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Keynote
Be a better test friend
Speakers: Martijn Goossens
Overview: We like this craft. Testing, quality assurance, whatever you might call it. But if we focus only on our craft in our jobs, we might end up being the only person on the team concerned about testing and quality. And while many other talks at this conference might give you something to learn, the learning doesn’t have to stop here.
During his QA career, Martijn has grown the most by learning from his non-QA peers. He learned about usability from a UX friend and performance testing from friends in the application management team. Teaching him valuable skills that made him a better tester. This talk is about breaking silos and how this can help you in your testing role. Martijn will talk about improving your testing craft with the help of friends in other parts of your company.
We will discuss likely candidates in every organization and Martijn will give you tips on forming these alliances. Learning from other fields is a good way to upskill yourself. This also opens the door for them to ask QA questions to you, where you can leave behind part of your passion for testing and quality. Making YOU a better test friend and your team better at testing.
Bio: Martijn has over 19 years of experience in the QA field. He started as an Agile QA automation engineer and has fulfilled various QA leadership roles for the past 8 years. Martijn is ISTQB and TMAP certified and is a frequent participant in QA meetups and conferences. In recent years he found the international conference stages where he is keen to share his experiences from the trenches. Follow his journey on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martijngoossens or on his website https://www.goossens.io
Test Planning & Automation Track
Unlocking Excellence in Test Management Strategies for a Agile Frameworks
Speakers: Clara Ramos Gonzalez
Overview: Join my session to discover the art of developing comprehensive Test Plans tailored to the company, project, and sprint levels. Learn why continuously evolving your test plan is crucial as projects progress and requirements shift. We’ll explore the synergy of deploying two complementary test strategies: the Shift-left testing as your primary approach, integrated seamlessly with a Risk-based approach as a vital secondary strategy. This session promises to equip you with actionable insights to enhance your testing framework and drive quality throughout your projects..
Bio: With OVER 14 years in the QA industry, Clara is a Senior QA Manager who specializes in leading teams through THEIR digital transformation. She delivers impactful workshops for IT leaders and teams, fostering growth, engagement, and a culture of quality. As a regular speaker at international tech conferences, Clara proudly represents some of the industry’s strongest brands.
Outside of tech, she is also a certified yoga teacher and dedicated meditator, integrating a holistic mindset into her leadership style and promoting conscious, human-centered innovation.
Testing Cloud Applications Without Breaking the Bank
Speakers: Fernando Teixeira
Overview: How do you test an application that relies heavily on cloud services? Do you have a specific strategy for testing it, or do you simply run your tests regardless of the infrastructure costs?
Testing cloud applications doesn’t have to break the bank—or your sanity. With tools like Testcontainers and LocalStack (free and open-source tools), you can create robust and realistic tests that mimic production cloud services, all without costly infrastructure or complex setups.
In this talk, we’ll explore how Testcontainers and LocalStack offer an affordable and scalable solution to cloud application testing without compromising on quality. This session will demonstrate how to use Testcontainers in combination with LocalStack to spin up containerized services to mimic all the AWS cloud services that your application depends on, enabling you to have your own cloud running locally on your machine or CI/CD. Together, those 2 tools can provide an efficient, cost-saving alternative to traditional cloud testing strategies.
Here is the agenda that I plan for this talk:
- State of cloud applications nowadays
- What are the challenges when testing cloud applications?
- Which options do we have to avoid some of those costs?
- Introduction to Localstack and Testcontainers
- Localstack and TestContainers in action (showing examples of how to use them)
- Conclusion
By the end of this session, you will have actionable insights on how to optimize your testing process, lower your infrastructure costs, and ensure your cloud applications are ready for production without complex setups.
Bio: I am a Lead QA Engineer with over 8 years of experience developing test automation solutions and test strategies for different projects. I specialized in backend, microservices testing and DevOps throughout my career, focusing on designing, implementing, and optimizing testing strategies for different kinds of software architecture.
