STAREAST 2025 - Test Leadership

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...

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...

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...

Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s so easy for agile teams to fall into the rut of testers only doing traditional testing activities and programmers strictly doing their time-worn coding activities. But there are actually many places testers can be influential and contribute value on cross-functional teams. Robert Sabourin will share several examples of how testing skills can be applied to a wide variety of activities in an agile project. For instance, testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Risk analysis in self-...

At some point in your career - especially at newer companies and start ups, there might come a time when you are hired onto a development team as the very FIRST QA hire! With such an exciting opportunity, there is so much at stake. Your performance will not only depend on your testing skills, but your ability to add value to the development process AND the product! In this presentation Stephanie will go over her own experience building a QA team, and some important milestones and challenges she hit along the journey. She will talk about how to evaluate the team you are being hired into,...

A big part of testing is ensuring that you're anticipating and proactively detecting problems before they appear. This means thinking beyond bugs and errors and considering tests that assess your system's ability to meet the needs of the business and customers. For example, most businesses and architectures are designed to deliver operational and cost efficiency. The challenge is, many organizations don't actively test/measure their efficiency. Customers also have expectations about their experience. What testing do you do to evaluate how the system is meeting its experience goals? This...

Have you ever had a QA tool fail to gain momentum? Ever had a splintered array of test automation frameworks that does the exact same thing across your quality engineering organization? Ever have a hard time getting leadership to sign off for tools that you know could easily boost testing productivity? If you answered yes to any of these, come join Albrecht in this crash course in building your quality engineering roadmap. In this session, Albrecht will go over how to build a product roadmap that aligns with your organization's goals and identify key milestones, to ensure your toolset is...

Have you ever felt like a pretzel while contorting a test case into a "Given-When-Then" scenario? The promise of BDD as a method for simplifying the communication and construction of a robust set of test cases has been somewhat successful in facilitating conversation but has impeded the take-up of more sophisticated analysis techniques, including depth of understanding, non-functional requirements, UI coverage reporting, and fundamental ease of adoption. In short a tool for communication not a tool for thinking! Application teams, especially those configuring or customizing SaaS or PaaS...

Less than two years ago, Anupama's team faced a legacy portfolio with under 12% automation, minimal test coverage focused only on-screen verifications, data validation limited to spot checking few records resulting in low release confidence. Join her as she shares the organization's transformative journey towards robust test coverage and reliable releases through continuous automation. This strategy addresses process, people, and technology including: evaluating applications from user perspective to identify key automation opportunities, mapping production data flows allowed them to create...

In an era where "doing more with less" has become a corporate mantra, executives are increasingly turning to Artificial Intelligence (AI) to boost efficiency and productivity. This shift places significant pressure on testing teams to rapidly adopt AI solutions without compromising quality. In this engaging presentation, a C-suite executive and a testing expert offer a unique "fly on the wall" perspective into the dynamic between leadership expectations and the realities faced by testers. The session will delve into the challenges testers encounter under executive mandates, explore...

The pressure to adopt new technologies like AI and automation without a strong foundation in core QA principles is fraught with risk.  Jumping into AI without understanding how to best leverage AI within QA for business success can cause quality issues. But lagging behind your competitors when it comes to utilizing AI can result in loss of market share. Join Igor Dorovskikh as he guides QA leaders on creating a balanced approach that integrates the use of AI capabilities within essential QA fundamentals. You'll learn how to define and implement these core principles, identify the pitfalls...