STARWEST 2026 - Test Transformation

AI has been rapidly changing the way we approach software testing. Traditional test automation is time-consuming to create and breaks down easily in the presence of change. Thankfully, AI is helping testing teams create less procedural, more resilient tests that are able to self-heal in the presence of modern, rapidly changing, highly dynamic production systems. This sounds great, but you may be asking yourself: How do I get started? What additional skills do I need to learn? What tools are available for me to start using, right now? Join Dionny Santiago as he breaks down different AI...

AI is changing how software is designed, built, and validated. As industries transition to AI-native product development, testing organizations must adapt their practices and skills. Manual testing is no longer enough; traditional automation should be enhanced with AI-driven quality engineering, autonomous agents, and data-powered tactics for faster and more reliable product delivery. Join Adam Auerbach to explore what it means to become an AI-Native Testing Organization. He will outline the AI-native software development lifecycle (SDLC) and highlight necessary changes in quality...

Building an agent is only the beginning. The next wave of AI innovation is being driven by teams of specialized agents working together to solve increasingly complex problems. As organizations move beyond individual agents and toward coordinated AI systems, a new challenge emerges: how do you lead, coordinate, and govern intelligent teams? In this hands-on tutorial, you'll move beyond creating agents and begin learning how to orchestrate them. Through practical exercises and real-world examples, you'll explore how specialized agents can collaborate, share responsibilities, and work...

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...

AI is in the systems you're testing — and the rules just changed. With the EU AI Act in full enforcement, 250+ U.S. state bills in motion, and audit demands rising, "we tested it" is no longer enough. Regulators, customers, and your own legal team want evidence: who validated what, against which risks, with what controls running when the model shipped. The good news: testers are the natural front line for AI governance. You already own validation, traceability, and the test-evidence chain that auditors will ask for. The opportunity is to make that work load-bearing for AI systems — and to...

The decision to migrate from Cypress to Playwright is often stalled by the sobering reality of the manual effort required to rewrite extensive test suites. Traditionally, this involves months of tedious refactoring and logic translation that drains engineering resources and delays critical innovation. In this session, Ryan Song reveals a high-velocity framework designed to automate the heavy lifting of framework transition using Generative AI. He will move beyond simple prompts to explore a structured AI pipeline capable of handling complex asynchronous logic, custom commands, and...

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...

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...