You can find links to my articles and personal projects on my website: https://teixeira-fernando.github.io/
Decoding Synthetic Monitoring: A Journey from E2E UI Tests to Service-Level Probes
Speakers: João Proença
Overview: “Those damn, flaky E2E UI tests are failing again!”
I was hearing this more than I cared to admit.
Our team relied heavily on these tests to monitor critical flows in production, but the pain was undeniable. Flakiness and slowness plagued us at every turn, leading to unreliable results and, worse, on-call alerts that woke people up in the middle of the night. It was clear we needed a better alternative—something that could reliably simulate user interactions without the instability and headaches of E2E UI tests. And so, I set out on a mission to find that solution.
Pretty quickly, I discovered that what we were attempting had a name: Synthetic Monitoring – a proactive approach that simulates real user actions to assess system health. Surprisingly, information was scarce; most resources were focused on showcasing specific tools rather than offering practical, actionable insights. This gap in guidance pushed me to dive deeper, determined to understand how synthetic monitoring could (and should) be applied to meet our needs.
In this talk, I’ll share what I learned about synthetic monitoring. Our journey took us from unreliable UI-based tests to a framework that uses API client tools (like Bruno or Postman) to simulate service-level interactions. By leveraging tools teams were already familiar with, we set up probes that perform synthetic monitoring at the right level. This transition not only improved reliability but also enhanced system observability. I’ll explain the multi-target exporter pattern and how it helped us build a scalable, resilient monitoring setup that ensures more accurate service checks, even for complex workflows. Join me to learn how we transformed our monitoring approach, and maybe you’ll walk away with key ideas for building your own synthetic monitoring strategy.
Bio: João Proença comes from Lisbon, Portugal, and is a Quality Engineer at Ada Health. He has assumed various roles throughout his career in the past 17 years, including quality assurance, development, customer support and marketing. Finding innovative solutions for difficult problems is what drives him the most, so he is always eager to talk about how professionals are overcoming testing challenges around the world. Outside of IT, João is passionate about songwriting, movies and football.
Modern Software Quality Using Agile Quadrants
Speakers: Josh Grant
Overview: What does “modern” mean to you? In the art world, modern art can mean taking an approach that’s new (like focusing on abstraction) and different (like focusing on surrealism). In software quality, modern could mean thinking about software in new and different ways. For example, if we look to the Agile Quadrants, an approach based on the work of Ron Jeffies and Lisa Crispin, we might be able to use their approach to see new ways of looking at software quality. Think of one of your favourite pieces of software to use: what exactly makes it great?
In this highly visual talk, we’ll look at what modern means for software and for art, with overlapping examples. In particular, we’ll look at software quality through the agile quadrants and how they can be applied to software development approaches.
Watching this talk, participants will learn:
– What modern means, along with ways to think about what makes something “modern”
– What the agile quadrants are and how they are a modern approach to software quality
– How to use the quadrants to consider different aspects of software quality
– A little bit of modern art history
Bio: Hello! I am a test automation professional with nearly 15 years experience. I’ve worked at all levels of the test automation pyramid, as well on engineering teams and customer-facing teams. My preferred language is Python. I currently reside in beautiful Toronto, Ontario.
An Ethical Decision Model for Software Testing
Speakers: W. Jim Jordan
Overview: Bad software has done harm to peoples’ well-being. In hindsight we can see that some of this is, in part, a product of inadequate testing. This extends beyond the relatively obvious inadequate security awareness leading to data leakage. I’m thinking particularly of poorly-designed UIs leading to overdoses of radiation therapy, and bad data handling leading to travellers wrongfully being ordered to quarantine during COVID restrictions.
If we know software failures can violate a person’s right to security of the person or a person’s right to a reasonable expectation of privacy, it seems that test professionals need to take those rights into account when establishing testing priorities. I’ll present a method of identifying most of the effects of testing choices on other affected parties, and the questions to ask about what’s reasonable to do with the resources at hand. Then you can defend the choices you made about what to test and how, and help your organization not appear at the top of a news website for reputation-killing reasons.
