STARWEST 2026 - Concurrent Sessions

Modern distributed systems fail in messy, non-obvious ways: a small latency spike in one microservice can cascade through queues, sidecars, gateways, and control planes, yet traditional logging and isolated dashboards rarely reveal the true root cause. In this talk, Sneha will share how Microsoft tackled this while building the telemetry and observability platform behind Azure Container Apps and the Aspire Dashboard, used across thousands of customer environments. They standardized on OpenTelemetry to unify traces, metrics, and logs across heterogeneous workloads, invested in consistent...

The decision to migrate from Cypress to Playwright is often stalled by the sobering reality of the manual effort required to rewrite extensive test suites. Traditionally, this involves months of tedious refactoring and logic translation that drains engineering resources and delays critical innovation. In this session, Ryan Song reveals a high-velocity framework designed to automate the heavy lifting of framework transition using Generative AI. He will move beyond simple prompts to explore a structured AI pipeline capable of handling complex asynchronous logic, custom commands, and...

Accessibility testing is critical, yet often under-tested due to limited expertise, time constraints, and manual effort. While tools exist, teams still struggle to translate WCAG guidelines into actionable, repeatable automated checks. In this session, Sidhartha will explore how AI can responsibly assist accessibility testing — not by replacing standards or human judgment, but by bridging the gap between guidelines and executable tests. Using Playwright MCP together with an LLM CLI, Sidhartha will demonstrate how AI can: interpret WCAG requirements, generate meaningful accessibility test...

Many teams begin load testing on a local machine or inside their own network, but quickly hit limits with CPU, bandwidth, realism, and scale. This session addresses the challenge of moving from local load testing to cloud-based execution in a practical, cost-conscious way using AWS. The session will walk through how to spin up EC2 instances as load generators, create and manage SSH keys, transfer and run tests remotely, and collect results without needing deep cloud expertise. You’ll learn how to use Spot Fleets to reduce costs, structure your test setup for repeatability, and safely...

This session presents a disciplined approach to exploratory testing that combines component-level defect analysis with focused and data-driven test charter design. Christopher will demonstrate how to decompose an application into meaningful components, consistently map defects to those components, and apply Pareto analysis to identify the areas responsible for the majority of defects. These high-risk components then become the basis for targeted exploratory test charters that summarize relevant defect history and provide testers with concrete test ideas and heuristics. Each exploratory...

AI code-generation delivers on speed, but teams working in medical, financial, transportation, and other high-risk domains face a dilemma: when the AI writes both code and tests, how do you know it hasn't hallucinated away a critical edge case? "Vibe coding" through iterative prompts leaves product advocates, testers, and developers uncertain whether all critical scenarios have been covered. Rob Myers shares practical approaches from teams using AI-augmented development with Test-Driven Development and Behavior-Driven Development. You'll see how to leverage a natural human strength—people...

Traditional Testing Centers of Excellence, once built for control, standardization, and governance, are struggling to keep pace with today’s AI‑driven, platform‑centric engineering landscape. Many organizations face the same challenge: fragmented testing practices, tool sprawl, inconsistent automation maturity, and a CoE model that feels more like a bottleneck than a value engine. In this session, Sunita will walk through how a modernized CoE can flip that script by shifting from enforcement to enablement, embedding quality into platform engineering, leveraging observability for real‑time...

As QA and DevOps teams, you rigorously test your login flows, MFA integrations, and session timeouts. But how do you test for an attack that doesn't break the code and mirrors the entire environment? Enter Adversary-in-the-Middle (AiTM) attacks—a sophisticated phishing method using reverse-proxy toolkits (like Evilginx) that bypass Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) by stealing live session tokens. In this session, Yaamini will move beyond standard functional testing to look at the technical reality of modern session-based threats. She will demonstrate how these "zero-hour" attacks operate...

As organizations increasingly deploy AI and machine learning systems into production, testing practices built for static, rule-based software are no longer sufficient. Unlike traditional applications, AI systems learn from data, change behavior over time, and are sensitive to data drift, bias, and feedback loops, making defects harder to detect with conventional test cases. This session presents a practical, experience-driven approach to testing AI systems across the full lifecycle, from model development to live deployment. Drawing on real-world implementations and applied research, the...

If you've ever shipped a GenAI feature wondering “is this actually good enough?”, you're not alone. Traditional pass/fail QA breaks down when outputs are non-deterministic, and teams end up making release decisions based on subjective “vibe checks” rather than data. This session shows how Product Managers can partner with QA to replace intuition with a systematic AI evaluation pipeline. You'll learn how to define quality as measurable dimensions (groundedness, tone, helpfulness, safety), build a representative test set, and design rubrics that align product goals with engineering...

As delivery cycles compress, single AI agents are not enough. The next leap is a coordinated swarm of specialized QA agents, each owning a slice of the quality lifecycle (requirements, test generation, execution intelligence, defect triage, and release decisions). This session shows how to design an agent operating model that scales across teams, products, and pipelines without losing trust, traceability, or control. This session will introduce a practical blueprint for deploying multiple cooperating AI agents across the SDLC, with clear boundaries, KPIs, and governance that align to...

Your manager asks you, "What did you accomplish this quarter…?" and your mind goes blank—trying to remember every feature, test plan, and testing result you've produced. The work is ‘invisible’; catching critical bugs before no one sees them and saving time and money that nobody sees, hence ‘The QA Curse.' Meanwhile, software developers ship features, and product owners show revenue metrics. According to the renowned P.I.E. research study of corporations, 10% of your promotion is based on performance and 60% is based on visibility. So working hard doesn’t get you promoted! The challenge is...

Many teams are adopting RAG to constrain LLMs to internal documents, policies, and knowledge bases, but “using RAG” does not guarantee trustworthy behavior. In practice, models still hallucinate, blend outside knowledge, ignore source boundaries, and produce confident answers that are not supported by retrieved evidence. Traditional test approaches (happy-path assertions, correctness spot checks, performance metrics) often miss these failures because the output reads plausibly correct. Drawing from real evaluation work on document-constrained enterprise systems, this session...