Past Events

Creating a Quality Playbook

6:15 p.m. Online Event - Zoom

Due to the current situation with Coronavirus the TASSQ Board has decided to continue with monthly free online events until further notice, in support of the QA community!

Speaker: Dawn Jardine

Want to improve quality processes across your project delivery teams, standardize best practices, reduce ramp-up time, and make your QA team more autonomous?

Create a Quality playbook.

A playbook contains all the pieces and parts that make up our go-to approach for getting things done. The playbook provides step-by-step quality guidelines and actions, along with practical templates and examples from prior projects that can be adopted on future projects. When there are successful ways of working that bring proven results, creating a "how to" playbook can provide a guide for delivery teams that can be used, adapted and improved upon with each project.

In this presentation, we'll talk about what a Quality playbook is, how to create one, how to implement, as well as introduce you to better practice

Avoiding common pitfalls while implementing BDD

6:15 p.m. GoToMeeting

Due to the current situation with Coronavirus the TASSQ Board has decided to continue with monthly free online events until further notice, in support of the QA community!

Speaker: Bernd Bornhausen

Behavior Driven Development (BDD) is a very powerful tool when implemented correctly; if not, it becomes a nightmare.
Organizations are driven by the buzz words around BDD: shift-left, test-driven, code reuse, clarity, automation; to name just a few. While these are some of the benefits of BDD, they can only be realized when implementing BDD correctly; and that means organizations have to not only understand what BDD is, and what it is not, but they also have to plan properly.

In this talk, Bernd Bornhausen will describe some of the common pitfalls an organization can encounter while implementing BDD. These can be enc

The Foundational Change Toolkit for Quality Professionals

6:15 p.m. Go To Meeting Conference

Due to the current situation with Coronavirus the TASSQ Board has decided to continue with monthly free online events until further notice, in support of the QA community!

Event Speaker: Peter de Jager

Every manager involved with Quality, regardless of industry sector, will agree on the validity of this simple statement: “Quality is an ongoing process. There’s no final destination where we can stop and rest on our laurels.”

This statement comes with a hidden imperative: Constantly increasing Quality requires Constant Change.

This is evident in the overlapping S-Curves in Maturity models. We reach Quality limits within existing approaches and must shift to new process to achieve greater levels of quality.

Each process shift requires a Change to processes that allowed us to achieve existing Quality levels.

This means that while much of Quality Assurance is about making sure processes become part of the Culture, there’s a critical requirement for bringing Change about, sometimes having to disrupt processes and cultures that have resulted in huge gains with respect to Quality. In these situations, Machiavelli’s quote always comes to mind;

There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

There are good reasons for the popularity of this quote, changing what’s working, in order to work better… is difficult.

This webinar will address two topics:

1. The Virginia Satir Change Process – with attention paid to the inevitable connection to Maturity Models.

2. A Template for communicating any type of Change.

Who should attend? : Anyone and everyone mandated to make things better.

Takeaways: The additions to their Quality Assurance Toolkit they will take away?

1. An understanding of a Change Process Model that explains WHERE resistance originates, and the different phases involved in accepting a Change – whether it is externally imposed, or internally demanded.

2. A Communications framework supported by the Change Model, that focuses o

Teaching Testing to Programmers. What Sticks, And What Slides Off? A Journey from Teflon To Velcro.

6:15 p.m. GoToMeeting

Due to the current situation with Coronavirus the TASSQ Board has decided to continue with monthly free online events until further notice, in support of the QA community!

Guest Speakers

Robert Sabourin – AmiBug.Com, Inc. and McGill University

Mónica Wodzislawski – Centro de Ensayos de Software (Software Testing Center), Uruguay and Universidad de la República, (University of the Republic), Uruguay

There is a lot of interest in teaching programming skills to testers, but Rob and Mónica suggest that it is even more important to teach testing skills to programmers. Corporate initiatives to “shift left” and Agile “test-driven” development approaches are only effective if a skilled programmer is also a skilled tester.

Agile training emphasizes soft skills and collaboration between team members with diverse skills. While appreciating such training, Rob and Mónica think that great testing does not naturally follow from team-building exercises; pragmatic hard skills such as programming, test design, troubleshooting and debugging must be taught.

In this presentation, Rob and Mónica will discuss two phenomena observed in thei

AGILE PRACTICES AND TESTING: The Art & Science of Testing the Unknown.