Bio: Jim is a software test developer and day-one employee at SkillsWave Corporation in Kitchener, Ontario. He worked as a software developer for Bell-Northern Research (eventually Nortel Networks) developing various low-level data management systems and gaining a US patent before jumping out of telecom into academic work. Jim got his first email address in 1981 during the age of bang paths. He earned his BMath in computer science from the University of Waterloo a few decades ago, and his PhD in philosophy (human rights in the cyber realm) from there in 2021. He has taught at Algonquin College, the University of Waterloo, and St. Jerome’s University, and co-authored a business ethics textbook for Oxford University Press before re-entering the tech world. He is #AuDHD, and has spoken to students and colleagues about removing the stigma around mental health concerns. Together with his wife Shelly he is the keeper of hundreds of books, a calico cat with a room-filling purr, a bunch of largely obsolete but still occasionally useful cables, and several moderately vitality-impaired houseplants.
AI Track
Quality in AI and Quality with AI: A Panel
Speakers: Rob Bowyer, Tina Fletcher and Martijn Goossens
Overview: Join our facilitated panel where our panelists discuss Quality in and with AI.
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Guarding the LLM Galaxy: Security, Privacy, and Guardrails in the AI Era
Speakers: Jigyasa Grover & Rishabh Misra
Overview: The widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Claude, and Gemini has introduced unprecedented capabilities and equally unprecedented risks. Organizations are increasingly deploying LLMs to handle sensitive tasks, from processing medical records to analyzing financial documents. This talk examines the evolving landscape of LLM security and privacy, combining theoretical foundations with a walkthrough of example implementations. Through real-world case studies of both attacks and defenses and practical implementation guidance using popular security tools, we’ll explore critical vulnerabilities and proven defensive techniques. Special attention will be given to securing fine-tuned and domain-specific LLMs, with live examples using NVIDIA’s NeMo Guardrails, LangChain’s security tools, and more.
Bio: (Jigyasa) 12-time award winner in Artificial Intelligence and Open Source and the co-author of the book ‘Sculpting Data For ML’, Jigyasa Grover is a powerhouse brimming with passion for making a dent in this world of technology. AI & Research Lead, she has many years of ML engineering & Data Science experience in deploying large‐scale low-latency systems for user personalization and monetization on popular social networking apps like Twitter and Facebook, and e‐commerce at Faire, with a recent focus on Generative AI. As a part of the Google Developer Advisory Board (gDAB) and one of the few ML Google Developer Experts, she collaborates with experts and contributes to shaping the future of Google’s developer ecosystem. As a World Economic Forum’s Global Shaper, she ensures the leverage of her technical skills and connections for solution-building, policy-making, and lasting change.
(Rishabh) Author of the book “Sculpting Data for ML”, I am a Staff ML Engineer & Researcher recognized by the US Government for outstanding contribution to ML research. I have extensively published and reviewed research at top AI conferences in NLP (LLMs / GenAI), Deep Learning, and Applied ML domains, such as ICML, KDD, ACL, TheWebConf, and RecSys, amassing over 800 citations. I specialize in designing low-latency, large-scale Deep Learning models and my work has received wide media coverage, notably by TechCrunch, Times of India, The Sun, Hindustan Times, Gizmodo, NBC, and Slash Film. My research work is also being used in Deeplearning.ai’s “Natural Language Processing in TensorFlow” course, used as training material for Google’s TensorFlow professional certification program, and used in an NSF-funded project, Narrative Modeling with StoryQ, to teach the concept of text classification models to high school students. The Data Science community has utilized my research artifacts hundreds of thousands of times to learn and apply ML concepts on leading platforms like Kaggle. Professionally, I am an ML Tech Lead of a foundational team driving 0 to 1 AI‑powered personalization efforts for Conversational Commerce (marketing relevant products through text/email) at a late-stage startup and have previously led AI-powered user personalization at Twitter and Amazon. You can visit him online at rishabhmisra.github.io.
