National Modern Software Delivery Lead Joseph Ours, Testing Strategist Matthew Eakin, co-lead of our India team Brian Offenbacher, software quality assurance tester Hayden Payne, and automation architect Donavan Stanley will speak at the 2019 QA or the Highway Conference.
Centric Consulting is also a Silver and lunch Sponsor for the conference, which is a regional, professional conference featuring real world experience and thought leadership in the Quality Assurance (QA) and testing industry.
The event will take place on Tuesday, February 19, 2019 at the Ohio State University Student Union. Tickets are $95, and include: two keynotes, 2 optional workshops, and 25 track session talks. Continental breakfast, lunch, drink and snack breaks are also included.
Get your ticket today, before sales close on February 11.
Read more about our sessions:
About Joseph Our’s Session “DevOps: The Big Picture for Testers”
If you put 50 folks from various parts of IT into a room, you’ll get 20 different definitions of DevOps and 30 opinions as to why an organization should embrace it.
Therein lies a key challenge with any DevOps discussion. Those individual views tend to be myopically focused on a specific area of interest to that single individual.
A tester may focus on automation or exploratory testing being tightly integrated, a developer may view DevOps as an extension of Continuous Integration activities and tools.
A Scrum Master may see it as extending Agile into the Operations space. Infrastructure may see it as cloud practices or Infrastructure as Code.
The truth is, DevOps is a bit of all of that – but it is so much more as well. But if it is more than that, what does that mean for testers – their role, their skills, and their future?
During this presentation, we will discuss DevOps from a holistic organizational perspective, how DevOps capabilities in various areas are interrelated, and how it can impact your company’s bottom line.
The goal would be for everyone to walk away with a common understanding of DevOps, how it makes your business more efficient and competitive, and how you can get involved in helping to grow DevOps – and future-proof your own career.
About Matthew Eakin and Brian Offenbacher’s Session “Successful Offshoring: A Look at Some Best Practices”
Offshoring development and testing work has become part of many companies’ standard operating practices. For good reasons: lower costs, increased headcount, and potential 24-hour development cycles.
But implementing an offshore model is difficult and can put many of these benefits at risk.
Are your costs really lower when your Managers are spending all of their time reviewing the code or test cases? Can one offshore tester really equal the workload of one FTE?
Is there truly a 24-hour development cycle? And do you even want one if it means your development team is in two locations?
In this presentation we will address these and many more questions through a series of “best practices” developed over years of working with offshore teams.
About Hayden Payne’s Session “Cutting in Line for Taylor Swift Tix with Watir”
When Taylor Swift announced her 2018 stadium tour, there was no question that I would be purchasing tickets. This time around, Taylor wanted to ensure that only verified fans would be able to purchase these tickets.
This meant that fans wanting tickets were either dedicating 80% of their time or bank accounts to Taylor Nation, LLC. Even as a very dedicated Swiftie, I did not love either of those options.
I knew that there had to be a better way.
In this presentation, I will show you how I utilized Watir, Ruby, Cucumber, and Page Object to automate my way to the front of Taylor Swift’s ticket line. Come and see how automation can also be applied to simplify even non-Swiftie pursuits, including your everyday testing tasks.
About Donavan Stanley’s Session “Rethinking the page object pattern”
Most in the Ruby automation world are very familiar with Page-Object and Watir. Page-Object served a very useful purpose, but as Watir-classic and Watir-webdriver issues have resolved into just Watir, it’s time to consider refactoring Page-Object into something faster, easier, and more extensible.
I have written a new DSL that makes declaring elements easier, and can actually be extended using the same patterns for the base set of elements.
Furthermore, a new Page-Object style DSL will be demonstrated to show how you can replace Page-Object in a way that gives you far more control and flexibility, with minimal re-work to replace Page-Object.
About Joseph Ours
As Centric Consulting’s National Modern Software Delivery Lead, Joseph Ours has nearly two decades of career experience in Information Technology and Certified Project Management consulting. He believes in finding ways to harmoniously work with all core IT competencies, and as such as works as a developer, tester, business analyst, and program manager. His strategic thought process and ability to translate vision into action has resulted in many large successful initiatives. Joseph’s expertise has also led to numerous national speaking engagements. He earned an MBA, and two bachelor’s degrees: in Electronic Engineering Technology, and in Technical Management. He is also PMP certified by the Project Management Institute. Joseph lives in Columbus, Ohio, and has six adult children. He is an early adopter and active technology enthusiast.
About Matthew Eakin
I am a Testing Strategist for Centric Consulting. With over 20 years of technical, leadership and planning experience, I bring a unique, thorough and comprehensive perspective to every project. My extensive expertise around all aspects of the SDLC combined with development skills has helped me to be an effective Agile practitioner and coach. I talk extensively on Gherkin Scripting and am in high-demand as a BDD (Behavior-Driven Development)/ATDD (Acceptance Test Driven Development) coach.
About Brian Offenbacher
Brian is the co-lead of the Centric India business unit. He is based in the US and provides delivery management support for projects that leverage Centric India. Brian has over 18 years of experience in the professional services industry and has spent the last 6 years focused on offshore operations. He has extensive experience with information technology in the areas of project management, full system lifecycle development, methodology development, training, requirements definition, analysis and design, and quality assurance. Brian holds a certification as a project management professional.
About Donavan Stanley
Donavan is the automation architect for Centric Consulting. In this role he spends quite a bit of time building automation frameworks and improving existing ones.
About Hayden Payne
Hayden Payne is a software quality assurance tester with Centric Consulting. She has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Systems from DeVry University. In her time at Centric, Hayden has built test automation skills with Ruby, Cucumber, Watir, and Page Object. She is always looking for fun, creative ways to apply automation outside of daily work.