STARWEST 2026 - Test Automation

Many organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems as their product matures and changes over time. As a leader, how can you ensure that your new automation efforts will get off to a good start? What can you do to ensure that your automation work provides continuing added value? Chris Loder will explain the critical issues you need to know to get a good start, and he will share his extensive experience in building great automation. He covers the most important management issues you should address for test automation success,...

People know Cursor as a vibe-coding tool, but it can be so much more. This hands-on tutorial will equip you with tons of tips on how to make your test automation workflow more efficient and turn you into a real 10x engineer. We'll take a look at how to personalize your experience with Cursor, write tests faster and without hallucinations, use diagrams and visualization tools to plan your test automation strategy, create your own custom Cursor rules and workflows, and enhance your test suite. Suitable for QA Engineers, Test Automation Engineers, Frontend Developers, and DevOps Engineers. By...

You have the basics of AI tools covered, now let’s push them to the limits. In this advanced, hands-on workshop, we’ll go beyond vibe-coding and explore how to use AI tooling as a strategic orchestration tool for test automation engineers. Suitable for QA Engineers, Test Automation Engineers, Frontend Developers, and DevOps Engineers; we’ll dive deep into advanced techniques like multi-agent reasoning for debugging, building robust end-to-end tests, maintaining long-context conversations without drift, and crafting reusable automation patterns. We’ll be building custom tooling and agents...

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...

Web applications are often security critical or serve as front-ends for security critical applications, making web testing for vulnerabilities an essential part of software testing. Unfortunately, most software testers have not been taught how to identify web security issues while testing applications. Join Jonathan as he shares what you need to know to security test web-based applications as part of your overall testing process. Learn about the most common web security vulnerabilities and how they are introduced into web code and exploited by hackers. Explore test techniques for ensuring...

Ready to push Playwright to the next level? This hands-on coding tutorial targets developers, testers, and SDETs who already know Playwright basics and want to scale their automation using AI-driven workflows. Using Playwright with TypeScript, we’ll dive straight into coding with tools like Playwright CLI and MCP, alongside AI coding agents such as Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or Codex. You’ll learn how to plan tests with AI, generate new coverage, and heal broken tests efficiently, while structuring your code with page objects and managing test data to avoid collisions. We’ll also explore...

Accessibility testing is critical, yet often under-tested due to limited expertise, time constraints, and manual effort. While tools exist, teams still struggle to translate WCAG guidelines into actionable, repeatable automated checks. In this session, Sidhartha will explore how AI can responsibly assist accessibility testing — not by replacing standards or human judgment, but by bridging the gap between guidelines and executable tests. Using Playwright MCP together with an LLM CLI, Sidhartha will demonstrate how AI can: interpret WCAG requirements, generate meaningful accessibility test...

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...

As organizations increasingly deploy AI and machine learning systems into production, testing practices built for static, rule-based software are no longer sufficient. Unlike traditional applications, AI systems learn from data, change behavior over time, and are sensitive to data drift, bias, and feedback loops, making defects harder to detect with conventional test cases. This session presents a practical, experience-driven approach to testing AI systems across the full lifecycle, from model development to live deployment. Drawing on real-world implementations and applied research, the...

If you've ever shipped a GenAI feature wondering “is this actually good enough?”, you're not alone. Traditional pass/fail QA breaks down when outputs are non-deterministic, and teams end up making release decisions based on subjective “vibe checks” rather than data. This session shows how Product Managers can partner with QA to replace intuition with a systematic AI evaluation pipeline. You'll learn how to define quality as measurable dimensions (groundedness, tone, helpfulness, safety), build a representative test set, and design rubrics that align product goals with engineering...

As AI-driven automation becomes the backbone of modern QA—from intelligent test generation and self-healing scripts to risk-based prioritization and autonomous agents—the need for ethical and responsible AI leadership in testing has become critical. While teams rapidly adopt AI tooling, the ethical dimension of how these systems operate, learn, and influence decision-making is often underdeveloped. This session reframes test automation through an ethical leadership lens, walking through the full software delivery lifecycle and identifying where AI-powered testing introduces new risks,...