important topics of discussion / panels where you can present. Talk to us about both, we welcome your input.
We are also planning short “how to do” sessions or full-day workshops to run as pre or post conference events. Let us know if you have a related topic that you want to run as a workshop or an extended briefing.
Please complete the speaker’s response form and submit a proposal to present at this event.
Theo Priestly, Global Thought Leader and TEDx Speaker
The future is an uncertain, uncomfortable prospect for employees, employers and society at large. A flurry of unprecedented events have proven that, despite what some politicians and economists may tell us, the future is not set in stone. Instead, it is constantly being shaped and redefined by the everyday decisions of individuals and organizations. With a comprehensive history of tomorrow, we will explore ground breaking topics such as AI, privacy, education and the future of work.
Pete Jenkins, Founder, Gamification UK
What do you play? Playing games can change people. Applying game techniques to deliberately change people is not technology but it is applied psychology. In this session we’ll see what gamification is and we’ll investigate different approaches to digital transformation through gamification, from changing mindsets to changing day to day behaviours in the real world.
Laveena Ramchandani, Senior Test Consultant, Deloitte
I’d like to share how I explored the world of data science when testing a model and how we can apply that if we find ourselves in this situation. It is an emerging area for testers and exciting.
I would like to share my knowledge about testing a model in a data science team. I appreciate this is a new area for testers to be in, but it has been a great experience to learn from.
Preparations:
I have heard from other senior testers around the world that they know of data science teams but no testers testing the models, how do we have enough confidence what is produced is good enough? A model is a statistical black box, how to test it so we understand its behaviours to test is properly. Main aim would be to help inspire testers to explore data science models.
I’d like to invite you to my talk where, we will go through my journey of discovering data science model testing and find the following takeaways useful not just for testing a data science model but day to day testing too.
Bob Crews, CEO, Checkpoint Technologies
The scope and complexities of software testing are increasing significantly as new technologies emerge, applications become more advanced, regulation and laws increase in complexity, and users become more astute! The quantity of test conditions can make the process of testing overwhelming, especially in an Agile and DevOps world when factoring in aggressive target dates, a lack of resources, and the never-ending effort to deliver high-quality software.
Utilizing an Agile, strategic risk-based analysis approach will assist you in prioritizing your overall testing effort based on the impact of the functionality should it fail and the likelihood such a failure will occur. If you can’t validate every scenario, every time then at least ensure you test the features and functionality most critical to your organization. Risk analysis is an essential element to successfully address the demands of quality in today’s IT landscape and the customer expecting such quality. It enables you to improve resource allocation, better prioritize efforts, and make wiser business decisions.
We will cover essential terminology pertaining to risk and risk analysis, factors heavily impacting risk, and an in-depth risk analysis approach. Additionally, this session will present timely, relevant information to enable your organization to implement approaches and proven strategies to successfully apply an Agile “Rapid Risk Analysis” process to better manage your delivery pipeline, testing efforts, and automation strategy.
Takeaways:
Jonathon Wright, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Assured
Next generation tools unlock the power of analytics and autonomics for continuous delivery. While automation solutions within current testing implementations help to address agility need, such automation is typically driven by static rules using conventional scripting and orchestration techniques. Such techniques incur high maintenance overhead to keep updated relative to changing circumstances. The recent emergence of cognitive engineering technologies (such as autonomics) has evolved the ‘State of Tooling’ introducing the possibility to drive adaptive automation within testing implementations. Such automation can self-heal and self-configure based on changing situations. In this session, Jonathon will present how next generation data engineering and autonomics technologies can be leveraged to power the next generation of cognitive testing implementations, and how they can support the needs of your organisation.
‘State of Tooling’ Report 2020 findings:
– The introduction of valid use cases for Artificial Intelligence (A.I) tool capabilities.
– The shift towards Shifting Right, over Shifting Left.
