The RisingSTAR award was created to encourage new ideas from within the testing industry and support these for the overall benefit of the community. Each year, the winner is decided by the RisingSTAR ‘Supporters‘ who are a dedicated group of testing experts that then provide valuable mentoring to the winner in the 12 months following their win. The Supporters review the entries and vote for the idea they deem the best. The 2018 RisingSTAR winner is Sanne Visser of NS Stations, Netherlands.
Thank you to each of our six finalists for being part of the 2018 RisingSTAR Award and to our Supporters who have committed their time to the winner.
See 2019 Finalists
RisingSTAR Award Winner 2018 – Sanne Visser
Idea: To adapt and/or develop a testing framework for Blockchain-based applications to positively shape the adoption and development of blockchain technology
Short Description:
1. I want to correctly represent this technology in a fun yet accurate manner. I want to develop a testing framework for Blockchain.
2. Thus my primary goal became to enable people without any IT or Blockchain knowledge to understand the most basic principles so that they can ask the right questions before considering a blockchain solution. Most coverage of blockchain in the media is about cryptotrading, scams and bitcoin exchange rates. It misrepresents the technology and overhypes the risk that a blockchain solution is vulnerable to scamming from third parties. This is the first part of my mission, to inform. To break down complex technology into terms anyone can understand, which is why my explanation uses Pizzas and Excel.
3. Secondary to this would be developing a testing framework for dealing with Blockchain-based applications. One of the current bottlenecks is that there are very few Blockchain software projects and this increases the need to gather diverse experiences testing Blockchain and sharing that knowledge, so this will be my focus in the short term. I will not to this alone and will build a framework with other testers and other companies, potentially forming a Blockchain testing group.
4. I also hope to develop a workshop with a demo-blockchain environment to teach about the technology and beyond that to teach how to test this technology.
How will it help? Develop a testing approach for Blockchain-solutions. How will I make it real? I will continue my current efforts to explain Blockchain basics and how to test Blockchain through presentations at testing conferences. Secondly, I hope to join (or form) a Blockchain testing group and share experiences and knowledge there and build and write a testing approach for Blockchain-based applications.
Link:
Video – Video Intro Link
RisingSTAR Award Runner Up 2018 – Brendan Connolly
Idea: Bring exploratory testing and automation together by enabling frameworks to support both automated and semi-automated testing, melding exploration and real time data with automated testing. Enabling testers to increase their speed and focus in the agile/ devops world.
Short Description:
My ultimate goal with this concept is to encourage a pruning of fully automated e2e tests to the minimum possible. To replace that effort with more valuable semi automated exploratory testing that can be quickly and easily executed. Test framework code to drive our product should also be able to facilitate testing by humans. Build a UI that leverages automation framework code, to automate repetitive actions in the product at the click of a button. This increases the ROI of the framework code and makes deeper manual testing easier, faster and more repeatable.
The UI could also poll monitoring tools or logging and report that real time while a tester is performing automated testing. Things a tester would have to remember to check could now be available at a glance.
There is so much focus on testers adding value to their teams by learning to code and contributing to automated testing efforts. I am all about teams building testing frameworks for their products and testers contributing to these efforts, but in reality they are generally building a single purpose tool to facilitate writing e2e test cases. No matter how well written e2e tests are generally shallow, brittle, expensive and worst of all slow. The quality of return is low, especially compared to unit and integration or component automated tests. Once you start releasing software multiple times a day, how frequently can you really run a set of tests that take hours to days to complete? What’s the value in tests that aren’t run or don’t give feedback in a timely manner? A good deal of testing is getting software into the state you need it to actually test new functionality. Then if you need to retest you need to do it all over again.
Link:
GitHub: https://github.com/brendanconnolly/semi-auto
2018 RisingSTAR Finalists – in order of their submission date
RisingSTAR Finalist 2018: Eric Jimmink
Idea: Improving the testing / analysis tools that come with Keras, one of the frameworks that is widely used in Deep Learning
Short Description:
Generally, I see a trend where all platforms start with developer-centric tools, with much-needed testing add-ons being produced later on, often by third parties or user communities.
In recent years, I have shifted my attention towards Machine Learning, particularly Deep Learning. I see that the Deep Learning community is a highly collaborative one, where people routinely share research data that may have taken months to collect or compute.
I intend to give something back to the community, by improving the testing / analysis tools that come with one of the frameworks that is widely used in Deep Learning. I have chosen the high-level Keras library (which typically uses Tenserflow as a backend).
The reason that testing / analysis tools are so important, is that ML systems have many knobs and settings that could be tweaked to improve overall performance. It would save valuable time if the tool that is used, automatically yields detailed diagnostics. For example, I have yet to see a tool that automatically detects whether a neural network model is overfitting the training data (and thus not generalizing well towards new data), let alone why it is overfitting.
Link:
To follow
RisingSTAR Finalist 2018: Biju Abraham
Idea: Business Process Automation using Test Automation Tools
Short Description:
Testing is not just finding bugs …!
As the initial face of the customer, testing community should understand business challenges and problems faced by them. Our business was not able to arrive at a cost effective solution for rekeying huge policy information to the Mainframe policy system. The solution was provided by the tester (me…!) to use UFT and we successfully developed a solution to automate the labour intensive process in the production environment on a complex mainframe application.
Firms struggling with RPA tools and the associated costs can think about implementing test automation tools to process labour intensive tasks. Currently this solution is implemented on various tasks across the organisation where repetitive work is occurring and for many processes , this solution works better than RPA tools.
And UFT was used to automate the mundane labour intensive when RPA was just forming up across the industry.
Link:
Image file – Overview slide
RisingSTAR Finalist 2018: Rami Dahmosh 
Idea: Mastering/exploring Linux command line/ops/tools with minimum knowledge
Short Description: MagicOps is very intuitive tool that can help IT , QA , Dev engineer to be more effective with less time the only thing that they need to do is to put all their bash commands, configurations and we’ll do the rest
What we’ll do:
1. Make scripts out of your info
2. Save your data online and access them anyware
3. Save your tool knowledge and explore more tools that can help you with less time
Link:
Company Website – http://magicops.io
RisingSTAR Finalist 2018: Roman Iovlev
Idea: Removing UI Testing Routines to let Test Engineers concentrate more on testing application specifics
Short Description:
Develop complex of frameworks and tools in order to simplify UI Automation engineers day-to-day work.
1. Flash Pages – this is a Chrome Plugin for immediate PageObjects generation and actualization. I have already developed an alpha version and it works. It is downloadable from GitHub and should be installed as a Chrome Extension..
2. Helps reduce QA Engineer effort on UI Automation twice time – PageObjects can be generated with one click, can verify site layout changes automatically and alert engineer, can manage page objects for different languages and can also be used in other tools as part of the bigger process
3. I am looking to improve this by supporting more testing frameworks as currently only selenium and JDI supported. I will add selenide, serenity (Thucydides), protractor, JDL light etc
4. I wish to support more development frameworks to include most popular UI elements frameworks and standards like Html5, Bootstrap, Vuetify
5. I will support more languages for generation – currently only Java but want to add C#, JavaScript and Python
6. I wish to add the ability to grab a list of pages and generate all pageobjects in one click
All my projects are OpenSource. We have a community in post-soviet area around JDI tools and want to go global now and setup discussion around more effective open source approaches in testing. Most of testing work in modern world can be done in 5-10 times faster (or even more) and we want to show how.
Link:
Powerpoint Presentation – https://www.slideshare.net/romaniovlev/jdi-2-flash-pages