STARWEST 2026 - Testing in DevOps
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...
Becoming an AI-Native Testing Organization
NewAI 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...
Tuesday, September 22
From PRD to Production: Designing a Test Strategy That Actually Works
NewMost test strategies don’t fail in execution. They fail before testing even begins. They start too late, focus too narrowly on automation, and miss the one thing that actually matters: understanding what we are building and why. Janna and Cara will walk you through building a modern test strategy from the ground up, starting with the product requirements document (PDR) and carrying that intent through test design, execution, and measurement. They will break down a practical, end-to-end approach to quality strategy that connects product intent to engineering reality. You will learn how to...
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...
Automating the Migration: Scaling Cypress to Playwright Migrations with AI-Driven Velocity
PreviewThe 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...
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...
Thursday, September 24
Quality Made Modern: The 2026 CoE Glow‑Up
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...
Testing Event-Driven Systems Without Losing Your Sanity: Practical Patterns for AWS Serverless and Asynchronous Workflows
Event-driven architectures promise speed and scale, but they also introduce testing pain: eventual consistency, non-deterministic timing, duplicated events, and failures that only appear in production. In this talk, Parthiban will share a practical, field-tested approach he has used while leading distributed teams building regulated FinTech workloads on AWS serverless components such as Lambda, EventBridge, Step Functions, SQS, and API Gateway. He’ll start with the common failure patterns that make traditional end-to-end testing brittle, slow, and expensive. Next, he will walk through how...
SLO-Driven Testing: Turning Reliability Targets into an Executable Test Strategy
Modern delivery pipelines still treat “testing” as something that happens before release, yet most high-impact failures in distributed systems are reliability failures that only show up under real traffic, real data, and real dependencies. In this session you will learn a practical, SLO-driven approach to unify quality engineering and reliability engineering. Shalini will start by translating critical customer journeys into a small set of measurable SLIs like latency, availability, error rate, and correctness signals and setting SLOs that reflect user expectations. Then she will walk...
LLM-Powered Observability for Modern Cloud Systems: Telemetry Reasoning, Incident Triage, and Faster Root-Cause Analysis
Modern cloud systems generate overwhelming volumes of telemetry—metrics, logs, traces, and events—yet incident response still relies on manual correlation, tribal knowledge, and brittle rule-based alerts. This work presents an approach to LLM-powered observability that augments traditional monitoring with telemetry reasoning to accelerate incident triage and root-cause analysis. Prashanthi proposes a pipeline that structures heterogeneous signals into a unified incident context, enriches them with service topology, deployment metadata, and SLO/SLA objectives, and guides engineers with...