STARWEST 2026 - Exploratory Testing
Wednesday, September 23
Purposeful Exploratory Testing: Finding What Matters When Time Is Tight
In today’s fast-paced delivery environments, testers are often expected to ensure quality with limited time, incomplete knowledge, and communication constrained to tickets and acceptance criteria. The result? A heavy focus on repeatable regression and surface-level checks—while deeper, high-risk issues can go unnoticed. This talk introduces Purposeful Testing—a practical, context-driven approach that helps testers focus their efforts where they matter most. Instead of simply verifying requirements, purposeful testers seek to uncover the risks that truly impact users and the business. They...
Making Exploratory Testing Data-Driven with Pareto Analysis
PreviewThis 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...
Thursday, September 24
SLO-Driven Testing: Turning Reliability Targets into an Executable Test Strategy
Modern delivery pipelines still treat “testing” as something that happens before release, yet most high-impact failures in distributed systems are reliability failures that only show up under real traffic, real data, and real dependencies. In this session you will learn a practical, SLO-driven approach to unify quality engineering and reliability engineering. Shalini will start by translating critical customer journeys into a small set of measurable SLIs like latency, availability, error rate, and correctness signals and setting SLOs that reflect user expectations. Then she will walk...
RAG Testing That Holds Up: Evaluating LLMs for Faithfulness, Boundaries, and Trust
PreviewMany 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...