STAREAST 2025 - Test Transformation
Sunday, April 27
Fundamentals of AI—ICAgile Certification (ICP-FAI)
Monday, April 28
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,...
Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization
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...
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...
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...
Automation Framework Essentials
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...
Tuesday, April 29
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually, a few classes, some tools’ introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward fairly efficient execution. However, these teams are quite often simply going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from their experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen and Mary Thorn explore high-performance team patterns, which are the thinking models of mature agile teams, including large-scale emergent...
Holistic Performance Testing for Modern Applications
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...
Agile Test & Transformation Leadership in Action
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...
Quality and Testing Measures and Metrics
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 Mike Sowers as he...
Wednesday, April 30
AI/ML SDET: A Title Change or a New Role?
Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning Software Development Engineer in Test. What a title! But what does that person even do? Are they using AI/ML to test software? Are they testing AI or ML? This isn’t just a title change for a software tester, this is really a mind shift and tool change. What if you don’t even have a UI in which to test your product? What if you don’t ship a UI or even a product? The world of software is changing with advancements in AI/ML and it is time to make sure we level up our testing abilities to match the revolution. Join Kevin as he walks you through his...
Building a QA Team from the Ground Up
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,...
Revolutionizing API Quality Assurance with Contract Testing and Error Code Analysis
In today’s microservices-driven landscape, ensuring seamless communication between services is critical. Traditional testing methods often fall short when it comes to detecting integration issues early in the development cycle, leading to unexpected failures in production. Contract testing is emerging as a powerful solution to this challenge, providing a way to verify that services meet agreed-upon expectations without relying on full end-to-end testing. This session will delve into the fundamentals of contract testing and how it enhances API quality assurance by detecting inconsistencies...
Is Your Playbook for Generative AI in Test Automation on Point?
Generative AI allows us to create test automation scripts really fast, but how can we be sure the outcome is truly complete? In this talk, Julio will discuss the critical process of how to define your prompts and evaluate if the results from AI-driven test automation creation cover all the necessary bases. He will bring a playbook for GenAI in test automation created based on the results of research that collected advice and feedback from dozens of test automation engineers. In the session, Julio will discuss practical examples of the mindset, a set of steps to be followed when using...
How to Hire the Best Quality Engineers
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...
Expanding Your Testing Scope: Thinking Beyond System Health
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...
From Vision to Velocity: Accelerating Agile Testing with Generative AI
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...
Panel - Revolutionizing Test Automation: The Impact of Generative AI on Quality Engineering
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
Redefining Quality: Empowering Autonomous Teams for SaaS Excellence
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...
Treat Your Test Tools Like a Real Product
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...
Starting Small: Piloting Automated Testing Capabilities for an Unemployment Insurance Service
In a complex, regulated legacy environment with minimal test automation and tight deadlines, technical and non-technical challenges can make it difficult to accelerate the QA process. This session uses Mighty Acorn Digital's experience launching an automated testing program for the New Jersey Unemployment Insurance Modernization initiative as a case study on introducing automation to ensure safety across thousands of test scenarios spanning multiple different technologies. Introducing test automation in this environment presented several challenges. There was skepticism about the...
Is the Juice of BDD Testing Worth the Squeeze?
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...
Don’t Just Shift Left—Shimmy: Infusing Quality into the Entire SDLC
In today’s fast-paced software development environments, "shift left" has become a widely adopted practice, encouraging teams to focus on quality earlier in the development lifecycle. While this is a crucial step, it’s not enough to ensure that quality is truly embedded throughout every phase of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). In this session, Amanda will go beyond simply shifting left—exploring how teams can "shimmy," moving fluidly and consistently to infuse quality into every step of the process, from ideation to deployment and beyond. Attendees will learn practical...
Continuous Automation, It CAN Be Done!
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...
Uncertainty of Change
Uncertainty and change are inevitable in our complex world, but how we each respond to it can vary from ignoring it to denying it or even trying to stop it. In this talk, Jitesh will examine why we react to uncertainty so poorly by sharing some case studies and then, through the psychology of uncertainty, help explain our responses. He will then discuss how software development is inherently uncertain and how some team's testing approaches can worsen this uncertainty. He will explain how we can reframe testing to reduce uncertainty and help engineering teams work more effectively in...
Testing Under Pressure: Leveraging AI to Satisfy the C-Suite
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 Revolution Was Not Televised: Software QA in the Era of Streaming and Livestreaming Services
PreviewYou heard about it—Netflix's Love is Blind Live event fiasco last year, Pluto's VMA's blues in LATAM, and other subpar experiences for some streaming services, both live and on-demand. How is software QA involved in those? Or, how was it NOT involved? As content production and distribution companies consolidate and grow their streaming services and peripheral activities including: user personalization, loyalty, and engagement; tailored quality assurance and testing efforts become critical to ensure a fully immersive and optimal experience. In this session, Ramy will explore how to...
Stop Listening to the Industry
Making the transition from manual testing to full test automation is hard. Consultants, vendors, speakers and the internet all have their own recommendations about how to get started. The challenge is that sometimes those recommendations do not align to your business’s development strategy or security protocols. So who is right? Do you shirk your company’s best practices that have been developed over time in favor of what the industry says is the ideal configuration? Will the testing rules be the same tomorrow? Maybe it’s time to blaze your own testing trail. In this session, Ingrid Warden...
Reception and Summit Kickoff: As a Leader, What Is Keeping You Up at Night?
Kickoff the Testing & Quality Leadership Summit with a reception and some networking.
Friday, May 2
Summit Welcome - Opening Remarks
After enjoying the Summit breakfast starting at 8:00 AM, join your moderator Jeff Payne as we kick off the STAREAST Testing & Quality Leadership Summit for 2025.
Balancing AI Innovations with Fundamental QA Principles
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...
Summit Lean Coffee: Leadership Secrets from the Room
While everyone has their own approach to leadership, we all have our go-to tips and tricks that can help others lead teams, organizations, and ourselves. These may be techniques for motivating staff, growing team skills, managing senior executives, or finding the right people for your organization.
During this collaborative lean coffee session, Jeffery Payne will facilitate a discussion to elicit and discuss those leadership secrets used effectively by Summit participants. Using a lean coffee meeting format, participants will choose which aspects of leadership to discuss, vote on...
Think Tank Discussion Parts I, II, III, and Wrap-Up
Think Tank Discussion Part I: Problem Definitions | 11:15 AM
Join with your peers in an engaging and highly interactive session to discuss the issues that affect you most. Using answers to the question “As a Leader, What is Keeping You Up at Night?” posed at Thursday’s evening reception, participants will form small groups to work on finding solutions to pressing leadership & management issues. Discussions will review identified issues, barriers to change, and focus on innovative strategies and practical next steps. At the end of the think tank, all feedback will be collected and...