Elisabeth Hendrickson will be coming to facilitate our February meeting. Here's her description:

UPDATE: SolutionsIQ are sponsoring pizza for twenty - arriving at 6:30 <<<

"It will essentially be a shorter preview of the Agile2009 demo I proposed at http://agile2009.agilealliance.org/node/641

Here's the blurb:

Agile teams practicing Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) define acceptance tests collaboratively while discussing each story. This practice helps uncover assumptions and confirm that everyone has a shared understanding of what “done” looks like. During implementation, the technical team automates the natural-language Acceptance Tests by writing code to wire them up to the emerging software. In this way, ATDD tests become executable requirements. This session is a demonstration of the full ATDD workflow from initial discussions through final demo, and everything in between."

Elisabeth Hendrickson came to Portland last month to introduce us to Acceptance Test Driven Development at XPDX. She'll be back in town in April to run a three day workshop: Agile Testing Series.

There are still places available -- be quick to get a spot as I expect that this will sell out soon.

What: Agile Testing Series When: April 28 - 30, 2009 Where: McMenamin's Kennedy School, Portland, OR Instructors: Elisabeth Hendrickson and Dale Emery Cost: Before March 29, $499/day. Group discounts also available.

Description: This is a 3 day series of 1-day classes on the essential principles and practices in Agile Testing: - Day 1: Adapting to Agile (also known as the "WordCount Simulation") - Day 2: Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) in Practice - Day 3: Exploratory Testing in an Agile Context

These classes involve lots of exercises, demonstrations, and discussions, and absolutely no slideshows, and no long, boring lectures.

For more information, please see the registration page: http://www.regonline.com/ATS042809

They're also offering this same series of classes in Pleasanton, CA the preceding week if you know anyone in the SF Bay Area who might be interested. See: http://www.regonline.com/ATS042209

PDX.pm meetings are on the second Wednesday of each month at 6:53pm, typically at Free Geek. Meetings are free-of-charge for all PortlandPerlMongerMembers. The cost for non-members is $2,000,000,000.00 per person.

What tools and techniques do you use to keep your project shiny and well-oiled? Bring a sample for show-and-tell, or just a few things to say about it.

Please see the kwiki link for the latest details about this meeting. Our panels always lead to interesting and surprising discussion.

Python Testing! New Time! New Location!

Join us for our inaugural meeting at Webtrends in downtown Portland. On the agenda for August:

• Testing in a Python World by Adam Originally proposed for OSBridge 2009: http://opensourcebridge.org/proposals/243

• Module of the Month by Michelle

• Pizza & Beer sponsored by Emma!

Join us on our python.org mailing list and on #pdxpython on Freenode. All are welcome!

The next talk in the Galois Tech Seminar series:

• Date: Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009
• Title: Testing First-Order-Logic Axioms in AutoCert
• Speaker: Ki Yung Ahn
• Time: 10:30am - 11:30am
• Location: Galois, Inc. 421 SW 6th Ave. Suite 300; Portland, OR 97204

For details (including an abstract and speaker bio), please see our blog post: http://www.galois.com/blog/2009/10/28/ahn-autocert/

An RSVP is not required; but feel free to drop a line to [email protected] if you've any questions or comments.

Levent Erkok

We're going to do a group activity on TDD. Please bring some tests -- good, bad, or interesting / enlightening in some way. (A USB stick is a good idea.) We’re going to discuss them, refactor them as a group, and generally use them as the fixed points around which we can discuss all things that improve our ability to design well (since design is what TDD is about)

Pizza and networking at 6:30; meeting at 7; beer and discussion afterwards.

Jon Bach is coming to our local agile users group to tell us about his specialty, exploratory testing. Pizza at 6:30, meeting at 7.

Talk: "Exploratory Testing: Now In Session"

The agile nature of exploration and the ability of testers to rapidly apply their skills and experience make exploratory testing a widely used test approach—especially when time is short. But exploratory testing is often dismissed by project managers who assume that it is not reproducible, measurable, or accountable. If you share these concerns, a solution may lie in a technique called Session-Based Test Management (SBTM), developed by Jon and his brother James specifically to address these problems. In SBTM, testers are assigned areas of a product to explore, and testing is time boxed in "sessions" which have mission statements called “charters” to create a meaningful and countable unit of work. Jon discusses—and you can practice—the skills of exploration and demonstrates a freely available, open source tool to help manage your exploratoration.

Speaker Bio: Jon Bach has been in testing for 14 years, 12 of which has been as a manager. His experience includes managing teams at Microsoft, HP and LexisNexis, and is currently a managing consultant for Quardev, Inc. -- a Seattle test lab. He speaks frequently about test management and exploratory testing, and is the co-inventor (with his brother James) of Session-Based Test Management. He’s also written a few articles for testing magazines as well as a listed co-author of a Microsoft Patterns and Practices book on acceptance testing (available for free online). Find him on Facebook, Twitter, or his presentations and articles on http://www.quardev.com, where he also has a blog.

speaker: Chad 'Exodist' Granum

Chad will demonstrate what he has so far, and request feedback.

From the fennec docs: Fennec - Framework upon which inter-compatible testing solutions can be built.

Fennec provides a solid base that is highly extendable. It allows for the writing of custom nestable workflows (like RSPEC), Custom Asserts (like Test::Exception), Custom output handlers (Alternatives to TAP), Custom file types, and custom result passing (collectors). In Fennec all test files are objects. Fennec also solves the forking problem, that's it, forking just plain works.

This framework is what has come from a discussion around modern testing in Perl. It is an attempt to address, or make addressable the desires and needs expressed therein. It is also an attempt to make glue for all future solutions to current and future problems.

As always, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab.

speaker: Ingy döt Net

Ingy will give a talk about:

• Acmeism - Programming above programming languages
• C'Dent - A portable module programming language
• Stardoc - An Acmeist documentation system
• TestML - An Acmeist unit test language

Imagine writing a Perl module, and then uploading it to RubyGems and PyPi and a dozen other language repositories as a native module for that language. C'Dent compiles modules Perl, Python, Ruby and JavaScript modules to many languages. Stardoc reformats POD to many other formats. TestML lets you write one set of tests that all the compiled modules must pass before shipping.

This is the future. This is Acmeism.

As always, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab.

speakers: chromatic and Michael Schwern

This meeting will be two shorter presentations back-to-back. The Modern Perl talk is broadly targetted at beginners and everyday general usage concepts while the Test::Builder 2 talk will delve much deeper into particular details of Perl's testing system.

chromatic on Modern Perl Perl masters talk about strange subjects such as whipupitude, manipulexity, context, lexicals, and linguistic principles. It may seem that you must be a wizard to apply these notions to your code and dexterously wield Perl's essential strengths. In truth, these ideas and idioms are deceptively simple: you use them every day when you read or write plain English. Demystifying the linguistic concepts in Perl opens up the doors of Perl mastery. Come learn the philosophy behind Perl's design in order to understand Perl and how to use its unique isms to improve your code.

Schwern on Test::Builder2 Test::Builder is what most Test modules are written with these days. It lets them quietly coordinate with each other and frees the authors from having to worry about the details. It was written in 2001 and in that decade there's been an explosion of testing modules. A decade later, Test::Builder is starting to show its age and limitations. Its assumptions and biases are restraining the Perl testing community. Perl has moved on, too. When Test::Builder was written, testing was still a "new" thing. Now it's a given. We have a real object system now and a sophisticated community to take advantage. Enter Test::Builder2. A total rewrite of Test::Builder to remove its biases and let test authors do whatever they can dream up while still being the solid iron core of Perl testing and remaining compatible with Test::Builder. It takes advantage of things like Mouse (that's a small Moose), method wrappers and roles. Counter-intuitively, it does less than Test::Builder does while providing more opportunities. Schwern has a grant for Test::Builder2 from the Perl Foundation and if he doesn't release something by October they'll break his legs. So he's hoping to generate some contributors by showing off the design and code!

As always, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab.

Writing Testable code with Michael Labriola

You all know by now that you should be unit testing your code, but do you know how? It is unfortunately really easy in Flex to architect code which is very difficult to test. In this session, we will explore how to build components and applications in flex which are inherently testable, and see how we test them.

Michael Labriola is a Senior Consultant at Digital Primates and the Lead Developer for FlexUnit 4.

