Equal Experts heads to Florida: a packed schedule at Better Software East

I’m excited to be speaking at Better Software East in Florida later this November, where I’ll be giving two talks: one on how to make your Continuous Delivery pipeline as fast as possible, and another on exploratory security testing in the browser.

It will be a privilege to speak at such a prestigious event – and great to meet people in the east, as I also recently gave my talk on the continuous delivery pipeline at JavaOne, in San Francisco.

Here’s a brief look at what I’ll be covering at the conference:

Keeping your build pipeline fast

Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are still relatively new practices. For many organisations, simply getting to the point where you have an automated build is still the goal – and you need to have achieved that before you can really focus on how to make it faster.

Nevertheless, long build times are undesirable, because they slow the rate at which teams are able to deliver value to an organisation – negating the benefit that ‘continuous’ should be bringing you! What’s more, many of the ‘solutions’ that organisations will typically employ can cancel out some of the positives that CI/CD should be bringing you.

Much of this is because the approach is still not widespread and the industry hasn’t figured out a standardised, ‘best’ way to optimise a build pipeline – but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. I believe that introducing a more data-led approach – with more measurement of what is working (or not) we can use the numbers to lead us towards a faster pipeline.

When done correctly, a fast, continuous delivery brings so many benefits it’s well worth pursuing. So in my talk I’ll be sharing techniques I have used to help delivery teams identify when build times are long, and what they can do about it.

Security testing in the browser

My second talk at Better Software East will keep the automation theme going: I’ll be sharing the thoughts of my EE colleague and tester extraordinaire Adrian Rapan on how to harness a web browser (Chrome/Firefox/Edge) to perform exploratory security testing.

Using a browser to attack a web application offers a way to automate security testing and get feedback on current vulnerabilities quickly and easily – and it won’t require any outlandish or unfamiliar techniques. I look forward to sharing the approach.

See you in Florida!

In addition to the talks outlined above, several of Abraham’s Equal Experts colleagues will be attending Better Software East – so it’s a great chance to hear more about the way we work. If you’d like to get in touch with us at the event, drop us a line at helloUSA@equalexperts.com.