Santhosh Tuppad, Software Testing Guru

A functionally working code is just not anymore enough.

I have been 22 years in the hacking arena & my views about the software are still absurd in terms of security since I started. I unconventionally look at security.

Edward Snowden is admired and disliked at the same time for whatever he did. We hear criticisms such as, there is a right way of doing it, and he could have done it differently. Or, that is a sickening act by Snowden. Well, the revolution has never been straightforward.

All of us need secure applications for our clients. Sadly, we have fallen into the trap of shallow security testing and lack of secure coding principles due to whatsoever reasons. By this, I mean most of the companies are super conventional in the way they manage security testing. And also, most of the security specialists and leaders in security space lack a sense of security from a pragmatic perspective or an evil attitude to fight black-hat hackers. What we need is both offensive & defensive methods with a white-hat and black-hat hacker mindset working as a team.

Even today, out of 10 applications that I choose, I can hack at least 7 of them. It is just a matter of time and motivation for hackers to identify and exploit creatively. That’s garbage. Right?

In this talk, we will look into the bad traditions leading to the garbage code and what change we can bring in to eliminate the garbage for a secure tomorrow. I am confident about the audience enjoying this demonstration based talk.

Shhhhhh… What happens in here stays in here!

Key-Learning

• Understanding that hacking is beyond OWASP Top 10 attacks
• The adrenaline rush after you leave the talk in terms of thinking about security
• Ability to ask “security” related questions and finding the “vulnerabilities” through questioning
• Perform the security tests to an extent and finding critical vulnerabilities after this talk
• Getting enthusiastic about starting a security testing journey

View Santhosh Tuppad’s video

Key recommendations to accelerate your Quality Assurance & Engineering journey in WQR 2021-2022:>

• • Focus on what matters. The emphasis should be on the customer experience and on business objectives, and on meeting needs in these areas with efficiency and speed. The focus is shifting from IT quality to production quality.
  • Standardize the use of test automation in QA, and use it from end to end. An automation-first approach in software quality delivery should now be the norm across all QA activities.
  • Stop talking about AI and ML, and start doing. Smart technologies are expected to transform quality engineering, so it’s imperative to begin the journey now.
  • Emphasize the availability of test environments and test data. Investment in real-time environment and data availability solutions should continue to be a focus within the organizational strategy.
  • Get management buy-in for intelligent industry initiatives. It’s a given that leadership backing facilitates change – so demonstrate feasibility, and quantify potential outcomes.

Panel Moderator
Diwakar Menon, Consultant

Panellist:
Santhosh Tuppad, Software Testing Guru
Subhash Kotra, QA Head, Tide
Prathap Jonnadula, QA Engineer, Crackle Plus
Sujata Dutta, Senior Vice President,Vodafone, _VOIS

Subhash Kotra, QA Head, Tide

Traditionally, QA is considered to be the same as Quality Assurance which is the process of Testing a developed product. This leads to an increase in the number of release cycles because we tend to Test the product using our Test cases (Automated & Manual).

The role of a Quality Advocate in the Agile world is more to do with the overall responsibility of the Product’s quality. A Quality Advocate ensures that the team is building the product right by undertaking the various actions, early on in the development cycle. An eg. of this is making sure that the acceptance criteria are clearly defined, doing Test coverage at Unit/Integration level, etc.

This new definition of QA could help increase collaboration, reduce the traditional Dev vs QA issues, and ensure that the End product is of the highest quality.

View Subhash Kotra’s video

Shirsha Ray Chaudhuri, Director of Engineering, Thomson Reuters Labs

The world is crazed by the popularity, possibilities and wonders of a solution that naturally embeds AI. Tech companies, big and small, are racing in their journey to embed AI into their existing solutions and/or create new ones. In this talk, we reflect on impacts that legacy software solutions, workflows, business processes and large chained tech systems have with the introduction of AI-powering services into them. We lay emphasis on the various needs for testing that introduction of ML for a large software solution. We hope to highlight some of the requirements we have uncovered as part of our Machine Learning projects for testing. We conclude with feedback and requirement analysis from planning POV for AI solutions as part of this talk.

View Shirsha Ray Chaudhuri’s video

Manish Kaushal Kushwaha, Director of Technology, McAfee

Biggest challenge with data ecosystem is to have trust on data and generated insights. To improve trust you need to have high data quality. To achieve high data quality you need to have right data testing plan. Data touches many stages so you need to automate your testing at various stages. You need to focus end to end from client-side data capturing to have data observability in pipe, data quality rules for each event and attributes, data discoverability.

View Manish Kaushal Kushwaha’s video

Ekta Khatana, Lead Software Development Engineer Test, Cvent and Lakshita Sharma, Senior SDET, Cvent

Performance is a critical non-functional quality aspect in software development. Performance issues discovered at a later stage in development cycle can lead to more significant problems down the road, where resolution can be expensive and time-consuming. RECOMMENDED SOLUTION. Continuous integration and delivery coupled with automated performance tests will enable finding performance issues while code is being developed. It is a faster and cost-saving approach for releasing new product features and enhancements with minimal performance risks drastically reducing time and efforts. As we progress towards shifting left, it becomes crucial to ensure that we find functional and non-functional issues early in the release cycle. At Cvent, we have implemented an end-to-end automated process for continuous performance engineering, minimizing the monitoring time to check for any degradation. Before going to production, code is deployed to the pre-production region, where the load tests are executed and analyzed to check the performance bottleneck in nightly regressions. The process includes data setup at runtime using test Data Management, test execution, and report generation using Gatling. As a part of release certification, we have scheduled load regression test runs via Slackbot, which can be triggered with either Auto-Abort or Notify-Only functionality and thereafter a notification is sent. Before the test kicks off, the system checks if auto-scaling is enabled, then accordingly scale up the services depending on the service utilization metrics. When anyone executes the load tests from Jenkins Pipeline, results/metrics are collected just after the completion of load tests. A consolidated report detailing graphical data analysis and performance metrics for Gatling, Datadog, and Splunk is generated once the test is completed via a customized reporting framework.

