STARWEST 2026 - Test Leadership
Wednesday, September 23
Leadership Without Authority: How Testers Influence Product Decisions
Testers are frequently held accountable for quality outcomes while lacking formal authority over priorities, timelines, or release decisions. This disconnect often leads to late surprises, ignored risks, and frustration when testing input is minimized or overridden. In this session, Niti will address how testers can exercise leadership, without relying on job titles, by changing how they influence conversations across product teams. Drawing from real project experience, Niti will explain practical techniques for reframing quality discussions in terms of business risk, using context-driven...
Thursday, September 24
Quality Made Modern: The 2026 CoE Glow‑Up
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...
Global Teams, Unified Quality—Building a Single Quality Mindset Across Borders
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...