STAREAST 2025 - Experienced Tester

Sunday, April 27

Tom-Stiehm
Coveros

Fundamentals of AI—ICAgile Certification (ICP-FAI)

Sunday, April 27, 2025 - 8:30am to Monday, April 28, 2025 - 5:00pm

Monday, April 28

Leandro Melendez
Grafana k6
MA

Ramping Up Modern Performance

Monday, April 28, 2025 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Modern software is developed in a continuous manner, with several backend services frequently being deployed and scaled in the cloud. Furthermore, as organizations move toward agile, DevOps, and continuous delivery, it is vital for them to move away from traditional approaches to evaluate performance. Are you interested in ramping up or polishing your skills on performance testing? Leandro Melendez will introduce attendees to modern, agile, and continuous performance testing. You’ll learn performance assurance principles and everything from fundamental performance concepts like correlation...

Tariq King
Test IO
MB

Testing from the Inside: Unit Testing Edition

Monday, April 28, 2025 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Do you want to take your testing and/or development skills to the next level? Are you working in an agile team where you are trying to shift-left so that your organization can reap the full benefits of testing earlier? In software testing, you're generally taught to think outside the box, from a user's perspective. However, sometimes great ideas can be sparked from inside the box, by looking at the underlying code and using that knowledge to identify various ways to break the software. Join Tariq King as he walks through the fundamentals of program-based testing so that you can find bugs...

Adam_Auerbach
EPAM Systems
ME

Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization

Monday, April 28, 2025 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

The DevOps movement is here. Companies across many industries are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, IT organizations have been staffed with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding to stay relevant and add greater value to the business. DevOps really...

Melissa Benua
mParticle
MF

Test Smarter, Not Harder: How to Design Test Suites for Continuous Delivery

Monday, April 28, 2025 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
MK

Badass Agile Coaching Skills for Everyone

Monday, April 28, 2025 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Some perspectives imply that Agile Coaching is for a small set of specialized agilists who serve to improve everyone else or that it’s a unique role that others, including managers and leaders, shouldn’t do or will find difficult to master. This talk intends to debunk those notions by illustrating the power and impact of Agile Coaching skills for everyone. In this workshop, Bob Galen will explore the nuance associated with Agile Coaching to demystify it. He’ll share and explore the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel as a competency model for agile coaching. We’ll do a deep dive into the critical...

Tuesday, April 29

TF

Holistic Performance Testing for Modern Applications

Tuesday, April 29, 2025 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Wednesday, April 30

Isabel Evans
Independent Consultant
K1

Heuristics to Help You Design, Build, and Choose Test Tools

Wednesday, April 30, 2025 - 8:30am to 9:45am

How well do we design and acquire our tools? Drawing on compelling evidence gathered from a series of interviews, workshops, surveys, and case studies with industry gurus and hands-on practitioners, we’re diving deep into a set of heuristics. Each one is a gateway to discovery, backed by explanations and enriched with engaging exploratory activities based on solid research. As an attendee, you will gain access to resources that can help enable critical thinking and reflection about tools and the problems they solve. We will see how sometimes heuristics can pinpoint when a tool might...

W8

How to Hire the Best Quality Engineers

Wednesday, April 30, 2025 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Endless candidates, loops ending in no-hires, missing data to make an informed decision...hiring is hard. Plus, the cost of mis-hiring (and bringing on someone who isn't a good fit) is very high. But there is a better way. The first step is determining exactly what are the requirements that your candidate must have (hint: it's not a specific programming language or experience using a tool). Knowing what questions to ask which assess the core skills for the position is essential. Join George as he talks about how to find and hire the best Quality Engineers starting at resume reviews to...

Philip Daye
Insider Intelligence
W13

From Vision to Velocity: Accelerating Agile Testing with Generative AI

Wednesday, April 30, 2025 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

In the rapidly evolving landscape of Agile and DevOps, traditional methods of testing business-facing features often struggle to keep pace with the demands for faster and more thorough testing. However, the fusion of traditional testing wisdom with cutting-edge AI presents a unique opportunity to enhance software quality and delivery speed, offering innovative solutions to longstanding challenges. Join Phillip as he examines key test design techniques - such as equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, decision table testing, and state transition testing - and explores how...

Lisette Zounon
Zsquare Solutions Inc.
W18

Enabling a DevOps Culture with Embedded Systems

Wednesday, April 30, 2025 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

In today's technology-driven landscape, where software and hardware intertwine seamlessly in embedded systems, adopting a DevOps culture becomes imperative. This talk delves into the dynamic world of embedded systems and explores how organizations can successfully implement and nurture a DevOps culture within this unique domain. DevOps, with its emphasis on collaboration, automation, and continuous improvement, has revolutionized software development. However, adapting these principles to the realm of embedded systems presents distinct challenges and opportunities. The discussion will...

Adam_Auerbach
EPAM Systems
K3

Panel - Revolutionizing Test Automation: The Impact of Generative AI on Quality Engineering

Wednesday, April 30, 2025 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

As Generative AI rapidly reshapes how we work, its impact on quality engineering and more specifically test automation is profound. Join our panel of AI and testing experts as they dive into how Gen AI is transforming testing practices, from creating smarter automation frameworks to redefining manual testing roles. Explore cutting-edge tools, discuss the challenges of integrating AI into test strategies, and debate the ethical implications of AI-driven quality engineering. This thought-provoking session will be driven by your questions and thus provide actionable insights, inspire...

Thursday, May 1

K4

Redefining Quality: Empowering Autonomous Teams for SaaS Excellence

Thursday, May 1, 2025 - 8:30am to 9:30am

Traditional roles within software development teams are being redefined in today’s fast-paced world of cloud platforms and Software as a Service (SaaS). The rise of DevOps has blurred the boundaries between development and operations, emphasizing speed, agility, and continuous delivery. Amid this transformation, the debate about whether to have a separate QA team is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Instead, the focus should shift to building autonomous, cross-functional teams equipped with the skills and ownership required to deliver high-quality SaaS products efficiently. Ronit...

Andrew Knight
Cycle Labs
T12

Scaling Automated Tests to Infinity and Beyond

Thursday, May 1, 2025 - 11:15am to 12:15pm

Testing is a risk-mitigating activity that takes time. Ideally, we want to cover as many behaviors as possible in the shortest amount of time for fast feedback. The only way to speed up is to scale up. But how? This talk outlines a playbook for the five most impactful ways to scale up tests. From improving infrastructure to arranging tests more efficiently down to refining the performance of particular steps, you will learn tried-and-true techniques for running more tests in less time. With this playbook, you could scale up to hundreds of tests running concurrently without crashing. Join...

Janna_Loeffler
mParticle
T18

Leadership in Software Quality: Insights and Strategies from Industry Experts

Thursday, May 1, 2025 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Are you navigating the challenges of leadership in the ever-evolving software quality industry? Join this dynamic panel discussion featuring seasoned leaders who will share their expertise, experiences, and actionable advice. This session is designed for professionals at all levels, from aspiring leaders to seasoned managers, seeking to enhance their leadership capabilities. The panelists bring diverse perspectives on fostering innovation, maintaining quality in fast-paced environments, building high-performing teams, and leading through change. Attendees will gain practical insights into...