STARWEST 2026 - Test Leadership

Thursday, September 24

Sunita Mccoy
Yum! Brands
T2

Quality Made Modern: The 2026 CoE Glow‑Up

Thursday, September 24, 2026 - 9:45am to 10:45am

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...

Poorva Dixit
Guardant Health
T8

Global Teams, Unified Quality—Building a Single Quality Mindset Across Borders

Thursday, September 24, 2026 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

In the world of Quality Engineering, the distance between "Developer" and "Tester" is already a challenge. Add 8,000 miles and a 12-hour time difference, and that gap can become a canyon where bugs hide and requirements die. Poorva Dixit, a Senior Manager with nearly two decades of experience in QA and Test Automation, argues that successful offshore leadership isn't about micromanagement, it's about rigorous process and radical human connection. This session unpacks the "One Team" framework: a methodology for erasing the line between onshore strategy and offshore execution. Attendees will...