STARWEST 2026 - Test Automation Engineer
Customize your STARWEST 2026 experience with sessions covering test automation for engineers.
Sunday, September 20
Strategies for Testing AI-Based Systems
Fundamentals of AI—ICAgile Certification (ICP-FAI)
Fundamentals of Agile Test Automation—ICAgile Certification (ICP-ATA)
Software Tester Certification Foundation Level—ISTQB CTFL v4.0
Monday, September 21
Test Automation: How to Start and Succeed
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,...
The How and When of Communication
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...
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...
Cursor and Claude Code for Test Automation Engineers (Basics)
NewPeople know Cursor as a vibe-coding tool, but it can be so much more. This hands-on tutorial will equip you with tons of tips on how to make your test automation workflow more efficient and turn you into a real 10x engineer. We'll take a look at how to personalize your experience with Cursor, write tests faster and without hallucinations, use diagrams and visualization tools to plan your test automation strategy, create your own custom Cursor rules and workflows, and enhance your test suite. Suitable for QA Engineers, Test Automation Engineers, Frontend Developers, and DevOps Engineers. By...
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...
Becoming an AI-Native Testing Organization
NewAI 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...
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,...
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...
Test Smarter, Not Harder: How to Design Test Suites for Continuous Delivery
Imagine: as soon as any developed functionality is submitted into the code repository, it is automatically subjected to the appropriate battery of tests and then released straight into the wild. Setting up the pipeline to do just that has become commonplace, but most organizations hit the same stumbling block: just what IS the appropriate battery of tests? Automated build pipelines don't always lend themselves well to the traditional stages of testing. In this hands-on tutorial, Melissa will introduce testers to the key principles of test case and test suite design that apply to...
Tuesday, September 22
Test Automation Architecture Master Class
NewEverybody 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...
Top-Notch Web Testing with Playwright and AI (Basics)
NewNew to Playwright or only scratched the surface? This hands-on coding tutorial is designed for developers, testers, and SDETs who want to start building real web tests quickly using Playwright with TypeScript. We’ll begin with what makes Playwright stand out from other tools. Then, we’ll walk step-by-step through setting up a project, recording tests, refining them into clean, maintainable test cases. From there, we’ll introduce AI-powered workflows using the Playwright CLI with skills to generate test plans and test cases. By the end of the session, you’ll have working tests, a clear...
Web Security Testing: The Basics and More
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...
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...
Accelerate Quality: A Hands-On Tutorial on AI-Assisted Software Testing
NewUnlock the next era of Quality Assurance (QA) by moving beyond simple code assistance and embracing the power of AI agents. This half-day, intensive tutorial offers hands-on experience with cutting-edge Generative AI tools, including GitHub Copilot and leading GenAI Chatbots, to integrate AI at every stage of the testing lifecycle. You will master practical techniques to dramatically accelerate quality, learning how to leverage AI to analyze requirements and identify risks, create comprehensive test cases and data, and accelerate test automation by generating scripts and suggesting...
Top-Notch Web Testing with Playwright and AI (Advanced)
NewReady 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...
From PRD to Production: Designing a Test Strategy That Actually Works
NewMost test strategies don’t fail in execution. They fail before testing even begins. They start too late, focus too narrowly on automation, and miss the one thing that actually matters: understanding what we are building and why. Janna and Cara will walk you through building a modern test strategy from the ground up, starting with the product requirements document (PDR) and carrying that intent through test design, execution, and measurement. They will break down a practical, end-to-end approach to quality strategy that connects product intent to engineering reality. You will learn how to...
Prompt Engineering for Software Quality Professionals
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...
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...
Automating the Migration: Scaling Cypress to Playwright Migrations with AI-Driven Velocity
PreviewThe decision to migrate from Cypress to Playwright is often stalled by the sobering reality of the manual effort required to rewrite extensive test suites. Traditionally, this involves months of tedious refactoring and logic translation that drains engineering resources and delays critical innovation. In this session, Ryan Song reveals a high-velocity framework designed to automate the heavy lifting of framework transition using Generative AI. He will move beyond simple prompts to explore a structured AI pipeline capable of handling complex asynchronous logic, custom commands, and...
