STARWEST 2026 - Agile Testing
Sunday, September 20
Fundamentals of Agile Test Automation—ICAgile Certification (ICP-ATA)
Fundamentals of AI—ICAgile Certification (ICP-FAI)
Monday, September 21
Stop Guessing and Start Planning with Better Behavior Discovery
Are you tired of working on user stories that seem to be missing vital details for testing? Are you frustrated with being left out of vital design conversations? Or are you fed up with sizing estimates that never turn out to be true to reality? Then it’s time to stop guessing your way through product development and start planning it with better behavior discovery. In this tutorial, we will learn how three vital roles – business, development, testing – can collaborate on what features to build and test through the structured activities of story mapping and example mapping. We will practice...
Automation Framework Essentials
Automation is critical in today’s software delivery lifecycle, and yet many organizations struggle to keep their automation running. How can we mitigate difficulties and get consistent automation runs and results we can trust? The secret is implementing a solid automation framework, but that isn’t as easy as it seems. Chris Loder has built several automation frameworks over his career and has learned what works—and, more importantly, what doesn’t. This tutorial will cover what an automation framework is, the benefits of having one, and the keys to a successful framework, including...
Getting Dirty with Data, Bots, Agents & Code: A Hands-On Approach to AI Testing
NewAI has crept into almost every app, feature, and test tool — but most testers still don’t have a playbook for how to utilize it. In this hands-on session, attendees will roll up their sleeves and get “dirty” with real data, bots, agents, and code. We’ll build test data generators, use ChatGPT for document transcription, create a lightweight chatbot, and even spin up dashboards to visualize results. Along the way, participants will learn how to design and evaluate systems where AI outputs are probabilistic, biased, or inconsistent — and how to adapt their testing mindset to this new reality...
Tuesday, September 22
Exploratory Testing in the Heat of the Sprint
Agile teams are burdened with the challenge of delivering working product increments after short iterations of development. Getting software from an ambiguous terse, incomplete requirement–to a done, working, solid, valuable, high-quality code requires testers to continuously adapt to change in a turbulent context and deliver actionable results. Chris Blain will illustrate how charter-driven session-based exploratory testing techniques can empower agile teams and help them learn quickly and adapt based on what really matters. Testers can design and execute tests on the fly as they explore...
Agile Test & Transformation Leadership in Action
Leading and driving change in our companies, organizations, and teams can be as difficult as pushing a wet rope uphill! Even with the best processes and tools, we may not achieve our business and customer satisfaction goals when our environment is stuck in the status quo. Ultimately, transforming an organization is about changing culture. Our values, beliefs, goals, assumptions, purpose, priorities, and other factors influence culture. Test managers and leaders are critical players in driving cultural change. Mike Sowers will explore the key attributes of being a Test Transformation Leader...
Automating Test Design with a Little Help from Generative AI
NewRob Sabourin has spent over four decades pioneering automated test design across a wide range of technology stacks. More recently, he’s been exploring the power, promise—and occasional perversity—of applying Generative AI to the challenges of test design. In this lively and hands-on tutorial, Rob shares practical lessons from his experience using Generative AI to address real-world testing problems. From success stories and failures to unexpected surprises, he offers a candid look at what works, what doesn’t, and why. You will explore a variety of proven test design techniques, including...
Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics
To be most effective, leaders—including development and testing managers, ScrumMasters, product owners, and IT managers—need metrics to help direct their efforts and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important evaluation activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, the progress and results of both development and testing must be measured. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because developers and testers often are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Jeff Pierce as he...
Wednesday, September 23
Herding Cats in the Cloud: QA Strategies for Non-Deterministic "Agentic" Workflows
The era of "AI Agent writes code" (2025) is over. In 2026, we face the reality of Agentic Orchestration, where autonomous agents (Sales, Support, Operations) interact to execute complex, non-deterministic workflows. As QA leaders, how do we test a system where the output changes every time it runs? Traditional "Given-When-Then" assertions are obsolete. A critical failure is "State Synchronization Failure" (Agent A using stale data updated by Agent B)—a distributed systems bug that conventional automation cannot detect. This session explores Agent Reliability Engineering. Gregory will...
Test-Driven Thinking in an AI-dominated World
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...