Active Talks
Inactive Talks
These talks have been retired for one reason or another. Oftentimes their content has been rolled into a newer, refreshed topic available above!
Continuous Integration as a Way of Life
Continuous integration (CI) is a buzzword in software development today. We know it means “run lots of builds,” but having a continuous integration pipeline opens up opportunities well beyond making sure your team's code compiles. What if this pipeline could improve everything from the quality of code reviews to how often and safely you deploy to production and how you monitor your product in the wild? What if CI could provide insights into how automated tests are performing and how to improve them? Melissa Benua describes how to set up a basic CI infrastructure and then transform it into a way of life for development and test teams. Using free or nearly free tools, Melissa walks through a practical approach to making sure your code works—all the time and at every stage of the release train. Come away with practical advice for creating builds and running automation on the fly without spending hundreds of hours or thousands of dollars.
Can Your Mobile Infrastructure Survive 1 Million Concurrent Users?
You’re building the next killer mobile app. How do you ensure that your app is both stable and capable of near-instant data updates? Build a backend! But there’s more to building a backend than standing up a SQL server in your datacenter and calling it a day. Since different types of apps demand different backend services, how do you know what sort of backend you need? And, more importantly, how can you ensure that your backend will scale so you can survive an explosion of users that comes from events like being featured in the app store? Siva Katir and Melissa Benua will discuss the common scenarios facing mobile app developers who are looking to expand beyond just the device and will share best practices learned while building the PlayFab and other companies’ backends. Join Siva and Melissa to learn how you can ensure that your app can scale safely and affordably into the millions of concurrent users (CCU) and across multiple platforms.
Integration Testing as Validation and Monitoring
In the world of software-as-a-service, just about anyone with a laptop and an Internet connection can spin up their very own cloud-based web service. Software startups, in particular, are often big on ideas but small on staff. This makes streamlining the traditional develop-test-integrate-deploy-monitor pipeline critically important. Melissa Benua says that an effective way to accomplish this is to reduce the number of different test suites that verify many of the same things for each stage. Melissa explains how teams can avoid this by authoring the right set of tests and using the right frameworks. Drawing on lessons learned in companies both large and small, Melissa shows how teams can drastically slash time spent developing automation, verifying builds for release, and monitoring code in production—without sacrificing availability or reliability.
When You're the Lone (Female) Voice of Reason
With software engineering still dominated by men, it is not uncommon for women to find themselves alone on a team of men. Those who are test-focused can find themselves in the awkward position of not only being the sole woman in the ship room, but with the tough job of telling her peers they are not ready to go to production. Melissa Benua has spent many years as the lone female voice speaking up for code quality at companies both big and small. Learn from her experiences on how to be heard and taken seriously, with tips on how to be “the woman” without making the job about being female, how to avoid common traps in team situations, and how to improve your team’s attitude toward test. Melissa walks through how to use an organized, data-driven approach to remove the 'intimidation factor' from the process of advocating for code quality in a team-based setting.