Get there at 5:30 for pizza, drinks and networking. The presentation will start at 6:00 pm.

Writing Testable code. You all know by now that you should be unit testing your code, but do you know how? It is unfortunately really easy in flex to architect code which is very difficult to test. In this session, we will explore how to build components and applications in flex which are inherently testable, and see how we test them.

Join us Thursday, October 14, for food and networking at 5:30 PM sponsored by Thetus Corporation in association with the PDXRIA User Group. Our speaker, Michael Labriola starts at 6 PM.

Michael Labriola is a Senior Consultant at Digital Primates and the Lead Developer for FlexUnit 4. He has been developing Internet applications since 1995 and working with Flex since its 1.0 beta. Michael is an Adobe Certified Instructor, Community Professional, and co-author of the Flex 2, 3 and 4 Training from the Source books and Breaking out of the Browser with Adobe AIR.

As an international speaker and team mentor on Flex and AIR projects, he has consulted for many of the world’s most recognized brands. His free time is spent escaping from technology through wine and food.

RSVP: http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/6735069/OR/Portland/Flex-and-Maven-a-joint-event-by-Thetus-Corporation-and-PDXRIA-User-Group/Thetus-Corporation/ Your RSVP enters you in a raffle for a Powell's gift card!

December 9th Rose City SPIN Seminar Announcement:

Beyond Acceptance Testing

Presented by BJ Clark

Dates/Times: Thursday, December 9th, 2010; Networking @ 6:00 PM; Seminar 7:00-8:00 PM Location: HF3 Auditorium, Intel Hawthorne Farms 3 (HF3) Campus, 5200 NE Elam Young Pkwy, Hillsboro, OR 97124 - View Map

Directions: From Cornell, head South on NE Elam Young Pkwy (near Costco). Take the first left to turn into the Intel parking lot. The HF3 campus will be directly in front of you. Parking is available on both sides of the building. Note that there are two NE Elam Young Pkwy streets that connect to Cornell. Use the west one, closest to Brookwood and Costco.

Abstract Fit, Fitness, and Cucumber have revolutionized development and brought the idea of acceptance-level testing and "Outside-in-development" to a whole community of developers, testers and product owners. But can we take the idea of acceptance testing to another level and test things other than the "correctness" of our software? What if we could also specify and test the quality of interaction in our applications? What if we could involve a whole other community of people, interaction designers and user experience professionals, in not just the ideation of our products, but the actual execution of the software itself? In beyond acceptance testing, we'll look into who could be writing acceptance tests and all the things that we could be testing that most of us currently aren't doing.

Speaker Bio

BJ Clark is a SE Portland based designer, "extreme programmer", and user experience professional. He works for Goldstar Events (goldstar.com) running skunk-works projects and working on the overall user experience. He has more than 10 years experience developing e-commerce platforms and working for numerous venture funded startups. You can read his blog at http://bjclark.me. He received his formal education in Fine Art and when not in front of a computer, likes to make furniture and wood-fired ceramics.

A Special Treat from PNSQC

Plan on coming early! In collaboration with the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference (PNSQC) the SPIN meeting will have pizza and pop provided by PNSQC beginning at 6:00 pm.

PNSQC is the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference, a group of volunteers interested in Software Quality. The Mission of the PNSQC is to enable knowledge exchange to produce higher quality software. As a non-profit, it seeks to promote software quality by providing education and opportunities for information exchange within the software community.

How to Register

This is a FREE lecture sponsored by the Rose City SPIN. Please RSVP to [email protected] so we know you’re coming!

Rose City SPIN

The Rose City Software Process Improvement Network (SPIN) is a monthly forum for networking, mutual support, and promotion of effective software practices. We exchange practical experiences, ideas, knowledge, wisdom, and war stories about the technical, business, and human facets of software process improvement. The Rose City SPIN serves the software development community of the Portland/Vancouver metro area. Whether you work for a large company or a small one, corporate or self-employed, industrial or academic setting, you are welcome at the Rose City SPIN.

Jon Bach is coming to our local agile users group to tell us about his specialty, exploratory testing. Pizza at 6:30, meeting at 7.

Talk: "Exploratory Testing: Now In Session"

The agile nature of exploration and the ability of testers to rapidly apply their skills and experience make exploratory testing a widely used test approach—especially when time is short. But exploratory testing is often dismissed by project managers who assume that it is not reproducible, measurable, or accountable. If you share these concerns, a solution may lie in a technique called Session-Based Test Management (SBTM), developed by Jon and his brother James specifically to address these problems. In SBTM, testers are assigned areas of a product to explore, and testing is time boxed in "sessions" which have mission statements called “charters” to create a meaningful and countable unit of work. Jon discusses—and you can practice—the skills of exploration and demonstrates a freely available, open source tool to help manage your exploratoration.

Speaker Bio: Jon Bach has been in testing for 14 years, 12 of which has been as a manager. His experience includes managing teams at Microsoft, HP and LexisNexis, and is currently a managing consultant for Quardev, Inc. -- a Seattle test lab. He speaks frequently about test management and exploratory testing, and is the co-inventor (with his brother James) of Session-Based Test Management. He’s also written a few articles for testing magazines as well as a listed co-author of a Microsoft Patterns and Practices book on acceptance testing (available for free online). Find him on Facebook, Twitter, or his presentations and articles on http://www.quardev.com, where he also has a blog.

speaker: Chad 'Exodist' Granum

Refactoring is something many developers approach with a great deal of fear. Sometimes you may need to refactor code that you do not understand. Sometimes there are no unit tests. Sometimes things can be scary.

Chad will be showing techniques for cleaning/refactoring code that will help avoid errors, and make things less scary. Ideally people will bring small/medium code samples or modules as examples. If nobody brings anything we may pull something off of cpan.

As usual, the meeting will be followed by social hour at the Lucky Lab.

SQAUG and TAO Presents:

A Conversation With James Bach

James Bach: Author, Public Speaker on All Good Things QA and Principle Consultant for Satisfice,Inc.

James likes to explore the answer to what 'good' means in software development. Come and chat with him about what Rapid Software Testing means, to testers, companies and the definition of quality!

CITCON, the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, is a world-wide series of free Open Spaces events for developer-testers, tester-developers and anyone else with an interest in Continuous Integration and the type of Testing that goes along with it.

CITCON provides a forum to connect with other people on topics you care about, to learn from their experience and share your own. Example topics from the most recent CITCON (Singapore) can be seen on the conference wiki: http://citconf.com/wiki/index.php?title=CITCONAsia2012Sessions

Free event but registration is required.

IMPORTANT: Space is limited to 150 participants, so please register to reserve a spot. The event is free, but a donation is suggested.

CITCON, the Continuous Integration and Testing Conference, is a world-wide series of free Open Spaces events for developer-testers, tester-developers and anyone else with an interest in Continuous Integration and the type of Testing that goes along with it.

CITCON provides a forum to connect with other people on topics you care about, to learn from their experience and share your own. Past topics include:

• What is Continuous Integration?
• What CI Tools can learn from the Rubber Chicken
• What Is The One True Language For Writing Tests?
• The Future of Build Languages
• BDD is not TDD
• How Far is End-to-End?
• Fit for Fun and Profit
• Overcoming Barriers to Adoption

Sponsored by AgilePDX, Agile Open Northwest, TAO QA & Dev Forums, PNSQC:

"Agile Testing: How do WE Make it Work?"

As our organizations move toward "Agile” for developing software, we all face the challenge of understanding how to adapt our former roles and ways of working to new work roles and processes. How do we ensure the continued value of testing?

Join us in Open Space to share your questions, challenges, strategies, success stories, and how you've overcome stumbling blocks.

In small groups, we’ll discuss topics such as:

· How is Agile testing different from how we’ve always done it? · How do we know what to test? · How do we know what not to test? · On Agile teams, when does testing happen and whose job is it? · What is Exploratory Testing and why should we care? · How do regression tests work? · How does testing improve my design? Should it? · How do we ensure it is cost effective? · What do people mean when they say, "no defects”? · Does Agile change how we test or does it just raise the existing issues?

Bring the topics you feel passion for and add them to the list!

Each self-organizing discussion group will create a document or other record of their discussion, ideas, questions, and insights. We’ll share everyone’s experiences at the end of the day.

