STARWEST 2026 - Career & Personal Development

Companies of all sizes face difficulties in achieving higher quality standards within their organization. As quality engineering includes various roles and activities, it is also challenging to find the right people to analyze the current state from a wide perspective and provide the recommendations that will allow these organizations to mature their teams, improving their DevOps culture in the process. Join Péter Földházi as he illustrates the knowledge and skills necessary to become your company's quality consultant. Péter's goal is to involve engineers from beginner to advanced levels...

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...

Everybody loves to talk about the latest and greatest tools when it comes to test automation. But what about coding principles that are specific to testing, and how can you properly design a test automation architecture even before the tool selection? At what stages of delivery shall your solution be integrated into CI/CD pipelines, and what's the value you can provide to the team? Will AI replace you or parts of your work? How to make your work visible to all the key stakeholders, and ensure buy-in from your higher-ups? These are going to be the main topics of discussion during Péter's...

As QA professionals, we're experts at identifying system failures, analyzing root causes, and implementing sustainable fixes—at work. But when Alison McGuigan's personal life became a critical severity issue (layoff, miscarriage, postpartum fog, and a chaotic household), she realized she'd never applied that same rigor to her own circumstances. She treated her messy house like a failed deployment. So she ran an 8-week experiment: What if she debugged her life like a QA project? She conducted root cause analysis to find real problems beyond surface symptoms. She defined "minimum viable...

Modern cloud systems generate overwhelming volumes of telemetry—metrics, logs, traces, and events—yet incident response still relies on manual correlation, tribal knowledge, and brittle rule-based alerts. This work presents an approach to LLM-powered observability that augments traditional monitoring with telemetry reasoning to accelerate incident triage and root-cause analysis. Prashanthi proposes a pipeline that structures heterogeneous signals into a unified incident context, enriches them with service topology, deployment metadata, and SLO/SLA objectives, and guides engineers with...