STARWEST 2026 - Half-day Tutorials

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...

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...

People 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...

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...

In many teams, the total number of possible combinations of inputs, outputs, browsers, and devices for the software we need to test has grown to an alarming number. As testers, we need to choose the most important tests first, but how do we do that without understanding the potential scope in the first place? In this tutorial, Julie Gardiner will share two powerful testing techniques that can help us be more efficient and effective with our testing. Classification trees are a structured, visual approach to identifying test objects and documenting test ideas and data in a way that allows...

Agents! Finally, a term that might be even more over-hyped than AI! But what exactly are Agents, and more importantly, how do you use them? Where do Agents fit within the overall AI toolkit? What capabilities do they add, and what tasks can they help us perform? Jeremiah will help you gain a solid understanding of Agents and the fundamental components of an Agent-based AI system. You’ll learn key design principles for Agents, as well as when to leverage them and scenarios where they may not be the best choice. He'll cover how to identify business problems that are well-suited for Agents,...

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...

AI 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...

New 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...

With the advent of frameworks like Angular, React, and Vue, the landscape of application performance has changed significantly in terms of testing and measurement. Gone are the days of measuring response time as a single value based on back-end performance. In modern web and mobile applications, additional layers need to be peeled apart at the front end to truly understand its performance characteristics. Traditional approaches to performance testing are no longer sufficient to provide a delightfully responsive user experience. Join Kaushal Dalvi as he details new developments in the...

Leading and driving change in our companies, organizations, and teams can be as difficult as pushing a wet rope uphill! Even with the best processes and tools, we may not achieve our business and customer satisfaction goals when our environment is stuck in the status quo. Ultimately, transforming an organization is about changing culture. Our values, beliefs, goals, assumptions, purpose, priorities, and other factors influence culture. Test managers and leaders are critical players in driving cultural change. Mike Sowers will explore the key attributes of being a Test Transformation Leader...

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...