6:15 p.m. GoToMeeting

Due to the current situation with Coronavirus the TASSQ Board has decided to continue with monthly free online events until December 2020, in support of the QA community!

Guest Speaker: Ardita Karaj, Agile Coach and Trainer.

Testing what we know, or have a clear understanding of, is relatively straight forward, as is making decisions based on the expected result. But today’s world is presenting us with the Unknown and the Ambiguous, which can only be approached by hypothesizing and experimenting - a lot! This requires intentional thinking, and a different strategy to observe in context.

This session will uncover how testers are helping their teams and product owners, by basing their testing on the science behind creating hypotheses and running experiments. A tes

RPA, AI and Automation Testing

6:15 p.m. GoToMeeting

***September 22 Update: Registrations are closed - EVENT IS SOLD OUT!!!***

Due to the current situation with Coronavirus the TASSQ Board has decided to continue with monthly free online events until December 2020, in support of the QA community!

Speaker: Jaideep Kala, RPA/AI Evangelist, Thought Leader, Speaker, Trainer and Principal at Onbotix Services

According to the Anatomy of Work Index Report, conducted recently among more than 10,000 people around the world by Asana, the team-based work management platform provider, the average knowledge worker spends about 60 per cent of their time on mundane duties that add little real value. Most of these activities are rule based, time intensive and repetitive. Humans are not particularly good at performing such activities. What if all these could be hived off to a software robot?. This would allow workers to focus on value-added tasks and become more productive, energized, and motivated.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the technology that accomplishes this. Increasingly, we are seeing developments in AI such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) making these robots become more intelligent and complex. Testing and implementing them requires a new approach, that is more agile and automated itself.

This presentation will look at all three aspects of robot development: RPA for building, Artificial Intelligence for making it more intelligent, and Automation Testing. The goal is stable and resilient robots. The speaker will discuss vendo

DON'T REGISTER - TASSQ NEW WEBSITE TESTING IN PROGRESS

6:00 p.m. The Albany Club - 91 King Street East, Toronto, Ontario

ISTQB -- CERTIFICATIONS AND MORE

6:15pm GoToMeeting

Due to the current situation with Coronavirus and need for social distancing, the TASSQ board has decided, to continue sharing knowledge and support the QA community, to make the June 23 conference a free online event!

Speaker: Gary Mogyorodi

Come to learn about the ISTQB Certification scheme and the new certifications being offered by the ISTQB.  Gary will discuss the history of the Canadian Software Testing Board (CSTB) since its inception in 2007.  He will also be talking about the additional opportunities that are available to testers who are interested in being part of the ISTQB Working Groups.

Mr

QA Guilds, True Agile and the Spotify Model

6:15pm GoToMeeting

Due to the current situation with Coronavirus and need for social distancing, the TASSQ board has decided, to continue sharing knowledge and support the QA community, to make the May 26 conference a free online event!

Speaker: Richard Strang

In 2018, Element Fleet Management committed to implementing "True Agile" into their entire software development organization. With the assistance of Boston Consulting Group, they embraced the "Spotify Model" of Agile which includes organizing Guilds for each role on the Squad.

In early 2019, Richard Strang was hired as the QA Guild Leader for Element. He found an organization with the will, but not the experience to best apply the Agile Principles into their software development processes. Over the last year, Richard has instituted a QA Guild at Element that endeavors to provide a forum for the 90+ testers currently working at Element to discuss the projects, practices, tools, and strategies that we all need to provide a quality service to our clients.

You are invited to attend a model QA Guild Meeting where we will discuss typical topics that come up with the testers currently working at Element. Richard will also present his experience and challenges imple

Testing Deep and Shallow

6:15 p.m. Go To Meeting Conference

Due to the current situation with Coronavirus and need for social distancing, the TASSQ board has decided, to continue sharing knowledge and support the QA community, to make the April 28 conference a free online event!

Speaker: Michael Bolton

One of the most fundamental questions you can ask about testing is "Did I test that?" But there isn't a binary answer to that question. We know when we haven't tested at all, but there is no such thing as infinite testing, so we can’t every test completely. We test in different ways, at different times, in different situations, for different reasons. And so, responsible testers must be able to reason about and assess the relative depth of their testing. How do we do that?

In this talk, Michael Bolton offers some suggestions on how to think about testing depth. That’s not simply about structural depth — “unit testing”, “sub-system testing”, “system testing”, or “end-to-end testing”. Instead, it’s about the thoroughness of testing — and t