Who should attend?

· Testers facing an Agile adoption/People new to the testing role/Testers eager to jump in · Devs who want to get serious about defect-free code · CTOs and Managers of Test/Validation, Dev, Application Delivery · Academics preparing new software/IT professionals for the real world

Cost to attend: $75 per person (Register early. We expect to sell out.)

This month, we’re talking about QA's role on the Agile Team.

Fresh from a successful ATONW (Agile Testing Open Northwest) we will delve deeper and discuss what QA's role is on agile teams.

Same bat time; same bat place: noon on Friday at Ringler’s (not Ringler’s Annex, keep heading east) on Burnside. Good food. Good beer. Good, straight talk.

A guide for the beginner: How to start up small with automation, and build up your portfolio! How to make your testing life easier!!

GUEST SPEAKER: Alan Ark, QA Manager at Compli

Alan Ark is the QA Manager at Compli, in Portland, Oregon. Alan has gained tremendous experience working for Unircu, Switchboard.com, and Thomson Financial – First Call. Mr. Ark has previously presented ‘Euro: An Automated Solution to Currency Conversion’ at Quality Week ’99, and ‘Collaborative Quality: One Company’s Recipe for Software Success’ at PNSQC 2008 and YES! You CAN Bring Test Automation to Your Company! at PNSQC 2011. At Compli, he is using Ruby to solve problems both large and small.

His LinkedIn profile can be viewed at http://www.linkedin.com/in/arkie

SQAUG is Portland/Vancouver area’s only Software Quality Assurance User Group! We are BRAND NEW, and would like to extend a warm welcome to everyone who would like to participate in a user group dedicated to growing the Quality Assurance field.

SQAUG is made up of a group of SQA professionals who have banded together in an open forum to learn from each other through a series of interactive discussions, engaged debates, training presentations, exploring tools, and general networking and sharing of job opportunities. Our goals are to expand knowledge about Software Quality to all professionals who are passionate about their careers, and take Software Quality seriously.

SQAUG Presents:

Murky Waters: Where Do Tests Come From? A discussion about requirements, and other sources for the development of test cases

Moderated by: Mary Torres Lead QA Engineer, Viewpoint Construction Software, Portland, OR

at Con-Way 2055 NW Savier, Portland, OR 97209 on Wednesday April 17, 2013 5:30pm until 7:30pm

Where do tests come from? Pittsburg. No not really. Actually, we hope to discuss the various sources for tests in the different SDLC environments. We want everyone to share good practices for gleaning information needed for testing, including; rummaging through requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, code commentary, etc. Do your Product Managers write up test cases, DEV’s? Business Analysts? Tech facilitators? Remember Use Cases? Much of what we used to do, has become muddled and wrapped up in terminology and processes that no longer mean the same things they used to. Let’s talk it through and see if we can help each other in this murky water.

Mary Torres; our moderator for this event currently works at Viewpoint Construction Software as Lead QA Engineer. She a degree in Computer Science, has almost 17 years working in the software industry, and has worked in QA for that entire time. Her work experience includes QA management, automated testing, and functional testing. She is also a certified scrum master. Mary has worked on projects that have utilized traditional Waterfall and Agile/Scrum SDLC’s.

Event is FREE and Open to the Public

Agenda: 5:30-6:00PM: Pizza, Networking and SQAUG Announcements 6:00-7:30PM: Scheduled Moderator: Mary Torres

Details: • Event is Free to the public • Onsite parking (directions below) • Light dinner and beverages will be served • No RSVP is required to attend

SQAUG is Portland/Vancouver area’s only Software Quality Assurance User Group! We are NEW, and would like to extend a warm welcome to everyone who would like to participate in a user group dedicated to growing the Quality Assurance field.

SQAUG is made up of a group of SQA professionals who have banded together in an open forum to learn from each other through a series of interactive discussions, engaged debates, training presentations, exploring tools, and general networking and sharing of job opportunities. Our goals are to expand knowledge about Software Quality to all professionals who are passionate about their careers, and take Software Quality seriously.

For more on SQAUG: http://www.sqaug.org/ Linked in: SQAUG Meetup: SQAUGPDX

6 to 6:30 networking and pizza sponsored by TekSystems

6:30 Task Base Async Programming

Providing scalability by maximizing throughput of mixed resource tasks in a multi-core environment

Venue sponsor New Relic pizza sponsor TekSystems Post meeting beer location TBD?

Presented by Alex Groce.

One of the most effective ways to test complex language implementations, file systems, and other critical systems software is random test generation. This talk will cover a number of recent results that show how---despite the importance of hand-tooled random test generators for complex testing targets--- there are methods that can be easily applied in almost any setting to greatly improve the effectiveness of random testing. Surprisingly, giving up on potentially finding any bug with every test makes it possible to find more bugs over all. The practical problem of finding distinct bugs in a large set of randomly generated tests, where the frequency of some bugs may be orders of magnitude higher than other bugs, is also open to non ad-hoc methods.

fennec is an alternate testing framework for perl. It's author will discuss recent improvements that have been made as the project has developed.

Crowdsourcing has become widely acknowledged as a productivity solution across numerous industries. However, for companies incorporating crowdsourcing into existing business practices, specific issues must be addressed: What problem are we trying to solve? How do we control the process? How do we incentivize people to achieve our goals? Ultimately, the key to successfully employing a crowdsourcing model is to move beyond the realm of the "mob" to create an engaged, interactive community of diverse and skilled professionals. In the world of quality assurance, crowdsourcing has the potential to effectively solve emerging challenges and take your testing to new heights. Using real-world examples, uTest's John Montgomery explains how you can leverage the crowd to complement your internal systems, ensure systems work as intended under real-world conditions and effectively manage the scalability of efforts.

It's not too late to register or volunteer for PNSQC, the Northwest's premier software quality conference. Attend the conference, watch the keynotes, talk to paper and poster presenters, come to the official party.

Please join us to kick-off this new Meetup group and help us develop a thriving community of practice for FitNesse in Portland.

If you’re not sure what FitNesse is or how it can be used to automate tests, specify requirements or support TDD practices, here are some sites to check out:

http://fitnesse.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FitNesse

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_dVuQjWXaw

Please RSVP at the website. We hope to see you and other members of the Portland development and SQA community there.

The key to successful adoption of any development methodology is a clear understanding of the roles and responsibilities of each team member within that framework. As agile continues its rapid adoption, it’s essential to define the role of QA in Scrum as concretely as we’ve defined the other team roles.
Agile methodology gives QA an opportunity for broader and deeper involvement in the software development lifecycle, enabling us more effectively to ensure quality, not by finding defects, but by preventing the introduction of defects in the first place. Because quality starts with the user story, QA can drive defect prevention by asking key questions of product owners during requirements definition. We can ensure that comprehensive acceptance criteria are in place, to drive high quality development, testing, and story acceptance. We can also ask technical questions of developers. This results in more thoroughly defined user stories and prompts developers to consider additional issues, and avoid pitfalls in advance of implementation. Finally, to prevent the steady growth of technical debt, we must remind scrum masters to plan story points for fixing both known and unknown defects as part of every sprint. This presentation will teach you how to leverage Agile within your organization to see immediate improvements in the quality of your software delivery.

About the speaker... Karen Ascheim Wysopal has been in software QA for over 20 years, in roles including tester, release manager, software engineer, test automation engineer, and 8 years as QA manager. She’s spent the past five years at Hewlett Packard, and currently heads Quality & PMO in the Software and Web Services organization, overseeing HPConnected.com, ePrintcenter.com, and related HP web-connected print technologies. She was a leader in the organization’s transition to Agile last year. Karen has presented at the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference. Her professional passions are building high functioning innovative teams from the ground up, defining processes that encompass a holistic approach to quality, and speaking on best practices to foster improvements across the industry. She can’t seem to stop breaking software.

SQAUG Presents: Building Automation on Business Concepts – Michael Cowan, SQE Viewpoint Construction SW Topic: Building Automation on Business Concepts - A Real World Example

Come participate in an open discussion of advanced automation concepts using real world examples from Viewpoints massive ERP Solution. There will be an initial presentation on key concepts, followed by a code review of real tests and ending in an open discussion of how these concepts can be applied to your work

The presentation will focus on how Viewpoint has structured its automation framework to focus on common business concepts and not a single technology. We wi ll show you how a single test can be written so it runs against a WinForm UI, Web UI, REST API or even directly against a database.

