STARWEST 2026 - Test Techniques
Sunday, September 20
Fundamentals of AI—ICAgile Certification (ICP-FAI)
Software Tester Certification Foundation Level—ISTQB CTFL v4.0
Fundamentals of Agile Test Automation—ICAgile Certification (ICP-ATA)
Monday, September 21
Test Automation: How to Start and Succeed
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,...
Smarter Test Design with Classification Trees and Pairwise Techniques
In many teams, the total number of possible combinations of inputs, outputs, browsers, and devices for the software we need to test has grown to an alarming number. As testers, we need to choose the most important tests first, but how do we do that without understanding the potential scope in the first place? In this tutorial, Julie Gardiner will share two powerful testing techniques that can help us be more efficient and effective with our testing. Classification trees are a structured, visual approach to identifying test objects and documenting test ideas and data in a way that allows...
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...
Top-Notch Web Testing with Playwright and AI (Basics)
NewNew to Playwright or only scratched the surface? This hands-on coding tutorial is designed for developers, testers, and SDETs who want to start building real web tests quickly using Playwright with TypeScript. We’ll begin with what makes Playwright stand out from other tools. Then, we’ll walk step-by-step through setting up a project, recording tests, refining them into clean, maintainable test cases. From there, we’ll introduce AI-powered workflows using the Playwright CLI with skills to generate test plans and test cases. By the end of the session, you’ll have working tests, a clear...
Web Security Testing: The Basics and More
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...
Top-Notch Web Testing with Playwright and AI (Advanced)
NewReady 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...
Testing on the Right: Lessons in Monitoring and Observability
Observability has exploded onto the software engineering zeitgeist over the last five years, and for a good reason. However, it suffers from being misunderstood and sometimes equated with a closely related subject—monitoring. This confusion is compounded by the fact that some of the existing tools and frameworks just adopted a lot of the observability terminology in just the letter of the word, not the intent. Not having a solid grasp on the basics of observability is becoming unacceptable in the world of effective software quality engineering. Kaushal Dalvi shares his experiences in the...
Wednesday, September 23
From Local to Cloud: Scaling Your Load Tests with AWS (Without Blowing the Budget)
Many teams begin load testing on a local machine or inside their own network, but quickly hit limits with CPU, bandwidth, realism, and scale. This session addresses the challenge of moving from local load testing to cloud-based execution in a practical, cost-conscious way using AWS. The session will walk through how to spin up EC2 instances as load generators, create and manage SSH keys, transfer and run tests remotely, and collect results without needing deep cloud expertise. You’ll learn how to use Spot Fleets to reduce costs, structure your test setup for repeatability, and safely...
Making Exploratory Testing Data-Driven with Pareto Analysis
This 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 exploratory...
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...
Testing AI Systems That Change Over Time
Modern software systems increasingly rely on AI-driven features such as recommendations, copilots, and automated decision-making. Unlike traditional software, these systems evolve over time as data changes and user behavior shifts, making them difficult to test using deterministic test cases alone. Many testing teams struggle with unpredictable outputs, flaky tests, and failures that only appear after deployment. In this session, Dr. Longe will address the challenge of testing AI-enabled systems that change over time and explain how testers can adapt familiar testing principles to these...
The Quality Nervous System
The Quality Nervous System is a biologically inspired network where AI agents and humans operate symbiotically in a single adaptive system. AI agents continuously explore, learn, and execute in real time across software at machine speed, while humans provide the judgment, strategy, and purpose to assure outcomes align with user and business goals. AI partnering fundamentally changes how software is built. Humans now collaborate with systems that generate code, tests, insights, and behavior at unprecedented speed and volume. Continuous real-time results flood teams faster than they can...
Thursday, September 24
Testing the Untestable: How to Validate Cloud‑Dependent Features You Don’t Fully Own and Control
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...
Agentic Quality at Scale—Orchestrating a QA Swarm for Swift Delivery
As delivery cycles compress, single AI agents are not enough. The next leap is a coordinated swarm of specialized QA agents, each owning a slice of the quality lifecycle (requirements, test generation, execution intelligence, defect triage, and release decisions). This session shows how to design an agent operating model that scales across teams, products, and pipelines without losing trust, traceability, or control. This session will introduce a practical blueprint for deploying multiple cooperating AI agents across the SDLC, with clear boundaries, KPIs, and governance that align to...
Scaling Quality with AI: How We Built Agent-Based QA and a Secure Internal GPT
As financial systems grow in scale and regulatory complexity, traditional QA approaches struggle to keep pace with the volume of requirements, risks, and test artifacts that must be continuously reviewed and maintained. In regulated fintech environments, QA teams must balance speed, accuracy, and compliance—often relying on manual effort that does not scale. This session presents a real-world case study of how the Acba Bank QA organization evolved from manual, human-heavy processes to an AI-assisted quality ecosystem built around purpose-driven AI agents and a secure, in-house GPT platform...