STAREAST 2025 - General Management

Are you tired of working on user stories that seem to be missing vital details for testing? Are you frustrated with being left out of vital design conversations? Or are you fed up with sizing estimates that never turn out to be true to reality? Then it’s time to stop guessing your way through product development and start planning it with better behavior discovery. In this tutorial, we will learn how three vital roles – business, development, testing – can collaborate on what features to build and test through the structured activities of story mapping and example mapping. We will practice...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Dive into the exhilarating world of Chaos Engineering, where chaos is not a threat, but a catalyst for resilience and innovation of product and security practices. This talk explores the transformative power of Chaos Engineering in navigating the unpredictable landscapes of software testing for product resiliency, which also directly impacts operational security. Organizations are often stuck on the “build it quickly and move on” mindset, leaving opportunities for competitors and security threats to set up their home base. Learn how leading organizations harness controlled chaos to uncover...

Maxine Thompson's team at Progressive had experienced several issues where individual contributors sometimes got released from projects due to reported lack of skills in certain areas such as communication, leadership engagement, collaboration, domain knowledge, as well as occasional technical gaps. The team realized a gap in the knowledge, confidence, leadership, communication, and technical skills demonstrated by some of their quality assurance analysts. The question was how to upskill their ICs to meet and overcome these challenges in the face of emerging and constantly changing...

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...