STARWEST Highlights: Lessons in Testing from HealthCare.gov and Disney
In October we were at the STARWEST testing conference in Anaheim, California, which featured more than a hundred learning and networking opportunities and had the theme “Breaking Software.”
Ben Simo took to the stage and blew the crowd away with his keynote presentation, “The Power of an Individual Tester: The HealthCare.gov Experience,” about how he inadvertently became a tester of the website when trying to enroll his granddaughter for health insurance.
What he found was a buggy website that failed to fulfill its purpose: educating people on the new health insurance law and helping them purchase coverage. Ben discovered not only many functional and performance issues, but also security vulnerabilities that exposed users’ data to unnecessary risk.
One of the biggest fails was that the site had only been tested for eleven hundred users, so it had a complete meltdown when accessed by two hundred fifty thousand people simultaneously. The government’s response: You have six months. Keep trying!
Testing Lessons Learned from Sesame Street
Robert Sabourin tapped into nostalgia with his session, “Testing Lessons Learned from Sesame Street,” about how everything we need to know we learned in kindergarten.
He kicked off the session with the familiar question “Who are the people in your neighborhood?” being updated to “A tester is a person in your neighborhood.”
The lesson: Who are the people who use our system?
Sabourin also adapted John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural presidential address for testers: “Ask not what the system can do for the user; ask what your user does with the system.”
Explore the community that uses your software and uncover their needs by identifying examples from their experience.
Testing the New Disney World Website
Les Honniball, technical QA manager for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Technology, led a session on testing the new Disney World website.
He shared the challenges of testing a global platform that includes testing for multiple languages, currencies, and taste preferences. Through their testing and data analysis, Disney testers are able to spot certain trends and identify that what may work in the United States may not work in, for example, Hong Kong or other markets.
The testing team at Disney “eats their own dog food” as they support the website year-round, and it is not passed on to a support or maintenance team. Similarly, they test buying Disney products from various third-party vendors to ensure a seamless buying experience for their customers.
The next STAR testing conference is May 3–8, 2015, in Orlando, Florida. For details, visit http://stareast.techwell.com.
