STARWEST 2026 - Project Manager
Customize your STARWEST 2026 experience with sessions covering project management.
Sunday, September 20
Fundamentals of AI—ICAgile Certification (ICP-FAI)
Strategies for Testing AI-Based Systems
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...
Become Your Company's Quality Consultant
Companies of all sizes face difficulties in achieving higher quality standards within their organization. As quality engineering includes various roles and activities, it is also challenging to find the right people to analyze the current state from a wide perspective and provide the recommendations that will allow these organizations to mature their teams, improving their DevOps culture in the process. Join Péter Földházi as he illustrates the knowledge and skills necessary to become your company's quality consultant. Péter's goal is to involve engineers from beginner to advanced levels...
Testing AI Systems That Refuse to Sit Still: Practical Evals, Red Teaming, and Oversight for AI Agents
NewModern AI systems don’t behave like traditional software. The same prompt can produce different outputs, models can drift without code changes, and AI agents may hallucinate, misuse tools, leak context, or confidently invent facts while appearing completely functional. In this hands-on tutorial, Jeremiah Marble will show attendees how to test and harden modern AI systems using practical, lightweight techniques teams can apply immediately. Participants will build tiny AI agents, intentionally break them through prompt injection, unsafe outputs, hallucinations, and memory drift, then create...
Automation Framework Essentials
Automation is critical in today’s software delivery lifecycle, and yet many organizations struggle to keep their automation running. How can we mitigate difficulties and get consistent automation runs and results we can trust? The secret is implementing a solid automation framework, but that isn’t as easy as it seems. Chris Loder has built several automation frameworks over his career and has learned what works—and, more importantly, what doesn’t. This tutorial will cover what an automation framework is, the benefits of having one, and the keys to a successful framework, including...
Tuesday, September 22
Agentic AI: From Rules to Reasoning
NewAI agents have existed for decades, but generative AI has fundamentally changed what agents can do and how they are designed and built. Come and explore the evolution of AI agents across two major waves. First, learn the foundations of Agentic AI through agents built using rules, heuristics, and traditional machine learning, examining where these approaches excel and why they struggle with complexity, ambiguity, and scale. Then dive into the second wave of agents powered by generative AI and multimodal large language models. These modern agents can reason, plan, use tools, and interact...
Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics
To be most effective, leaders—including development and testing managers, ScrumMasters, product owners, and IT managers—need metrics to help direct their efforts and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important evaluation activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, the progress and results of both development and testing must be measured. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because developers and testers often are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Jeff Pierce as he...
Wednesday, September 23
How Technical Program Management Became the Architecture Layer of Modern AI Execution
As Generative AI moves from prototypes to production, one truth is emerging across every major tech organization — scaling AI responsibly isn’t just a data, science or engineering challenge but also an orchestration challenge. Behind every AI system that ships reliably, there’s a hidden architecture of alignment: between model builders, applied scientists, data engineers, security, compliance, and product teams. In that architecture, Technical Program Management (TPM) is becoming the connective tissue — the execution layer of modern AI. In this talk, Raj Karan shares lessons from leading...
Beyond Coverage: Governing GenAI-Generated Tests with Metrics Leaders Can Trust
Generative AI has created a new risk for quality leaders: "Coverage Theater." This occurs when AI-generated test suites inflate code coverage metrics to record highs while silently reducing assertion quality, leaving teams with green dashboards but escaping defects. In this session, Niranjan will dismantle this illusion by implementing a Quality Governance Audit using two advanced metrics that reveal what coverage hides. He will introduce the Assertion Strength Index (ASI), a scoring framework that rates tests from generic "existence checks" to rigorous business validation, exposing GenAI’...
Thursday, September 24
Building Ethical AI Literacy in Next-Generation Test Automation Leaders
As AI-driven automation becomes the backbone of modern QA—from intelligent test generation and self-healing scripts to risk-based prioritization and autonomous agents—the need for ethical and responsible AI leadership in testing has become critical. While teams rapidly adopt AI tooling, the ethical dimension of how these systems operate, learn, and influence decision-making is often underdeveloped. This session reframes test automation through an ethical leadership lens, walking through the full software delivery lifecycle and identifying where AI-powered testing introduces new risks,...
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...