Hands-on for CAST 2022 - Louise Perold and James Thomas
The theme of CAST 2022 on November 7th and 8th is hands-on. That’s the entire theme: anything hands-on that can improve context-driven testing in any way. Check out the schedule at https://associationforsoftwaretesting...
To warm up for the conference, two of AST's directors will celebrate being hands-on with experience reports of recent practical activities from their workplaces.
Louise Perold, Building "Quality" Connections in a Remote World
Faced with being fully remote left me struggling to find ways to build trust, connection and start valuable conversations in my role as a Quality Lead. I'll be sharing my experiences and learnings evolving in-person informal interactions into a set of recurring remote interactions (meetings) that have (mostly) helped.
James Thomas, Random Exploration of a Chatbot API
Three related coverage risks stood out when I joined a new project to build a chatbot API for Ada Health's medical symptom checker. With an infinite space of possible chats, how could we:
look for unintended consequences of changes as we built the API from the ground up
discover some of the edge and corner cases bugs that would surely exist
exercise the API to any significant extent before the very tight first deadline for delivery
To help mitigate these risks I built a client which would randomly walk through dialogs, unattended, and report on what it had found.
In this talk, I'll describe how I implemented that client by iteratively adding functionality that I hoped would facilitate my exploration of changes and fixes to the emerging API. I'll give examples of features that worked well (such as configuration of probabilities for different types of answers) and those that did not (such as checking for specific classes of medical outcome), explain how I built on top of the client to make a load testing tool, and think about what I'd do differently next time.
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