STARWEST 2026 - Test Management

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,...

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...

The 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...

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,...

Building 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...

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...

Most 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...

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...

The 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...

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...

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’...

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...

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...

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...

Many teams are adopting RAG to constrain LLMs to internal documents, policies, and knowledge bases, but “using RAG” does not guarantee trustworthy behavior. In practice, models still hallucinate, blend outside knowledge, ignore source boundaries, and produce confident answers that are not supported by retrieved evidence. Traditional test approaches (happy-path assertions, correctness spot checks, performance metrics) often miss these failures because the output reads plausibly correct. Drawing from real evaluation work on document-constrained enterprise systems, this session...