This framework was implemented in C# (but I have implemented Java and Scala versions at past companies) and was executing test cases in less than 30 days. Everything we discuss will be targeted at how to get something viable up and running in less than 30 days

About Our Speaker: Michael Cowan has over 20 years’ experience in the
software industry, and has held individual and management roles in both QA and Development. His passions have always been automation, and he has been a lead engineer on several successf ul automation frameworks

Agenda: 5:30-6:00 PM: Pizza and Networking 6:00-6:15PM: SQAUG Announcements 6:15-7:30PM: Michael Cowan will discuss automating business concepts, and any questions you’ve sent.

Details: . Event is Free to the public · On site parking (directions below) · Light Hors d'oeuvres and beverages will be served · No RSVP is required to attend

SQAUG is Portland/Vancouver area’s only Software Quality Assurance User Group! We are BRAND NEW,
and would like to extend a warm welcome to everyone who would like to participate in a user group dedicated to growing the Quality Assurance field.

SQAUG is made up of a group of SQA professionals who have banded together in an open forum to learn from each other through a series of interactive discuss ions, engaged debates, training presentations, exploring tools, and general networking and sharing of job opportunities. Our goals are to expand knowledge about Software Quality to all professionals who are passionate about their careers, and take Software Quality seriously.

For more on SQAUG: http://www.sqaug.org/ Linked in: SQAUG

Join us for an evening discussing application and user testing.

This meeting will be at Plus QA in SE where they have just opened acommunity test lab ( http://portlandtestlab.com ) with various iOSand Android devices for developers.

The user testing meeting a few months ago was a huge hit and we aredoing that again. So after we talk about testing on devices we'llbreak into small groups to run user tests on our own apps in afriendly environment.

Thanks in advance PlusQA for supplying the space and pizza and beer.

Agenda:

• Welcome, Intros and announcements

• Community test lab - how it will work and how it is useful

• User testing - bring your apps and devices

• Discussion and socializing

SQAUG Presents:

Getting The Job You Love Is the Grass Greener on the Other Side??? by Angela Enloe, Senior IT Manager, Conway

at Con-Way 2055 NW Savier, Portland, OR 97209 on Wednesday May 14, 2014 at 5:30pm until 7:30pm

Event is FREE and Open to the Public

Getting the Job You Love! Is the grass greener on the other side? We all have choices! We can choose where we work, and what we want in a job! But do we all know how to grow and change in our jobs, to create the best impact for our careers? Do we know how to hunt or interview for that "just right" company? Learn about how to make the right choices, how to take that large step up the career ladder in this talk about career development, hunting for the right job, and growing your skills for a competitive and demanding job market!

Angela Enloe, Senior IT Manager at Conway, will be presenting this don't-miss topic at our next SQAUG meeting. Are you looking to develop your career? Come learn about how best to do that! If you have found a terrific job – come share with others about how you did that! If you ARE looking currently - Angela will share some of the things you can do to make YOU the best candidate!

About Our Speaker: Angela Enloe, Sr. IT Mgr. is in a senior leadership role at Con-way, Menlo Worldwide Logistics. She is responsible for the QA Team and Technical Support groups and has been in the IT/SQA field for 18+ years. She is co-founder and past President of SQAUG, and wants to share her passion for career development, mentoring and networking. Her diverse background includes many different industries and management of a broad selection of IT teams including: QA, development, change management, release management, and technical support.

Agenda: 5:30-6:00PM: Pizza and Networking 6:00-6:15PM: SQAUG Announcements 6:15-7:30PM: Angela Enloe will talk about how to grow your career.

Details: • Event is Free to the public • Onsite parking (directions below) • Light Hors d'oeuvres and beverages will be served • No RSVP is required to attend

SQAUG is Portland/Vancouver area’s only Software Quality Assurance User Group! We are BRAND NEW, and would like to extend a warm welcome to everyone who would like to participate in a user group dedicated to growing the Quality Assurance field.

SQAUG is made up of a group of SQA professionals who have banded together in an open forum to learn from each other through a series of interactive discussions, engaged debates, training presentations, exploring tools, and general networking and sharing of job opportunities. Our goals are to expand knowledge about Software Quality to all professionals who are passionate about their careers, and take Software Quality seriously.

For more on SQAUG: http://www.sqaug.org/ Linked in: SQAUG

To be on event notification mailing list, join the SQAUG group at MEETUP.com.

Highly Functional Programming

Speaker: Eric Wilhelm

Functional programming is very pure and elegant when nothing can change, and the computer can reason about your code for you -- in theory. Reality is messier, but Perl and other high-level languages support pure functions as a subset of the procedural and OO paradigms, so why don't we use them more? Functional techniques are good problem solving tools, useful for event-driven programs, and can be mixed into traditional OO and procedural codebases for better code reuse and testability.

In this talk, we'll look at some benefits of purely functional programming from a pragmatic and procedural viewpoint. There will be absolutely no mention of monads because we will just ride our lambdas through the mud and get it done. We'll see how good programming practices tend to suggest stateless and functional approaches. We'll examine techniques for refactoring which separate functions from state changes and allow you to better test and reason about your code. Finally, we'll look at language interpreters and discuss how technology might be able to help get even more benefits out of highly functional programming approaches.

This is a preview of an upcoming OSCON talk.

As always, meet us at the Lucky Lab for some beer and good company following the meeting.

Galois is pleased to host the following tech talk. These talks are free and open to the interested public--please join us! (There is no need to pre-register for the talk.)

Abstract

QuickCheck is a powerful library for automatic test-case generation. Because QuickCheck performs random testing, some of the counterexamples discovered are very large. QuickCheck provides an interface for the user to write shrink functions to attempt to reduce the size of counterexamples. Hand-written implementations of shrink can be complex, inefficient, and consist of significant boilerplate code. Furthermore, shrinking is only one aspect in debugging: counterexample generalization is the process of extrapolating from individual counterexamples to a class of counterexamples, often requiring a flash of insight from the programmer. To improve counterexample reduction and generalization, we introduce SmartCheck. SmartCheck is a debugging tool that reduces algebraic data using generic search heuristics to efficiently find smaller counterexamples. In addition to shrinking, SmartCheck also automatically generalizes counterexamples to formulas representing classes of counterexamples. SmartCheck has been implemented for Haskell and is freely available.

Bio

Lee Pike manages the Cyber-Physical Systems program at Galois, a company specializing in software-intensive critical systems. He has been the Principal Investigator on approximately $10 million of R&D projects funded by NASA, DARPA, and other federal agencies. His research focuses on applying techniques from functional programming, run-time verification, and formal verification to the areas of operating systems, compilers, cryptographic systems, avionics, and control systems. Previously, he was a research scientist in the NASA Langley Formal Methods Group and has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University.

Driving Mobile Applications with Appium for Automated Testing

The objective of this talk is to gain familiarization with Appium - a selenium-based tool for testing mobile applications. Through a series live demos we'll discuss automation techniques for functional and performance testing of Android and iOS apps using Appium's Java API. We will also see a couple of other tools that can be useful for developing and testing mobile apps, including Xamarin Studio and Riverbed SteelCentral.

Speaker

Ian Downard, a Developer Advocate for Riverbed Technologies, is a polyglot programmer with a penchant for C++ and Java. His professional career has focused on developing tools to optimize the performance of applications and networks. He has a knack for automation and has had success applying those skills broadly, from software testing to chicken coops.

SQAUG Presents:

Non-Expert Automation Testing (NEAT)

by Loren Brown

at Con-Way 2055 NW Savier, Portland, OR 97209 on Wednesday March 18, 2015 5:30pm until 7:30pm

Event is FREE and Open to the Public

Non-Expert Automation Testing (NEAT) is an automation testing framework that enables non-experts to harness the power of data-driven, Selenium automation tests. The NEAT web portal simplifies and guides the creation of otherwise complex scripts through the use of an intuitive user interface that manages a web element object repository, test case input data, and test scripts. This approach is intended to enable test script automation to be completed in hours or days instead of weeks or months. The motivation behind NEAT is to equip business analysts, without automation expertise, with an intuitive tool to create and execute sophisticated, automated end-to-end testing scripts. This framework enables teams to increase automated test coverage and allows the highly skilled automation developers to focus on more complex automation testing needs of the organization.