Dave Snowden, Chief Scientific Officer, Cognitive Edge
Different types of knowledge, community and techniques for sharing.
Omer Felder, Director of Product Management, Micro Focus
Successful organizations must deliver faster, and at scale, across the enterprise. The right tools enable them to manage scale and complexity, modernize test and quality management processes, correlate data from all phases of the application lifecycle, achieve end-to-end automation, and extend Agile practices to their teams. This session explores how organizations can accelerate and scale Agile by integrating with frameworks such as SAFe, open source, and third-party solutions to support planning, analytics, end-to-end traceability, and rich reporting. This reduces the development lifecycle, and enables continuous delivery, while maximizing current IT investments.
Drew Shefman, Software Engineer, Disney Streaming Services
While the Agile concepts may sometimes be easy, the why’s and how’s are a little trickier to wrap your head around. Having flooded numerous times in Houston, I’ve applied an agile approach to real world rising water natural disasters.
Yong Yuen He, Senior Test Engineer, Booking.com
“A volcano is a rupture in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface.” – Wikipedia
Now replace the following words in above statement:
Volcano = Tech Debt, Earth = Code/Product, Hot Lava = Defects/Risks, Volcanic Ash = Code Smells and Gases = Disruptions.
Let’s talk about similarities between volcanos and tech debt. How do they pile up and what not to do.
Giles Lindsay, Giles Lindsay, CEO, Agile Delta
As a technology and agile leader, I am always being asked the question about agile people in many different settings, by different groups of people, so the points from this talk come from my own experiences, successes and failures, leading agile adoptions over the last 10+ years, understanding the roles of the agile people that I have worked with during that time, uncovering what makes them tick, discovering the challenges they have to go through to be agile and listening to the advice being given to support them on their journey.
Seb Rose, BDD Advocate, SmartBear
Test automation and BDD are related, but they are not the same. To get the most out of each of them, we need to understand the separate challenges that they address before getting engrossed in the tools that have been created to facilitate their adoption. And those challenges are rooted in the interactions between the different disciplines involved in software specification and delivery.
In this session we’ll explore what test automation and BDD are – and how they separately contribute to successful inter-disciplinary agile delivery. We’ll also spend some time describing how they’re different, and look at several typical examples of what can go wrong when BDD and test automation get confused.
Eran Bachar, Sr. Product Management Lead, Micro Focus
Test Automation is considered one of the key aspects to deliver the speed and reliability of any continuous delivery pipeline and yet, according to the 2019-20 World Quality Report, organizations recognize that less than 19% of their testing is fully automated. When asked about their major challenges to increasing automation coverage, the lack of proper skillsets combined with the cost of building and maintaining automation assets are at the top of the priority list. Eran Bachar explains how Micro Focus is using Artificial Intelligence to deliver revolutionary advances in functional testing that will enable testers to easily keep up with the speed of application changes across multiple devices and platforms while reducing the cost of building and maintaining automation assets.
Richard Bishop, Test Specialist, Lloyds Banking Group
Lloyds Banking Group, in common with many organisations, has been using Jenkins for test automation for several years. Over time we’ve moved from static tests and groups of tests defined in Jenkins to an approach using tests defined as code in GitHub. This presentation describes our change of approach as well as the advantages of defining tests as code for reusability and more responsive test teams.