AI-Driven Identity Governance: How Testing Teams Secure Access in Zero Trust Environments
As organizations adopt Zero Trust Architectures, Identity and Access Management has become a critical security control that testing teams can no longer treat as a black box. Traditional role-based access models struggle to keep pace with dynamic cloud environments, non-human identities, and evolving threat patterns. This session explores how AI-driven identity governance transforms access validation into a continuous, testable security practice. Drawing from real enterprise implementations across finance, healthcare, and e-commerce, the presentation demonstrates how behavioral analytics,...
AI-Assisted Accessibility Testing: Generating WCAG-Focused Checks with Playwright MCP and LLM CLI
Accessibility testing is critical, yet often under-tested due to limited expertise, time constraints, and manual effort. While tools exist, teams still struggle to translate WCAG guidelines into actionable, repeatable automated checks. In this session, Sidhartha will explore how AI can responsibly assist accessibility testing — not by replacing standards or human judgment, but by bridging the gap between guidelines and executable tests. Using Playwright MCP together with an LLM CLI, Sidhartha will demonstrate how AI can: interpret WCAG requirements, generate meaningful accessibility test...
From Local to Cloud: Scaling Your Load Tests with AWS (Without Blowing the Budget)
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...
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...
The Quality Nervous System
The Quality Nervous System is a biologically inspired network where AI agents and humans operate symbiotically in a single adaptive system. AI agents continuously explore, learn, and execute in real time across software at machine speed, while humans provide the judgment, strategy, and purpose to assure outcomes align with user and business goals. AI partnering fundamentally changes how software is built. Humans now collaborate with systems that generate code, tests, insights, and behavior at unprecedented speed and volume. Continuous real-time results flood teams faster than they can...
The Future of Test Automation: Trends, Challenges, and Your Burning Questions - Panel
Test automation is evolving at an unprecedented pace, driven by AI, continuous testing, and the ever-increasing complexity of modern software development. Join us for an engaging panel discussion where industry experts will explore the latest trends in test automation, including AI-powered testing, low-code/no-code automation, and the role of testers in a rapidly changing landscape. This session will also serve as an open forum for attendees to ask any lingering questions from the conference. Whether it’s about the future of automation, best practices, or the impact of AI on testing roles...
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...
Testing the Untestable: How to Validate Cloud‑Dependent Features You Don’t Fully Own and Control
Today’s software relies on a collection of cloud services, shared platforms, and third‑party tools, many of which your teams don’t own, control, or even fully understand. Yet when something goes wrong, customers don’t blame the cloud provider or the external API. They blame your product. That puts testers in a tough spot: how do you ensure quality when key parts of the system are unpredictable, unavailable, or outside your team’s reach? This session explores how to build confidence in features that depend on other teams and the ever‑changing cloud. The session will look at practical ways...
Taming the Stochastic Beast: Building AI Evaluation Pipelines for GenAI Releases
If you've ever shipped a GenAI feature wondering “is this actually good enough?”, you're not alone. Traditional pass/fail QA breaks down when outputs are non-deterministic, and teams end up making release decisions based on subjective “vibe checks” rather than data. This session shows how Product Managers can partner with QA to replace intuition with a systematic AI evaluation pipeline. You'll learn how to define quality as measurable dimensions (groundedness, tone, helpfulness, safety), build a representative test set, and design rubrics that align product goals with engineering...
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...
Scaling Quality with AI: How We Built Agent-Based QA and a Secure Internal GPT
As financial systems grow in scale and regulatory complexity, traditional QA approaches struggle to keep pace with the volume of requirements, risks, and test artifacts that must be continuously reviewed and maintained. In regulated fintech environments, QA teams must balance speed, accuracy, and compliance—often relying on manual effort that does not scale. This session presents a real-world case study of how the Acba Bank QA organization evolved from manual, human-heavy processes to an AI-assisted quality ecosystem built around purpose-driven AI agents and a secure, in-house GPT platform...
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...