About Our Speaker: Loren J. Brown is a Test Automation Architect and owner of Quantum Peg, Inc. He is currently teaming up with John Cvetko from TEK Associates to develop the DEAP testing tool. After obtaining a Bachelor’s in Computer Science at Portland State University, Loren worked for over two decades as a QA Engineer in various capacities. At Intel Corporation he spent a little over a dozen years in various product teams and Intel Labs as a QA Lead in various software projects including Video Conferencing, IP Telephony, TCP/IP Network Performance, and others. He spent over six years at Automatic Data Processing (ADP) as a QA Lead developing various test automation frameworks and harnesses, and multiple software lifecycle data visualization projects. When he carves out time for hobbies, Loren likes tinkering with microcontrollers and small electronics projects. Agenda: 5:30-6:00PM: Pizza and Networking 6:00-6:15PM: SQAUG Announcements 6:15-7:30PM: Presentation/Q&A

Details: · Event is Free to the public · Onsite parking (directions below) · Light Hors d'oeuvres and beverages will be served · No RSVP is required to attend

SQAUG is the Portland/Vancouver area’s leading Software Quality Assurance User Group. We are in our 3rd year and extend a warm welcome to everyone to participate in a group dedicated to growing the Software Quality Assurance profession.

SQAUG is a group of SQA professionals who come together in an open forum to learn from each other. We engage in discussions, debates, presentations, explore tools of the trade, network, and share job opportunity information. Our goals are to expand knowledge of Software Quality to all professionals who are passionate about their careers and take software quality seriously.

For more on SQAUG: http://www.sqaug.org/ Meetup: SQAUGPDX Linked in: SQAUG

Rose City Software Quality Engineers (RCSQE)

Empowering software professionals to build better software for tomorrow by championing quality today

Tonight's discussion: 'Multiply with Beaker' by Alice Nodelman (Puppet Labs)

Beaker is an acceptance level testing tool developed by Puppet Labs that supports both multi-platform and multi-virtualization techniques.  Beaker tests combine basic Ruby with a custom DSL and are designed to be executed no matter the operating system or cloud provider selected at runtime.  SUTs of a variety of platforms (linux, mac, windows, etc) are provisioned on a variety of virtualization systems and are then validated and configured.  The result is a SUT abstraction that allows automators to write understandable and powerful scripts.

SQAUG Presents:

The Importance of Abstraction in Automation Projects at Con-Way 2055 NW Savier, Portland, OR 97209 on Wednesday May 20, 2015 5:30pm until 7:30pm

Event is FREE and Open to the Public

The majority of automation projects fail, most within the first 6-12 months. Initially it’s easy to put something together that works for a small number of test cases, but as the application evolves, the troubleshooting/maintenance needs of the tests quickly overcome the ability of the team. Eventually (around 6-12 months) a new engineer takes over and restarts the automation effort in a new direction, often with the same issues.

This presentation will be focused on how to use the OOP concept of Abstraction to reduce the maintenance costs of automation and extend the life of your frameworks. Additional benefits will be discussed, like the ability to change the Automation Technology without rebuilding all your tests.

These concepts will work with 3rd party automation products like QTP as well as homegrown frameworks. You will get the most value from abstraction when its added at the beginning of the projects, but we will discuss how they can be leverages in larger, existing frameworks. Level: Intermediate. Knowledge of automation concepts along with some basic understanding of development practices will be assumed.

All code examples will be shown in C#, but the concepts will apply to any tool or language.

Supporting Material https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS550US550&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=Why+software+automation+fails

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_%28computer_science%29#Abstraction_in_object_oriented_programming

About our speaker: Michael Cowan is a Principal QA Engineer at Viewpoint Construction Software. He has over 20 years’ experience in the software industry, and has held individual and management roles in both QA and Development. His passions have always been automation, and he has been a lead engineer on several successful automation frameworks.

Agenda: 5:30-6:00PM: Pizza and Networking 6:00-6:15PM: SQAUG Announcements 6:15-7:30PM: Presentation/Q&A

Details: · Event is Free to the public · Onsite parking (directions below) · Light Hors d'oeuvres and beverages will be served · No RSVP is required to attend

SQAUG is Portland/Vancouver area’s only Software Quality Assurance User Group! We are in our 3rd year and would like to extend a warm welcome to everyone who would like to participate in a user group dedicated to growing the Quality Assurance field.

SQAUG is made up of a group of SQA professionals who have banded together in an open forum to learn from each other through a series of interactive discussions, engaged debates, training presentations, exploring tools, and general networking and sharing of job opportunities. Our goals are to expand knowledge about Software Quality to all professionals who are passionate about their careers, and take Software Quality seriously.

For more on SQAUG: http://www.sqaug.org/ Meetup: SQAUGPDX Linked in: SQAUG

SQAUG Presents:

QA and The Role They Play in Team Dialogue at Con-Way 2055 NW Savier, Portland, OR 97209 on Wednesday June 17, 2015 5:30pm until 7:30pm

Event is FREE and Open to the Public

Dialogue is a contraction from the Greek words for through and words. It suggests an activity aimed at eliciting meaning…

The Greeks introduced the idea that individuals are not intelligent on their own, that it's only by reasoning together that they are able to uncover the truth for themselves. …By questioning and probing each other, carefully dissecting and analyzing ideas, finding the inconsistencies, never attacking or insulting but always searching for what they can accept between them, they can gradually attain deeper understanding and insight.

The role of QA is often seen as one that only reports negatively on the work of others: “…found a bug with your code”; “…the way you designed this isn’t good for the end user”; “…You never include requirements in your stories…and when you do, they lack sufficient details.”

The importance of True Dialogue is that it allows positive reactions and outcomes, from negative input…when done well, the benefits can be extraordinary!

About our speaker: Joe Famme is a Quality Minded individual, who’s been helping to improve the quality of his teams, and the software they work on, for over 20 years. He started in phone support with WordPerfect, in the early nineties. After about a year and a half of that…and the release of Windows 3.0…he discovered the world of QA, and has never looked back.

Besides WordPerfect, Joe’s also worked for internationally known companies Novell, Corel, Intel, and Sage.

Joe’s been working in the Portland Tech Community since 1996. He’s been part of several strong Oregon Companies and several startup companies, .com’s & .bomb’s. And, Joe’s been part of the SQAUG organization since before it became a public group.

In all of his years of being part of the Quality Assurance field, he has found that the quest for the mastery of effective communication and true dialogue has been a key element to success. And, he hopes that some of the dialogue during his presentation provides at least one insight for all attendees to take back to their teams.

Agenda: 5:30-6:00PM: Pizza and Networking 6:00-6:15PM: SQAUG Announcements 6:15-7:30PM: Presentation/Q&A

Details: · Event is Free to the public · Onsite parking (directions below) · Light Hors d'oeuvres and beverages will be served · No RSVP is required to attend

SQAUG is Portland/Vancouver area’s only Software Quality Assurance User Group! We are in our 3rd year and would like to extend a warm welcome to everyone who would like to participate in a user group dedicated to growing the Quality Assurance field.

SQAUG is made up of a group of SQA professionals who have banded together in an open forum to learn from each other through a series of interactive discussions, engaged debates, training presentations, exploring tools, and general networking and sharing of job opportunities. Our goals are to expand knowledge about Software Quality to all professionals who are passionate about their careers, and take Software Quality seriously.

For more on SQAUG: http://www.sqaug.org/ Meetup: SQAUGPDX Linked in: SQAUG

Clojure's test.check library for generative testing is something that a lot of people talk about, but relatively few actually use. Lots of people, myself included, find that test.check's Haskell origins make it more than a bit alienating at first, and dealing with that unfamiliarity while adopting a new testing paradigm is a lot to ask.

In this short talk, I'll discuss ways of approaching generative testing in Clojure and show how generators are composed of small, simple parts. I'll also demonstrate my own library based on test.check, jen, which makes it even easier to write generators for typical Clojure data types.

Bio: Justin Holguín is a full-time Clojure developer at Puppet Labs who enjoys experimenting with new ways to write, find, and fix bugs.

