STARWEST 2026 - QA Engineer
Customize your STARWEST 2026 experience with sessions covering QA engineering.
Sunday, September 20
Fundamentals of AI—ICAgile Certification (ICP-FAI)
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...
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...
Getting Started with AI-Driven Automation
AI has been rapidly changing the way we approach software testing. Traditional test automation is time-consuming to create and breaks down easily in the presence of change. Thankfully, AI is helping testing teams create less procedural, more resilient tests that are able to self-heal in the presence of modern, rapidly changing, highly dynamic production systems. This sounds great, but you may be asking yourself: How do I get started? What additional skills do I need to learn? What tools are available for me to start using, right now? Join Dionny Santiago as he breaks down different AI...
Stop Guessing and Start Planning with Better Behavior Discovery
Are you tired of working on user stories that seem to be missing vital details for testing? Are you frustrated with being left out of vital design conversations? Or are you fed up with sizing estimates that never turn out to be true to reality? Then it’s time to stop guessing your way through product development and start planning it with better behavior discovery. In this tutorial, we will learn how three vital roles – business, development, testing – can collaborate on what features to build and test through the structured activities of story mapping and example mapping. We will practice...
Forming Your Agent Team: From LLM to Agent
NewThe conversation around AI has already moved beyond prompts and chatbots. Today's engineering teams are beginning to build agents that can reason, use tools, and perform meaningful work. While many professionals have experimented with large language models (LLMs), far fewer understand how agents actually work or how to build one themselves. In this hands-on tutorial, you'll move beyond simply using AI and begin building with it. Through practical exercises and real-world examples, you'll learn the foundations of modern agentic systems and follow the evolution from LLM to agent. Along the...
A Quality Engineering Introduction to AI and Machine Learning
Although there are several controversies and misunderstandings surrounding AI and machine learning, one thing is apparent — people have quality concerns about the safety, reliability, and trustworthiness of these types of systems. Not only are ML-based systems shrouded in mystery due to their largely black-box nature, they also tend to be unpredictable since they can adapt and learn new things at runtime. Validating ML systems is challenging and requires a cross-section of knowledge, skills, and experience from areas such as mathematics, data science, software engineering, cyber-security,...
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...
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...
Leading Your Agent Team: From Agent to Agentic Orchestration
NewBuilding an agent is only the beginning. The next wave of AI innovation is being driven by teams of specialized agents working together to solve increasingly complex problems. As organizations move beyond individual agents and toward coordinated AI systems, a new challenge emerges: how do you lead, coordinate, and govern intelligent teams? In this hands-on tutorial, you'll move beyond creating agents and begin learning how to orchestrate them. Through practical exercises and real-world examples, you'll explore how specialized agents can collaborate, share responsibilities, and work...
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...
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...
AI-Driven API Test and Automation
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to use GenAI to implement and test a REST API from scratch. Using Cursor as your development environment, you’ll be guided through a hands-on experience that combines powerful tools like Mocha, Supertest, k6, and GitHub Actions to implement automated testing and continuous integration. Under the guidance of Julio de Lima, you’ll first dive into essential REST API architecture concepts to build a solid foundation. Then, with the support of GenAI, you’ll generate and refine your API, create functional test cases, and automate them to validate behavior and...
AiGovOps for Testers: Validating AI Systems You Can Ship — and Defend
NewAI is in the systems you're testing — and the rules just changed. With the EU AI Act in full enforcement, 250+ U.S. state bills in motion, and audit demands rising, "we tested it" is no longer enough. Regulators, customers, and your own legal team want evidence: who validated what, against which risks, with what controls running when the model shipped. The good news: testers are the natural front line for AI governance. You already own validation, traceability, and the test-evidence chain that auditors will ask for. The opportunity is to make that work load-bearing for AI systems — and to...
AI-Enabled SDLC: Let the Robot Do the Work
NewTheory is great, but what about getting your hands dirty with some real problem-solving? This tutorial is about building your own AI Operating System that you'll take home and use immediately. Join Melissa Benua and Ryan Lee for a hands-on session where you'll construct a personalized AI toolkit that solves YOUR specific testing problems, regardless of your coding background. We'll start by deconstructing the modern SDLC, the same one you're already working in, and show you exactly where AI accelerates each phase. Then we'll prove a critical insight: code is now cheap. AI can generate...
Wednesday, September 23
Tester 2.0—Becoming Indispensable in the Age of AI
Over the past few months, it has become clear that human testing expertise isn't going anywhere. However, surviving the AI era is not the same as thriving in it; simply "not being replaced yet" isn’t the same as being future-ready. With code being produced faster than ever and teams getting leaner, there seems to be a growing gap between code velocity and code quality. Are we just going to have to live with the fact that software quality is in decline? The answer is "no, but..." While some things stay the same, testers of tomorrow need to prepare for the trials ahead. Advocates for quality...
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...
Thursday, September 24
The Quality Engineering Mindset: High-Performance Frameworks for Career and Personal Growth
Success in software testing depends on more than technical know-how—it requires a unique set of skills that can elevate both your work and your personal growth. The mindset, habits, and analytical approach testers develop are powerful assets for thriving in an ever-changing world. The core skills honed as a tester—curiosity, critical thinking, adaptability, and clear communication—are exactly what you need to solve complex problems, make smart decisions, and drive improvement in any domain. Kulas explores how the essential skills of a software tester—like questioning assumptions, focusing...
Cartoon Logic, Real Automation: What We Learned from Saturday Morning Cartoons
Do you remember sitting in front of the TV on Saturday mornings, bowl of cereal in hand, glued to your favorite cartoons? In this interactive session, Chris Loder brings that nostalgia to life, and invites you to help connect the dots between classic cartoon wisdom and modern test automation practices. Through real-time audience participation, live polls, and open discussion, we'll explore how characters like Scooby Doo®, Wile E. Coyote®, and Bugs Bunny® accidentally (or cleverly) taught us principles that apply directly to automation strategy, code reuse, and team collaboration. What can...