View Ekta Khatana and Lakshita Sharma’s video

HariHaraGanesh D, Director, Technical Program Management, Visa

Culture @ work should be aligned with Core Values and must be a driver for delivering better business outcome. “Wall of wow” or “Appreciation day” can boost cultural quotient at workplace. Winning Team’s framework’ and Agile Value delivery model are designed to focus on outcome rather than output

Most change management focuses on the business context, process and role changes, and transitioning employees through training and new measurements. This approach may be fine for addressing the organizational ‘machine,’ but it does not adequately address the human aspects of the Organization. How to feel the culture at workplace? If Core Values of an Organization are aligned with Organization’s Strategy, then the Organization growth will be sustainable. Let us discuss a simple case study. A team delivers with in Scope, Budget, and Schedule over the last three quarters and bags the ‘Best Team Award’. Is the Best Team a Happy Team? Do they really have a culture of giving open feedback to each other or do they love what they do? At the executive level, does Velocity of a team mean anything? If not Velocity, what is the alternative? How do we influence the executives to shift the focus from output to outcome? Welcome to my talk where I discuss my ‘Winning Team’s framework’ that focusses on unearthing cultural elements @ team level. The Agile Value delivery model focuses on the Value delivered sprint on sprint over the productivity thus influencing Executives to adopt this model. How can you realize culture elements at work that is aligned with Core Values and that are driver for delivering better business outcome? You can start with “Wall of wow” to extend recognition to your peers or launch “Appreciation day” to appreciate your employees. Culture club driven by WOW boards and Appreciation day are building block for creating collaborative culture @ workplace. Through appreciation & recognition, people feel valued and this build a great relationship among the team members.

As the curtain closes, I would also recommend a new and interesting way to explain culture of an organization in simple terms.

Come and Join me in World Conference Next Gen Testing 2022 to get swamped in Cultural Rain !!!

Sreekala Sunderrajan, Head of Programme Management: People and Culture, Gojek

Anyone can be a leader. However the one that sustains tides and inspires others to do so with ease makes a successful leader. The one thing that differentiates fantastic leaders from the crowd is their mindset. Mindsets are never built in a day and normally have a lot of background work, experience and exposure that has gone into one being who they are today. And this becomes a game changer.

Having a Tester’s mindset plays a large role in being a successful leader. From personal experience, I know for sure that my life as a tester has not only charted out career options like no other but has actively contributed into making it successful as well. What are those pivots that make this mindset, how does it contribute to leadership excellence, is there a secret sauce combo that we all know but don’t recognise yet that makes this mindset? This talk charts that out for you as take away.

See you as we interact on building, nourishing this testers mindset that will set you up for success as a successful leader.

View Sreekala Sunderrajan’s video

Anjanita Das, Associate Director, Cognizant

Artificial Intelligence is present everywhere nowadays. Artificial Intelligence can help software testing in several ways, from creating test cases to anomaly detection to recommended solutions. The application of AI in software testing tools is focused on making the software development lifecycle easier. Through the application of reasoning, problem-solving, and, in some cases, machine learning, AI can help automate and reduce the amount of mundane and tedious tasks in development and testing.

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Venki Jayaraman, Senior Director, Walmart

AI has driven every industry in the world. Testing is one of the challenging place where AI really is pushing its limits.

There is never a possibility to test every single scenario and ensure 100% quality. AI can look at certain specific parameters And ensure the way Testing can happen and ensuring coverage to the max. AI driven testing not only will reduce the test cycle But will also improve the way testing can happen and provide the right focus at the right place.

View Venki Jayaraman’s video

Abhinav Agrawal, Senior Manager – Development, Amadeus

GitOps is all the rage now for Kubernetes based Software deployments. In this presentation we will see how GitOps can be leveraged to increase time to market by making teams more Agile and with more automation.

Krishnakumar Mahalingam, Executive Director, J P Morgan Chase & Co and Suchitra Narayan, VP, J P Morgan Chase & Co

Web applications are increasingly resorting to public cloud platforms, To most developers, web security is a rather unpopular topic. However, previous studies have shown that the virtualized infrastructures used in a cloud environment can introduce performance issues. As developers the need to address these issues should be more than agreeing to the fact of being addressing the issues. The performance issues are considered less interesting solely for the effort it takes to be taken care of, it makes development and testing harder as the process would either have to mock the authentication or simulate.

The challenge of authentication can be taken care of by using the right backing services, while with the right framework the data replication through mocking or simulating can be well handled. This also needs to be backed with the right service tools.

The topic we present will bring in more light on the above mentioned points which will be supported by usage of top rates tools which are the concepts of Cloud Application Programming Model

View Suchitra Narayan’s video