You’ll learn:
Vicky Giavelli, Director of Product Management, Micro Focus
The cost of poor application performance cannot fall on quality assurance (QA) alone, and the days of “tossing apps over the fence” are over. Performance must become everyone’s responsibility – from the designer, coder, developer, QA tester to the performance engineer – so that teams design better performing software from the start. Join us to understand the common pitfalls and easy solutions to building a robust performance engineering practice. Along the way you’ll learn more about the Micro Focus LoadRunner family and how these integrated solutions solve today’s critical challenges. Prioritize responsibilities across developers, testers, and performance engineers. Broaden the integration of performance into the CI/CD process. Continuously monitor and analyze performance from build to production. Achieve maximum scalability at a lower cost
Paul Gerrard, Founder, Gerrard Consulting
Test (execution) automation has been a goal since the earliest programs were written. The mechanics of automated tests have evolved with the technology used to build software, but the fundamental problems of test automation have not changed. Establishing a consistent environment, creating integral and re-usable test data, handling genuine failures, false negatives (and positives), tear-down, and clean-up. These are well-understood challenges. Developers and testers battle with flaky environments, test frameworks, and buggy software under test much the same way they always did. There is little debate about these technical or logistical matters. The use of unit test frameworks to test low-level components and integration is well-understood and usually most effective. But where the user interface is graphical and/or where tests of larger, integrated systems are required, test automation is more challenging. These tests tend to be longer, slower, and more complex and consequently, they are harder to write, debug, and maintain. These tests also run relatively slowly. All in all, long-winded, complex tests are flaky and far less efficient and economic. Two models dominate people’s thinking in this area – the four-quadrant model and the test automation pyramid. They have some value, but practitioners and managers need something better to guide their thinking.
This is the “state of automation” and has been for many years.
In this talk, Paul sets out a way of thinking about testing and test automation that helps to answer the strategic questions: What does test automation actually do for us? When and how is automation the right choice? How do we justify automation? Can automation replace testers? What new tools and skills do we need to implement automation in the future?
Eran Kinsbruner, Chief Evangelist, Perfecto
As majority of organizations aim to be elite performers in their DevOps journey, the reality they face is quite challenging. Automating processes throughout the pipeline, specifically testing is a burden, and an ongoing challenge. Building test automation that can be trusted, and that can match the various personas within the pipeline requires solid strategy, and ongoing tuning to ensure it continuously works and adds value while mitigating business risks. In this session, Eran Kinsbruner, Author, Chief Evangelist, and product manager from Perfecto by Perforce, will prescribe a winning CT strategy that teams can adopt immediately. Eran will ensure that the audience leave the session knowing the following:
Paul Grossman, Senior SDET Architect, Utopia Solutions
An element in the latest build of our application under test has changed its class in the Object Repository. To fix this we need to create a new element and replace every code reference. Easy enough for just one element. But what if it was 50 elements? And there were four code references per element? And the client expects results in two hours? See how Dynamic Class Switching saved the day in UFT.
Iwona Winiarska, Agile Delivery Consultant, Automation Logic
In a world of complexity, uncertainty and shifting priorities, it’s important to be nimble and adapt to the rapidly changing environment. It is widely acknowledged that organisations need to tackle these problems and apply new approaches and methods.
This talk delves into a human-centred design which is necessary to create new ways of working to deliver innovative digital services and DevOps solutions.
This human-centred approach will also help you understand different types of users and stakeholders with conflicting needs and aspirations during the whole process of ‘value’ co-creation.
I will propose a possible answer to these challenges through a case study of delivering a new Data Platform and adopting Cloud in a highly regulated environment.
Sarah Saunders, Managing Software Engineer, Capgemini
Companies move their IT estates to the cloud for one reason – efficiency. Sounds great – but how do we get there? I’ll talk through some of the steps a company needs to consider before they are ready to build cloud native apps. My favourite word in the Cloud Native landscape is EPHEMERAL – the concept that an environment can be temporary – built when needed and torn down afterwards. I’ll talk about how developers can build their own ephemeral environments using Terraform and Helm.
Doug Morrison, DevSecOps Professional Services, Melillo Consulting Inc
Why some customers often fail, but the top companies combine these tools as a force multiplier. A review of best practice of how Microfocus PPM, ALM Octane, and Fortify can work together to alter the perception of IT from cost-center to growth-engine. Each tool has some strong benefits, but combined they can break down silos, support open-source tools, maintain end-to-end traceability, reduce risks, and all while supporting a range of DevOps maturity levels and methodologies across the organization.
