STARWEST 2026 - Agile Team Member
Sunday, September 20
Fundamentals of Agile Test Automation—ICAgile Certification (ICP-ATA)
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...
Holistic Performance Testing for Modern Applications
With the advent of frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue, the landscape of application performance has changed significantly in terms of testing and measurement. Gone are the days of measuring response time as a single value based on back-end performance. In modern web and mobile applications, additional layers need to be peeled apart at the front end to truly understand its performance characteristics. Traditional approaches to performance testing are no longer sufficient to provide a delightfully responsive user experience. Join Kaushal Dalvi as he details new developments in the...
Wednesday, September 23
Herding Cats in the Cloud: QA Strategies for Non-Deterministic "Agentic" Workflows
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...
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 in Production: How QA Frameworks Debug Life's Messy Systems
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...
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...