Join us on October 14 for Using Chef and Vagrant to create build, development, and test environments. Go beyond automated tests into automated environments. Learn the nuts and bolts of how to fully automate the provisioning of build and test environments through the story of how it was done at Tripwire. When build, development, and test environments are defined as code, they can be versioned along with the software that they support. This allows truly reproducible tests and builds by controlling and versioning changes to the test and build environments.

Speaker Ryan Larson, Software Engineer at Tripwire Ryan Larson is a Software Engineer at Tripwire with a passion for automation and efficiency. Ryan introduced Tripwire to Chef and architected the automation of Tripwire's development, build, and test environments using Chef, Vagrant, and Packer.

Event Details- When: Wednesday, October 14 Location: Smarsh, 851 Southwest 6th Avenue, Suite 800, Portland, OR 97204 Time: 5-6:30 PM Cost: Members $25, Nonmembers $45 Series Sponsors: Metal Toad & New Relic

SQAUG Presents:

QA and Poetry - how these two disciplines are surprisingly related at Con-Way 2055 NW Savier, Portland, OR 97209 on Wednesday October 21, 2015 5:30pm until 7:30pm Event is FREE and Open to the Public

This month, we are excited to welcome Scott Poole for a talk on how writing a poem is similar to QA. You have to anticipate the pitfalls an audience and a user might fall into. To illustrate this, Scott will read several humorous poems that reflect on this QA type experience. He will discuss about how both disciplines have influenced each other and the benefits gained. Scott is also one of the keynote speakers for the PNSQC’s October events and will be tailoring his presentation specifically for SQAUG!

About our speaker: Scott Poole is most well known as the “House Poet” on the weekly Live Wire! public radio variety show, taped in Portland and broadcast nationally by Public Radio International. However, he is also a software developer. Currently, he’s the Senior Web Developer for Columbia United Providers in Vancouver, WA. He’s been writing code for 9 years and poetry for 25. He is the author of three books of poetry, The Cheap Seats, Hiding from Salesmen and, most recently, The Sliding Glass Door.

Agenda: 5:30-6:00PM: Pizza and Networking 6:00-6:15PM: SQAUG Announcements 6:15-7:30PM: Presentation/Q&A

Details: • Event is Free to the public • Onsite parking (directions below) • Light Hors d'oeuvres and beverages will be served • No RSVP is required to attend

SQAUG is Portland/Vancouver area’s only Software Quality Assurance User Group! We are in our 3rd year and would like to extend a warm welcome to everyone who would like to participate in a user group dedicated to growing the Quality Assurance field.

SQAUG is made up of a group of SQA professionals who have banded together in an open forum to learn from each other through a series of interactive discussions, engaged debates, training presentations, exploring tools, and general networking and sharing of job opportunities. Our goals are to expand knowledge about Software Quality to all professionals who are passionate about their careers, and take Software Quality seriously.

For more on SQAUG: http://www.sqaug.org

Meetup: SQAUGPDX Linked in: SQAUG

Test Ruby PDX is a new user group focusing on testing from a developer's perspective. Join us for peer mentoring, conversation, and pizza at 6, followed by presentations at 7. This month, Jason Clark of New Relic will discuss how to tackle the complex testing issues that come up when your code needs to be compatible with multiple dependencies.

For more information about this and future meetings, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter.

Testing the Multiverse

Jason Clark

It’s a basic principle of testing that minimizing dependencies will make you happier, faster, and more productive. But what happens when you can’t? If your code plugs into or extends another gem, comfortable isolation might be out of the question. Stubbing and careful design can carry you a ways, but eventually you need to actually test your code against those gems you’re building on. Luckily, there are ways to reduce this pain. We’ll dig deep on creating a simple environment to check your work against multiple dependencies. We’ll see patterns that help avoid pulling your hair out when those dependencies change. We’ll even search around the raw edges, examining how to verify what your code does when it lands in an environment you haven’t tested. There’s a multitude of gems out there to build on. Let’s see how we can test with them!

ActiveMocker: Fast ActiveRecord Mocks

Dustin Zeisler

Tired of a slow test suite in Rails? Hitting the database so often it's getting you down? Is waiting for Rails to boot as you do red, green, refactor killing your vibe? Wouldn't it be great if your tests ran in milliseconds instead of seconds or minutes? You may say "That's all great, but I'll have to change the way I test and program adding tedious boilerplate, making my code ugly." And I would say, no! I created ActiveMocker to save my team from just that. You can have nearly all of the benefits by adding one setting to your test file and with just a little more work you can have full, glorious, unadulterated speed. ActiveMocker creates mock classes from ActiveRecord models, allowing your test suite to run at breakneck speed. This can be done by not loading Rails or hitting a database. The models are read dynamically and statically so that ActiveMocker can generate a Ruby file to require within a test. The mock file can be run by itself and comes with a partial implementation of ActiveRecord. Attributes and associations can be used the same as in ActiveRecord. Methods have the same argument signature but raise a NotImplementedError when called, allowing you to stub it with a mocking framework, like RSpec. Mocks are regenerated when the schema is modified so your mocks won't go stale, preventing the case where your units tests pass but production code fails.

Thanks to Renew Financial for providing the space and pizza for this event!

Conversation and peer mentoring starting at 6, presentations at 7. For more information, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter or join the #testrubypdx Slack channel (under PDX.rb).

Presentations

Bernerd Schaefer: Refactor Your Feature Specs!

expect(page).to have_css(".active"). It's clear what this line does, but what is it really testing? And why? Together we'll take some real-life feature specs and refactor them so the intent of the spec shines through.

Portland's testing user group for Ruby developers! Conversation and peer mentoring starting at 6, presentations at 7. For more information, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter or join the #testrubypdx Slack channel (under the pdxruby team).

How and Why to Test Rake Tasks - Brett Chalupa

Testing classes and modules is essential to writing well tested Ruby code. However, testing Rake tasks is not as straight-forward. In this talk, you will learn how and why it is valuable to test Rake tasks. This talk will go over testing regular ole Rake tasks and Rake tasks in a Rails app. Before you know it, you will be writing Rake tasks in a test-driven manner, hooray!

Camp Optimization's mission is simple: provide a casual, fun and informative forum for digital marketers and technologists to share optimization best-practices, challenges and wins.

This month’s discussion topic: The Power of Unified Customer Data & Segment Marketing. Camp Optimization welcomes Craig Schinn, Senior Director of Solutions Consulting at Lytics. With a strong analytics background, and over 15 years e-commerce and digital marketing experience, Craig knows how to turn customer data into dollars. Join us this month as we discuss the power of customer journey mapping, and hear first hand what it takes to create more effective personalized experiences across email, web, and mobile.

Lytics is a Portland-based, easy-to-use customer data platform that creates insightful user profiles for powering personalized marketing. Check them out here www.getlytics.com.

We'll be meeting at Ecliptic Brewing for some beer and casual networking. First round is on us! Make sure to spread the word and don't forget to RSVP. We hope to see you there!

Portland's testing user group for Ruby developers! Conversation and peer mentoring starting at 6, presentations at 7. For more information, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter or join the #testrubypdx Slack channel (under the pdxruby team).

Paul Baker - Golden Thorns: Lessons from the Gilded Rose Kata

The Gilded Rose Kata is a fairly well known kata that utilizes a "golden master testing" strategy to provide safety while the developer refactors a messy legacy code base in order to add new features. I will walk through my take on the kata and then review some lessons that I have learned as a sr. developer working with legacy code and where this pattern can be helpful.

Analytics Pros Presents: 12:00-5:00pm Google Analytics for Optimization Training

This 1/2 day training session is a great way to quickly learn from the analytics experts, and is perfect for those getting started with Google Analytics or just looking for tips on how to get the most out of their optimization efforts.

There are limited seats remaining for the 12:00-5:00pm session. Take advantage of the special $99 price (regularly $399) and sign-up today.

