STAREAST 2025 - Agile Team Member

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

Tricia Broderick
Ignite Insight + Innovation
MI

Facilitating Team Decisions

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

One of the agile manifesto principles is “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.” Tricia Broderick wishes this principle was written to say, motivated teams. Because leaders giving the environment and support for individuals to make team decisions is anything but trivial. Achieving effective decisions goes beyond bringing people together for consensus. This approach may lead to groupthink or repeating decision meetings. Instead, leaders facilitate collaboration by building and tapping into the co-...

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

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.Com, Inc.
TE

Exploratory Testing in the Heat of the Sprint

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

Agile teams are burdened with the challenge of delivering working product increments after short iterations of development. Getting software from an ambiguous terse, incomplete requirement–to a done, working, solid, valuable, high-quality code requires testers to continuously adapt to change in a turbulent context and deliver actionable results. Chris Blain will illustrate how charter-driven session-based exploratory testing techniques can empower agile teams and help them learn quickly and adapt based on what really matters. Testers can design and execute tests on the fly as they explore...

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...

VISA USA, INC
W4

SQL Server Indexing Strategies Using Query Store for Improved Performance in Retrieving Data

Wednesday, April 30, 2025 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

In the realm of database management, optimizing query performance is crucial, especially for SQL Server environments dealing with large datasets. The challenge lies in identifying and implementing effective indexing strategies that can significantly enhance data retrieval performance. During her talk, Navya will address the common issues of slow query performance and inefficient indexing, often exacerbated by the complexity of modern data systems and the dynamic nature of query patterns. To tackle this problem, she leveraged SQL Server's Query Store feature, which provides a powerful tool...

Dan Reiley
SiriusXM
W6

Exploratory Testing Superpowers: Unleashing Your Inner Batman

Wednesday, April 30, 2025 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

In this talk, Dan Reiley will touch on a common issue in software testing: scripted tests often miss hidden problems, especially when dealing with fast-changing software. Following rigid checklists limits the ability to uncover deeper bugs. To address this, QA teams the world over turn to exploratory testing, which involves learning, designing, and executing tests at the same time. Drawing from his experience at Sirius XM and with the SiriusXM app, Dan applied three important skills: observation, deduction, and documentation & adaptability. Through careful observation, he discovered...

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...

T4

Enhancing Automation Testing with Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and the Screenplay Pattern

Thursday, May 1, 2025 - 9:45am to 10:45am

In Esri's quest to improve automation testing, they faced a significant challenge: integrating Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) into the existing framework without discarding established tools. The goal was to maintain a shared business language while simplifying the testing process. To tackle this, Junuen's team adopted the screenplay pattern and rebuilt their XCUITest framework from the ground up. This innovative structure focused on tasks, interactions, and abilities, all elements of the screenplay pattern, enabling them to prioritize what truly mattered in their tests: the end-user...

Amanda Ellison
Kimedics
T8

Don’t Just Shift Left—Shimmy: Infusing Quality into the Entire SDLC

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

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...

T15

Uncertainty of Change

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

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...