STARWEST 2026 - Architecture - Design
Customize your STARWEST 2026 experience with sessions covering architecture and design.
Monday, September 21
Become an AI Power User
Impostering a bit in the AI-verse? Overwhelmed by daily AI announcements? Unsure you're using AI most effectively? Tiny bit of FOMO? Jeremiah has you covered! In this workshop, he'll help you become an AI Power User. Become a boss at your job, whatever your role or industry! He'll show you where AI shines and where you'll want to be careful, plus toss you lots of hands-on practice. In the time together, Jeremiah will help you pinpoint YOUR niche, build a custom AI assistant, and develop a comms strategy to show off your new skills. You'll walk out with cutting-edge knowledge, a...
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...
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...
Automating Quality at Scale: Test Strategies for Video Streaming Platforms
Video streaming services must deliver consistent playback, picture quality, and low latency across many devices, networks, and regions—but manual testing of every combination does not scale. Teams often struggle with flaky scripts, unclear coverage, and slow feedback when releasing frequently. This session addresses that gap by walking through a practical approach to streaming test automation. Suresh Kumar Palus will share how his team defined testable quality criteria (e.g., start time, buffering, bitrate behavior, and basic accessibility of player controls), chose automation layers (API...
Thursday, September 24
AI Enablement at Scale: How to Lead an Organization Through a Successful AI Transformation
As AI rapidly moves from experimentation to a core organizational capability, many companies struggle not with models or tools—but with transformation itself. In this talk, Svetlana Stogni shares real-world experiences of leading AI enablement transformations at the organizational level. You will learn how to assess AI readiness, review existing PDLC processes, run rapid assessments, and establish continuous health monitoring to guide sustainable change. The session covers practical approaches to AI tools and platform setup, driving adoption across teams, defining performance and...
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...
Testing AI Systems That Learn in Production: From Static Test Cases to Continuous Validation
As organizations increasingly deploy AI and machine learning systems into production, testing practices built for static, rule-based software are no longer sufficient. Unlike traditional applications, AI systems learn from data, change behavior over time, and are sensitive to data drift, bias, and feedback loops, making defects harder to detect with conventional test cases. This session presents a practical, experience-driven approach to testing AI systems across the full lifecycle, from model development to live deployment. Drawing on real-world implementations and applied research, the...
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...