STARWEST 2026 - Test Leadership

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...

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...

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...

Generative AI has created a new risk for quality leaders: "Coverage Theater." This occurs when AI-generated test suites inflate code coverage metrics to record highs while silently reducing assertion quality, leaving teams with green dashboards but escaping defects. In this session, Niranjan will dismantle this illusion by implementing a Quality Governance Audit using two advanced metrics that reveal what coverage hides. He will introduce the Assertion Strength Index (ASI), a scoring framework that rates tests from generic "existence checks" to rigorous business validation, exposing GenAI’...

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...

Today’s software relies on a collection of cloud services, shared platforms, and third‑party tools, many of which your teams don’t own, control, or even fully understand. Yet when something goes wrong, customers don’t blame the cloud provider or the external API. They blame your product. That puts testers in a tough spot: how do you ensure quality when key parts of the system are unpredictable, unavailable, or outside your team’s reach? This session explores how to build confidence in features that depend on other teams and the ever‑changing cloud. The session will look at practical ways...

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...

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,...