STARWEST 2026 - Testing for Developers
Sunday, September 20
Software Tester Certification Foundation Level—ISTQB CTFL v4.0
Monday, September 21
Testing from the Inside: AI-Assisted Unit Testing Edition
NewWant to level up your testing and development skills while harnessing the power of AI? In today’s environments, shifting left is more important than ever to catch bugs early and accelerate delivery. Traditional software testing teaches you to think outside the box from a user’s perspective—but some of the best insights come from looking inside the box, analyzing the code itself, and applying AI to make testing faster and smarter. Join Tariq King as he walks you through the fundamentals of program-based testing, now enhanced with AI assistance. Learn how to apply techniques such as testing...
Cursor and Claude Code for Test Automation Engineers (Basics)
NewPeople 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...
Cursor and Claude Code for Test Automation Engineers (Advanced)
NewYou 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...
Building Apps and Tests Together with AI: Agentic Spec-Driven Development
NewWhat if you could turn ideas into working software with tests to prove it, using AI as your collaborator? This hands-on half-day tutorial introduces agentic spec-driven development, a practical approach for building web apps and test automation together with AI coding agents like Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or Codex. Designed for testers and anyone involved in software development, this session shows how to define a clear project context and rules. You will write feature specs as structured markdown with user stories, design decisions, and acceptance criteria. Then you will use AI to generate...
Test Smarter, Not Harder: How to Design Test Suites for Continuous Delivery
Imagine: as soon as any developed functionality is submitted into the code repository, it is automatically subjected to the appropriate battery of tests and then released straight into the wild. Setting up the pipeline to do just that has become commonplace, but most organizations hit the same stumbling block: just what IS the appropriate battery of tests? Automated build pipelines don't always lend themselves well to the traditional stages of testing. In this hands-on tutorial, Melissa will introduce testers to the key principles of test case and test suite design that apply to...
Tuesday, September 22
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
Telemetry at Scale: Lessons from Building Observability for Distributed Systems
Modern distributed systems fail in messy, non-obvious ways: a small latency spike in one microservice can cascade through queues, sidecars, gateways, and control planes, yet traditional logging and isolated dashboards rarely reveal the true root cause. In this talk, Sneha will share how Microsoft tackled this while building the telemetry and observability platform behind Azure Container Apps and the Aspire Dashboard, used across thousands of customer environments. They standardized on OpenTelemetry to unify traces, metrics, and logs across heterogeneous workloads, invested in consistent...
How Testers Can Break AI: Practical Techniques to Find Bias, Hallucinations, and Accessibility
As AI-powered features (especially generative AI) are rapidly integrated into modern software, testing teams face a critical challenge. Traditional testing approaches focus on correctness and performance but fail to uncover ethical risks such as bias, hallucinations, and accessibility regressions. In real projects, this has led to AI systems that technically “work” yet exclude users, generate misleading outputs, or erode trust. In this talk, Aditi addresses this gap by reframing AI quality as a testable concern and applying practical, tester-led techniques rather than data science-heavy...
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...