Industry Leaders Share How They're Delivering Continuous Quality

Welcome to the 2021 Automated Software Testing and Quality Summit! This half-day event discusses industry challenges and insights about software quality. Join this event to learn from our customers and partners who will share their real-life experiences solving enterprise software challenges with an intelligent automated testing and quality platform.

These companies have transformed their test automation strategies and processes to accelerate the delivery of high-quality, secure, and compliant applications. From challenges such as decreasing defects in a complex data-intensive application to transforming testing to shift left, these sessions will discuss aspects of the people, processes, and technologies involved. Join us!

About the Speaker: 

Arthur Hicken is the evangelist at Parasoft and has been involved in automating various practices for over 25 years. He has worked on various projects involving databases, the software development life cycle, legacy system integration, static code analysis, and cybersecurity, and holds 5 patents for software development. Recognized as an expert in his field, Arthur is a regular speaker at conferences, participates in security communities, and manages his Code Curmudgeon blog. 

Break the vicious cycle of manual software testing and deliver better software faster!

Every software delivery leader is being asked to deliver better software faster. However, many organizations struggle with a quality assurance program centered around late-stage manual testing. They also wrestle with the brutal reality that manual software testing can quickly consume all the available capacity for quality assurance work. Practices such as shift left and test-driven development (TDD) could address these issues.

Coupled with a lack of investment in the tools required to eliminate low value quality activities, many organizations are trapped in a quality catch-22 that feeds buggy releases and technical debt. Join Cole Cioran, the head of Applications Research and Advisory Services at the Info-Tech Research Group, to explore how to break free of the vicious cycle and truly deliver quality software faster, including:

• How to make the case for effective quality assurance programs based on business outcomes.
• The place of test automation in an integrated software delivery toolchain.
• The roadmap for building a holistic test automation into your quality assurance practices.

About the Speaker: 

Cole Cioran leads the Applications Advisory team at Info-Tech Research Group. Cole has worked in the mobile, ERP, and financial services sectors. With over 30 years of experience, Cole realizes that effective applications practices are about much more than software and hardware. Technology does not solve problems unless people, processes, tools, and organizations change as well.

Global organizations must deal with the complexities of doing business around the clock – there’s no time zone available for downtime. RBC Wealth Management has offices and teams across multiple continents that all require access to the same service for testing purposes, making it a challenge to schedule batch runs which take that service offline to prevent unplanned updates and data pulls. If this service isn’t available, their other applications won’t load and testing becomes stalled.

To avoid causing downtime issues, the RBC team simulated the critical application being available so that multiple applications downstream could continue doing testing. By eliminating testing delays due to environment outages, their teams can execute tests more consistently and plan more efficiently for performance, penetration, and regression testing. This results in lower costs for the development and test teams and enables them to meet schedule targets.

Jason King will feature the RBC journey and:

• Describe the challenges with developing and testing in a global environment.
• Explain how they use virtualization to isolate dependencies and increase efficiency.
• Share the multi-year path and future roadmap outlook to expand the use of virtual assets.

About the Speaker: 

Jason King has served as the senior QE manager at RBC Wealth Management for three years, expanding upon his prior experience with QA testing and test data management. He manages a team of test data specialists providing test data and solutioning testing issues for the organization.

Purchasing a new vehicle online may seem straightforward, but the process behind the scenes can be complex with steps to obtain the loan, verify the transaction, sign the contract, and more. The Cox Automotive Dealertrack product portfolio provides a credit and contract application that manages the transactional data for many dealers and lenders. This software incorporates numerous integrations and multiple layers with both legacy and modern code that pass data through complex infrastructure. Due to testing challenges across these layers, they experienced quality issues that impacted overall customer satisfaction.

With a new focus on test resiliency and discipline, Dealertrack has implemented service virtualization as a key component to more effectively diagnose and address issues in the application. Accurate simulation of the layers enables them to mimic actual functionality for responses, provide correct responses through the entire flow, and validate that transactional data moves correctly through the infrastructure and related queues. Along with additional monitoring, Dealertrack has improved the overall quality of their product lines by significantly reducing the escaped defects.

In this session, learn how Cox Automotive:

• Defined a new testing discipline with a designated CoE contact.
• Established processes to address defects earlier in the test cycle.
• Achieved end-to-end testing with service virtualization.

About the Speaker: 

Roya Montazeri is Senior Director Technical & QA at Cox Automotive. She is responsible for quality engineering initiatives across Dealertrack organization. She works with Agile scrum teams, release management, test and performance engineers, and Quality Assurance analysts to establish practices and test frameworks for Dealertrack software. With 20+ years of technology leadership experience, Roya is an expert in establishing quality models and processes across large enterprise projects.

Many organizations are developing or implementing plans for transforming their software development and deployment processes. In the current age of frequent data breaches, it’s imperative to ensure good security practices are incorporated into the new strategies and processes for a successful digital transformation.

