Biography

Christina Thalayasingam has more than 7 years of experience in both functional and non-functional testing. She possesses a development background. Since she has worked on PHP Web Development and Android Mobile Development before taking up Quality Engineering. She has worked in automate testing content management systems for the UK government, point of sales applications, eCommerce applications, and clinical trial applications. She has worked on-site in the UK on projects with the UK government sector and major food supply chain management companies. Christina is currently working as a Senior Test Engineer at Medidata Solutions by Dassault Systèmes®, an award-winning company that develops and markets software as a service (SaaS) for clinical trials. Also, she has been part of various prestigious conferences, technical meetups and webinars. She is a software testing evangelist.

Talk

1# Softs You Need to Run the Perfect Load Test

Performance of the end-product has become vital; hence performance testing has started getting more important in the software development cycle. Many think load testing === performance testing but that is not the case. Load testing is an important type of performance testing. Most testing teams do try to conduct load testing, but many fail to find the real issues/bottlenecks in the application. There is a perception that if you know how to execute tests with load testing tools you are good to go forward to create/conduct the load tests. Well, that alone would not let you mimic the real-world load. This means you will not be able to spot the real issues. To create such useful tests you need to do the right groundwork. The tester/test engineer involved needs to possess some important skills to make this a reality. This talk will help you understand the skills you need to set up a robust load testing process. Make sure that the load testing you are conducting is conducted in a manner so that it puts the spotlight on real issues. Design your tests to gather the real picture of the way the application is used.

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Talk

2# Full-stack Testing in is the New Normal

Many teams aim only in having a bug free system. How can you make your team believe in delivering the true quality of the end product? How can you drive your team to understand that skipping non functional testing like performance and security testing could lead to the breach of your product quality ? How can you make them understand the importance of CI/CD in the testing lifecycle? How can you pour the passion into them to move forward to make a change? Setting up a team that has these skills could make this possible, but do they believe in what they do? How can you make them actually feel the essence of quality being a culture that does not focus alone on reporting bugs? Let us discuss ways on making your team walk in the path of Full Stack Testing, so that the team knows their vision and the mission. Quality is key and the world is evolving into have Full-stack testing as the new normal.

The team should move into a position where any member of the team can understand the testing requirements of the application and execute them. Drive the entire quality team to understand the skills that each of them possess. To understand this, let’s look at what traditional QA practice is. There are several areas and types when it comes to Quality Assurance – Testing, Test Automation, Performance, etc. Generally, there are teams specialized in each of these areas executing each of these test types. Here we need to be able to pick anyone from the quality team to be able to cover any of the above test types. Similar to the rise of full stack engineering that brought the end of specialized front-end and back-end developers, and brought about the age of engineers that can build a product end to end independently, the time for QA to follow suit is near. And let us discuss how this can be achieved.

Full-stack test engineers are individuals capable of working on all aspects of quality across all the application’s layers, using different testing methods. They will think about the many different aspects of product quality, such as functionality, usability, performance, security etc, and will also be familiar with test automation strategies and technologies. The full-stack test engineer will have a rich mix of domain knowledge, technical skills, and testing expertise. This is the trend that test engineering is flowing into today. This talk will cover how we can get our teams to explore this venture.

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