Training Agenda:

12:00 - 1:30pm: Crash Course to Google Analytics

1:45 - 2:15pm: How to find what to test with Google Analytics

2:15 - 2:45pm: Integrating Google Analytics and your optimization platform

2:45 - 3:45pm: Exercise: Create, Target, and Analyze Audiences

4:00 - 5:00pm: Reporting Options, Google Optimize Demo, and Q&A

5:30 - 7:00pm: Camp Optimization Meet-Up and Happy Hour featuring Cali Pitchel

Portland's testing user group for Ruby developers! Conversation and peer mentoring starting at 6, presentations at 7. For more information, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter or join the #TestRubyPDX Slack channel (under the pdxruby team). We are still looking for speakers, so if you're interested, visit testrubypdx.org/speak for details and suggested topics!

We'll have two talks this meetup:

• Jim Walter: Adapting A/B Testing To Software Performance And Efficiency

• Scott Chamberlain: request - an R library to make http requests a snap & http request caching

Doors open after 6 pm. DO NOT SHOW UP BEFORE 6 PM. Talks start at 6:30 pm. Repeat: DO NOT SHOW UP BEFORE 6 PM.

Doors are open at bottom, take elevator to 3rd floor, door should be open for suite 320

We'll visit a local watering hole afterwards.

Portland's testing user group for Ruby developers! Conversation and peer mentoring starting at 6, presentations at 7. For more information, follow @TestRubyPDX on Twitter or join the #testrubypdx Slack channel (under the pdxruby team). We are still looking for speakers, so if you're interested, visit testrubypdx.org/speak for details and suggested topics!

Test Ruby PDX is a user group focused on Ruby testing. In particular, we are developers interested in testing our own code. We offer pizza, conversation, and peer mentoring starting at 6 before moving on to presentations at 7. This month, Daniel Dreier of Puppet will talk to us about how to test command line apps using Cucumber and Aruba.

Design Week Portland is launching its full website in mid-February, and we're calling all coders to help get it ready to go live! We'll be launching the schedule, sweeping for content, squashing bugs, cleaning up code, writing tests and maybe even doing some progressive enhancement. Whether you're a junior developer or a seasoned senior, we'd love to have you involved. There will be pizza. There will be beverages. There will be code. Join us at FINE for an evening of hacking.

Coders beware: this seems less like a hackathon and more like a "we said we'd do this but don't have the resources, so come do it for us and we'll take the credit". Don't forget your time is worth $$ and the people putting this on are likely getting free tickets to DWP from your hard work!

Justin Smith will present his library, poirot, and explain why it was needed and demonstrate how it is used to simplify debugging and writing regression tests.

Bio:

Justin is a full time Clojure programmer and maker of weird music. He's remarkably active on #clojure IRC and the clojurians slack channel.

Please RSVP on Meetup.com if you can, so that we can get a headcount for ordering food!

Kubernetes 1.10 will release (hopefully) on the 26th. So, first, Josh Berkus of the Kubernetes 1.10 Release Team will be presenting "What's in 1.10?" including Advanced Auditing, CronJobs, Dynamic Kubelet Configuration, Persistent Volume Protection, and more.

Next, Dan Anolik will present "Continuous Testing of Containers". He works at Cambia Health Solutions where his team containerizes everything, including the API tests for every service container. He'll demonstrate their solution for automated testing of containers during CI/CD workflows, and again later in runtime clusters. Dan's team makes strong use of Cucumber for API tests, and Docker Compose for managing our mock environments, but the techniques would work across multiple frameworks.

Food and drinks hosted by Cambia Health: https://www.cambiahealth.com/

Now in its 36th year, the Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference prioritizes adding and improving the quality of software.

Our industry learns from working with education, healthcare, manufacturing, government sectors, and more. What can those other industries learn from us? Come and find out at PNSQC 2018.

TestML - Data Driven Testing for All Modern Programming Languages

by Ingy dot Net

In 2004 I created the Test::Base data driven testing module for CPAN. It became popular with several prolific CPAN authors like MIYAGAWA and became the main testing framework for companies like Socialtext and OpenResty, In 2010 I decided to "Acmeize" it and I made TestML with the intent of making it work in all programming languages. I got it going in Perl5/CPAN and a couple other languages. In 2017 OpenResty paid me to write a new version of the language in their proprietary ecosystem, and the resulting idea was really much better. They allowed me to take the new ideas to Open Source and in 2018 I have the new great TestML language. It is currently working in 8 languages (Bash, CoffeeScript, Go, JavaScript, Perl 5, Perl 6, Python 2 and Python 3) and easy to port. Other ports are under way including C++. The official YAML test suite is written in TestML!

In this talk I will:

• Introduce you to the TestML language (it's so simple, most programs are a single line!)
• Show how TestML works well with any language's existing test frameworks
• Show how to use in Perl 5 and 6 and others
• Show how the language is compiled to Lingy (a JSON based Lisp)
• Show how to port TestML to a new programming language or test framework
• and much more!

Join us for a very special, expert panel edition of Roboboogie’s Camp Optimization. Our next meet-up will feature Roboboogie’s very own website optimization pros, sharing their wisdom across three unique disciplines. Anyone interested in learning more about the process, tools and techniques required to make a test-and-optimize program successful should attend. As if that is not enough, we will also explore the merits of consuming mezcal with an A/B test, and enjoy light appetizers and the Latin-American flair of Teote.

Program:

6:00-6:30 PM - Mezcal A/B tasting and light appetizers

6:30-7:15 PM - Panel discussion and audience Q&A

Network with Portland's top digital marketing, design and optimization professionals at Teote Mezcalería, located on NE Alberta. Don't forget to RSVP and spread the word. Your first drink is on us. Come enjoy a beverage and some light appetizers.

Join Roboboogie for a very special, expert panel edition of our bi-monthly meetup: Camp Optimization. Our next meet-up will feature Roboboogie’s very own website optimization pros, sharing their wisdom across three unique disciplines. Anyone interested in learning more about the process, tools and techniques required to make a test-and-optimize program successful should attend. As if that is not enough, we will also explore the merits of consuming mezcal with an A/B test, and enjoy light appetizers and the Latin-American flair of Teote. Admission is FREE!

Program:

6:00-6:30 PM - Mezcal A/B tasting and light appetizers

6:30-7:15 PM - Panel discussion and audience Q&A

Network with Portland's top digital marketing, design and optimization professionals at Teote Mezcalería, located on NE Alberta. Don't forget to RSVP and spread the word. Your first drink is on us. Come enjoy a beverage and some light appetizers.

The 37th Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference will be held October 14-16, 2019. With two days of technical talks and keynotes and a full day of workshops, this conference focuses on ways to improve the process of building and deploying software projects and systems.

Tracks Include - People, Management and Leadership - Technologies and Tools (including Machine Learning and AI) - Performance and Security - Automation - Processes, Practices, and Methods - Quality Engineering

Registration information is online https://www.pnsqc.org/2019-conference/2019-registration-information/

Our industry learns from working with education, healthcare, manufacturing, government sectors, and more. What can those other industries learn from us? Come and find out at PNSQC 2019.

This year’s theme for PNSQC is 2020 Vision: Quality Looking Forward. We chose this theme to inspire attendees and speakers to think of ways to learn from the past, and envision ways to achieve quality software in the future.

Just as lighting the Olympic flame before the games is a gesture of ceremony and inspiration, this kickoff of the call for proposals for PNSQC 2020 is a way to spark your imagination to contribute your own vision of quality.

Come hear a "full stack" of lightning talks on visions of quality. What’s in store for software QA in the future as it merges with DevOps. How will you adapt to changing organizational structures, roles and required knowledge? Find out what leaders in the field are thinking and doing.

Get inspired to see yourself presenting in October at PNSQC 2020 Networking afterward for ideas to achieve 2020 vision. Snacks and refreshments available during the talks.

Then prepare to share your own clarity of vision at PNSQC 2020 by submitting a proposal to present at the conference in October.

How do I get involved? To attend, please finish your RSVP here on meetup. If you wish to present at this event, please submit your ideas on PNSQC’s OpenConference site: https://www.openconf.org/pnsqc2020/author/submit.php

This event is open to software developers, IT managers, project managers, product owners, testers, security professionals -- anyone who is passionate about professional software quality.

Whether you’ve given hundreds of talks, just gave your first talk, or perhaps are thinking of giving a talk next year, we all could use tips in not only overcoming our fears of public speaking but getting good at it. As engineering professionals, sometimes we may focus on the engineering problem and analysis yet don’t realize that how we deliver the message can be just as important as the message itself.