By encouraging and enabling teams to integrate security initiatives early and throughout the software development life cycle, you can build confidence in the quality and integrity of your applications. A security-focused approach will reduce risks, optimize the user experience, and protect customer confidence.

Join Kevin Greene as he hosts this interactive panel to discuss:

• Benefits of integrating a security-focused approach into digital transformation strategies.
• How a DevSecOps-driven workflow accelerates transformation and eliminates roadblocks.
• Ideas to deliver value by reducing security issues that impact the bottom line.

About the Moderator: 

Kevin E. Greene, Director of Security Solutions at Parasoft, has extensive experience and expertise in software security, cyber research and development, and DevOps. He leverages his knowledge to create meaningful solutions and technologies to improve software security practices. 

About the Panelists: 

Matt LaBrie works in the software development department at Capital Services, designing and developing software solutions and processes that help their customers and internal staff provide quality services to a portfolio of card holders. He has most recently been focused on security initiatives and enhancements for their software development life cycle.

Jon Chase is a Senior Cybersecurity Consultant and Application Security Service Lead with 9 years of experience at AT&T Cybersecurity Consulting. Jon is an offensive security specialist who has conducted hundreds of assessments related to application security, network security, and social engineering.

We know the cost of quality failures, but how do we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach to quality engineering? It takes a dedicated effort to spot early signs of emerging risk and prove out the value in quality of shifting development models.

Likewise, how do you establish the return on investment in vendors and determine the right spend and effort on ensuring consistent quality? In recent papers, Justyn Trenner has illustrated that beyond explicit spend on quality and testing as much as half of technology budgets may be going to remediating and re-engineering. Further, he asserts that a lack of agreed, inspectable quality benchmarks contribute to the challenge in tracking digital resilience preparedness.

In this session, Justyn will explain:

• How QA Vector Analytics have been built to provide appropriate quality standards.
• Important lessons learned from customer work and analysis to date.
• How the analytics have allowed firms to determine optimal spend allocation, vendor, and operating model selection.
• How AI is now being applied to predict risks to resilience and on-time performance.

About the Speaker:

Justyn Trenner is an experienced business consultant in the area of software quality benchmarks and RoI. He built a consulting, research and trading technology Fintech which resulted to successful exit. Justyn managed a range of business initiatives and acquisitions at board and executive level. He has extensive experience working across Europe, Asia, Africa and North America with proven ability to devise and implement solutions straddling business lines, operating modes, technology and compliance and the people involved. Justyn graduated from the University Oxford.

Transitioning from an Agile development process with waterfall testing practices to a full CI/CD methodology with testing integrated throughout the workflow requires a dedicated effort with strong leadership. WoodmenLife has spent the past year working to implement a true test management process to achieve CI/CD with quality embedded into the workflow.

Going through a transformation like this involves a series of steps, such as establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE), educating everyone involved — AppDev, Testing, Security, and Business stakeholders — about new processes, and implementing a technology platform that supports the organization’s needs.

Danny Oslin will share his experiences with leading this initiative and describe the progress they’ve made, including:

• Integrating business needs and requirements earlier into the dev/test cycle.
• Helping the entire team understand the value of shifting testing to the left.
• Expanding their testing capabilities beyond UI to address broader code coverage goals.
• Changing the fundamental testing strategy with supporting processes and platforms.

About the Speaker:

Danny Oslin is the manager of enterprise automation at WoodmenLife and is focused on improving test management processes within the organization. Danny has spent more than 10 years in quality assurance roles and also has 10+ years of prior development experience.

We hope that in each session you got a glimpse of a valuable and real story that's similar to your own journey. In this last session, we'll summarize some of the key takeaways and relate the challenges and solutions discussed to the trends and initiatives driving our industry today.

We'll share some additional perspectives from the many customers we partner with every day. Finally, we'll discuss the future of our industry and how Parasoft is crafting a roadmap for our continuous quality platform to enable our customers to accelerate the delivery of world class software and applications.

About the Speaker:

Matt Klassen leads marketing strategy, campaigns, programs, messaging, and public relations to strengthen Parasoft’s market position and drive revenue growth. He’s passionate about the impact that software has on business, our personal lives, and the world.

Can you relate to the challenges our speakers talked about today? Would you like to experience how to solve those challenges with a modern continuous testing platform that integrates into your DevOps workflow? If yes, then join our demo session after the closing keynote. You can see the Parasoft Continuous Quality Platform in action. We'll cover API test automation, service virtualization, and automated UI testing for Selenium. Our experts will close with a live Q&A session and respond to your questions about continuous testing and the Parasoft test automation solutions.

About the Speaker:

Jeff Peeples is a Senior Product Manager at Parasoft, leading the functional platform direction for SOAtest, Virtualize, and CTP. Jeff has extensive experience defining solutions and developing roadmaps for enterprise industries including energy, financial technologies, and travel/hospitality.