STARWEST 2026 - Software Tester

Many organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems as their product matures and changes over time. As a leader, how can you ensure that your new automation efforts will get off to a good start? What can you do to ensure that your automation work provides continuing added value? Chris Loder will explain the critical issues you need to know to get a good start, and he will share his extensive experience in building great automation. He covers the most important management issues you should address for test automation success,...

Ever struggled to communicate test progress, influence a stakeholder, or win support for a quality improvement initiative? Do you find it hard to help developers appreciate the value of building testing into the lifecycle? Have you seen ineffective communication reduce the chances of gaining approval for AI initiatives or other important changes? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, then this session is for you. Julie Gardiner shares key ingredients for getting your message across more effectively. She introduces a communication model she has used for nearly 25 years in her...

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...

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...

AI 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...

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,...

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...

What 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...

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...

Everybody loves to talk about the latest and greatest tools when it comes to test automation. But what about coding principles that are specific to testing, and how can you properly design a test automation architecture even before the tool selection? At what stages of delivery shall your solution be integrated into CI/CD pipelines, and what's the value you can provide to the team? Will AI replace you or parts of your work? How to make your work visible to all the key stakeholders, and ensure buy-in from your higher-ups? These are going to be the main topics of discussion during Péter's...

Web applications are often security critical or serve as front-ends for security critical applications, making web testing for vulnerabilities an essential part of software testing. Unfortunately, most software testers have not been taught how to identify web security issues while testing applications. Join Jonathan as he shares what you need to know to security test web-based applications as part of your overall testing process. Learn about the most common web security vulnerabilities and how they are introduced into web code and exploited by hackers. Explore test techniques for ensuring...

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...

Ready to push Playwright to the next level? This hands-on coding tutorial targets developers, testers, and SDETs who already know Playwright basics and want to scale their automation using AI-driven workflows. Using Playwright with TypeScript, we’ll dive straight into coding with tools like Playwright CLI and MCP, alongside AI coding agents such as Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or Codex. You’ll learn how to plan tests with AI, generate new coverage, and heal broken tests efficiently, while structuring your code with page objects and managing test data to avoid collisions. We’ll also explore...

AI 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...

Rob Sabourin has spent over four decades pioneering automated test design across a wide range of technology stacks. More recently, he’s been exploring the power, promise—and occasional perversity—of applying Generative AI to the challenges of test design.  In this lively and hands-on tutorial, Rob shares practical lessons from his experience using Generative AI to address real-world testing problems. From success stories and failures to unexpected surprises, he offers a candid look at what works, what doesn’t, and why. You will explore a variety of proven test design techniques, including...

With the sudden rise of ChatGPT and large language models (LLMs), professionals have been attempting to use these types of tools to improve productivity. Building off prior momentum in AI for testing, software quality professionals are leveraging LLMs for creating tests, generating test scripts, automatically analyzing test results, and more. However, if LLM's are not fed good prompts describing the task that the AI is supposed to perform, their responses can be inaccurate and unreliable, thereby diminishing productivity gains. Join Tariq King as he teaches you how to craft high-quality AI...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...