If you break a sweat when speaking to more than a few people as we did, you’ll appreciate these transformational tips as Brian and Phil discuss practices for putting together a talk for a conference. As an engineer, learn a step by step pragmatic approach with several techniques and exercises to cure your nervousness and improve your delivery in a systematic way. Public speaking is a top skill for anyone who wants to effect change. Whether speaking to a department, at a meetup or presenting keynotes around the world, Phil and Brian have worked to hone their presentation skills.

You’ve heard “Practice Makes Perfect” right? Well, that’s not quite right. “Practice With Feedback Makes Perfect”. In this free workshop, you will learn systematic methods with exercises so that you can improve on the spot.

Walk away more confident in your ability to improve your public speaking skills with a framework and techniques for improvement.

This is a free three-hour workshop limited to the first 18 people. The content will be in three parts, but each section builds on the previous. Please RSVP on Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/Pacific-NW-Software-Quality-Conference-PNSQC/events/266871919

Both Brian and Phil are officers and board members of the Pacific NW Software Quality Conference (PNSQC).

Brian Gaudreau is a seasoned quality professional with 20+ years of management, software testing and QA experience relevant to telecom, enterprise metadata, government, multimedia, health care and marketing CRM platforms.

Philip Lew, CEO of XBOSoft, has founded and managed companies in his 25+ year professional career. He frequently can be found speaking at conferences including Softec Asia, HUSTEF, TestIstanbul and StarEast.

PNSQC, in association with PDX Blacks in Technology, is happy to present "Three Steps to Better Estimation" with Moss Drake.

How many times has someone asked you how long it would take to build some software even before they have told you how it might work? Do you think you could estimate a series of random tasks within 90% accuracy? We’ll do an interesting exercise in estimation and then talk about the value your estimates provide. We will talk about three steps to improve your estimates right away and discuss other methods of estimation.

This event will be hosted by PDX Blacks in Technology with networking and food sponsored by PNSQC.

Agenda: 5 pm - Network & social 6-ish - Announcements & Lighting Talk

Bio: Moss Drake has over 30 years of experience developing software and leading software projects. Which, coincidentally, is about the same amount of time he has been encountering managers in hallways and answering the question “How long will it take to build X?”

There's still time to submit a proposal to present at PNSQC 2020. And, to help you get inspired, we are hosting the second annual Pitchfest to give you quick feedback on ideas.

What is a Pitchfest? Speaking at PNSQC 2020 is your chance to share your software quality expertise and experience on trends, process improvement and technology solutions. The Pitchfest is your chance to quickly propose and iterate on an idea before submitting it.

Why show up for a Pitchfest? - You have an idea for a paper, but don't know "if it's good enough" - You have the germ of an idea and want to refine it before writing a proposal - You're curious what ideas other people have - You have questions about the overall paper/presenter/speaking "thing" - You want to have appetizers and something to drink while networking with software quality professionals

Appetizers will be provided by PNSQC. We are meeting in the "Barrel Room" (ask at the bar if you can't find it).

Even if you can't attend the Pitchfest, check out the program committee's "wish list" for topics. Remember, proposals for papers must be received by April 15th, 2020 at 11:59 PM PDT.

Here is the URL to submit a proposal https://www.pnsqc.org/2020-conference/call-proposals/

Here is the link to the "wish list" https://www.pnsqc.org/a-pnsqc-wish-list-topics-to-inspire-your-vision-for-quality/

PNSQC’s mission statement is to enable knowledge exchange to produce higher quality software. The event is free and open to all interested.

UPDATE: Due to Coronavirus, this session will be held online. Join here:

https://cvent.zoom.us/wc/join/170670023

PNSQC, in association with PDX Veterans in Technology, is pleased to present "Secrets of Test-Driven Development" with James Shore.

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is an essential part of agile software development. Without it, codebases lose the flexibility they need to change direction and respond to new business needs.

But what is TDD, exactly? And how does it work? In this brief introduction, expert TDD practitioner James Shore will show you what TDD is, how it works, and why it works. You’ll leave with new insights about this key software development practice.

This event will be hosted by PDX Veterans in Technology with networking and food sponsored by PNSQC.

The agenda is:

• 6 - 6:30 Networking & Food
• 6:30 - 6:35 Quick intro to event , thank sponsors.
• 6:35 - 7:05 Presentation
• 7:05 - 8:00 Q & A, Socialize
• 8p - Good night

James Shore teaches, writes, and consults on Agile development processes with an emphasis on technical excellence. He is a recipient of the Agile Alliance's Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice, co-author of The Art of Agile Development, host of “Let's Code: Test-Driven JavaScript,” and co-creator of the Agile Fluency® Model.

InfoQ has named him one of the “most influential people in Agile.” You can find his screencasts at letscodejavascript.com and essays at jamesshore.com.

Moss Drake will represent PNSQC to talk about the call for abstracts and the conference this year.

The 38th Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference will be held October 12-14, 2020. For this year’s conference, we’re focusing on Quality Looking Forward — how AI is changing the industry, staying ahead of hacks on the security front, managing remote teams during COVID-19, and where software quality is heading in the future. PNSQC 2020 will be online this year, so you can easily join keynotes, technical presentations, panels, and workshops. Stream the conference to watch from the comfort of your home office, or next to your cat or dog on the couch. Early bird pricing is just $95 for all three days, which includes a hands-on security vulnerability testing workshop. Join us for October 12-14, 2020, by registering now.

Tracks Include - People, Management and Leadership - Technologies and Tools (including Machine Learning and AI) - Performance and Security - Automation - Processes, Practices, and Methods - Quality Engineering

Registration information is online https://www.pnsqc.org/2020-conference/

Our industry learns from working with education, healthcare, manufacturing, government sectors, and more. What can those other industries learn from us? Come and find out at PNSQC 2020.

When you make a change to your code, how do you know it still works as expected?

Do you make sure to check edge cases? Do you make sure to test all possible code-paths? Do you make sure the changes you made to one module don't break other modules that depend on it? Do you do all of the above every time you make any change, no matter how small the change?

Doing all that every time a change is made is a ton of work. There has got to be a better way!

Using our skills as programmers, we can automate the testing process. This allows us to be much more thorough while simultaneously reducing effort over the long run.

In this presentation, we will learn the basics of writing automated tests. We will discuss unit tests, integration tests, and test-driven development (TDD).

Presented by PDX Code Guild Instructor Evan Hackett

Come Together for the 2021 Culture Jam!

It’s time to open the PNSQC 2021 Call for Papers with a Culture Jam. This year the theme is Quality Coming Together. As we begin planning for the conference, we’re hosting an afternoon of lightning talks to have a meeting of minds and get your ideas flowing for new proposals on software quality.

Each speaker will have 15 minutes to get to the point and convey their ideas on the theme of how quality comes together for their teams, organizations and projects.

This is the official opening of the call for papers for the 2021 conference. It will be held virtually with breaks for networking, announcements and PNSQC 2020 Conference Award presentations.

How do I get involved?

• If you want to present, please submit your ideas here: https://forms.gle/qp7eJywD6ycViNuu6

• If you want to attend, please RSVP through Meetup. https://www.meetup.com/Pacific-NW-Software-Quality-Conference-PNSQC/events/275421880/

Watch past Culture Jam events on PNSQC’s youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/PNSQC/playlists

PNSQC’s mission statement is to enable knowledge exchange to produce higher quality software. The event is free and open to all interested.

The 39th Pacific Northwest Software Quality Conference will be held October 11-13, 2021. The conference theme is Quality Coming Together — how all the separate people, teams, processes, libraries and ideas come together to build a quality system (or not). PNSQC 2021 will be online this year, so you can easily join keynotes, technical presentations, panels, and workshops. Stream the conference to watch from the comfort of your home office, or next to your cat or dog on the couch. Early bird pricing extended until September 20th!

Register online https://mms.pnsqc.org/members/evr/regmenu.php?orgcode=PNSQ

Tracks Include - People, Management and Leadership - Technologies and Tools (including Machine Learning and AI) - Performance and Security - Automation - Processes, Practices, and Methods - Quality Engineering

The full schedule is here:

https://www.pnsqc.org/pnsqc-2021-conference-glance/

Our industry learns from working with education, healthcare, manufacturing, government sectors, and more. What can those other industries learn from us? Come and find out at PNSQC 2021.