AI-assisted 3DDs – A New Way Test-First Approach
Speakers: Kulas Angeles
Overview: This talk discusses reviving the 3DDs (ATDD, TDD, BDD) test-first approach using AI tools like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot Chat. These technologies helped overcome previous challenges of speed and efficiency. The talk covers the implementation process, challenges faced at various levels, and success stories including demo. By leveraging AI assistance, the team was able to address both speed and quality concerns simultaneously. The talk also highlights how AI tools augment rather than replace human expertise, creating a balanced approach that combines the efficiency of AI with human insight and decision-making in the software development process.
The presentation aims to inspire other software quality professionals to become change agents in their organizations by adopting AI-assisted test-first methodologies.
After this talk, you will learn about:
- Our success story so you can have confidence starting it out in your own companies
- How we implemented the AI-assisted 3DDs
- Our challenges, from upper management to the teams that are implementing it so that you can learn from them and avoid it in your implementation
Bio: Mark Nicholas Angeles, or Kulas, is based in Okotoks, Alberta, Canada and currently a Director, Software Quality Engineering with Sun Life Financial.
Kulas is a seasoned Engineering leader with more than 17 years of experience in IT mostly in quality engineering and DevOps.
He worked with different companies mainly in the financial and insurance industries, such as the Development Bank of Singapore, Chubb Insurance, Manulife Financial, and RBC as a quality engineering leaderfocusing mostly on transformation work and quality advocacy through culture, technology and process shifts.
Kulas holds a Master of Technology Management and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science degree from the University of the Philippines.
Kulas is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) and a member of the International Coaching Federation (ICF) focusing mainly on Life and Transition coaching for individuals, teams, and groups.
Outside work, Kulas is a husband and a father to his 3 beautiful children. He also plays the drums, has a love for obstacle course racing, and a Jesus follower.
Taming the AI Beast: Testing the Unpredictable with Confidence
Speakers: Lee Barnes
Overview: For years, we’ve built our testing strategies around the comforting assumption that system outputs are predictable and deterministic. Enter AI-based systems – where the rules change, and suddenly, we’re wrestling with non-deterministic outputs that look reliable but can shift in ways we don’t expect. So how do we ensure quality when the system itself refuses to play by the old rules? In this session, we’ll break down the deceptive nature of AI-generated responses, exposing the hidden pitfalls of testing AI-driven features. You’ll gain practical techniques for verifying AI’s unpredictable behavior, and leave with a strategic roadmap for testing AI-based systems effectively. Whether you’re a tester, developer, or quality engineer, this talk will equip you with the tools to stop AI from outsmarting your test cases and ensure your systems remain trustworthy.
Bio: Lee has over 30 years of experience in the Software Quality Assurance and Testing field. He has been involved in the implementation of quality processes – with a focus on test automation and performance testing solutions – in hundreds of environments across a wide array of industries. Most recently, Lee has been involved the practical integration of AI technologies to augment quality engineering practices. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences including STAREAST, STARWEST, Agile+DevOps East, Agile+DevOps West, QA or the Highway, Targeting Quality, DevOpsDays, and TestCon Europe
No, AI won’t replace you!
Speakers: Maciej Konkolowicz
Overview: Will AI steal your testing job? While the headlines might scream disruption, the reality is more nuanced. This session empowers Quality Champions to navigate the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence in software testing and leverage its true potential. Maciek, a Senior DevOps Manager at Functionize, an agentic test automation company, will share a practical framework to help you identify the right AI tools to enhance, not replace, your expertise. Discover answers to crucial questions: What types of AI are truly valuable for testing? How can your teams effectively integrate AI? And do you need to be a machine learning expert to benefit? By the end of this session, you’ll be able to critically evaluate AI offerings, separating genuine value from marketing buzz. Learn how to make informed decisions that will demonstrably speed up your testing, improve quality, and solidify your role as a vital contributor – all without relying on generic AI recommendations.
Bio: Maciek is a Senior DevOps manager. He works at Functionize, an agentic AI driven test automation platform. He’s spent more than 10 years focused on driving quality in software and increasing delivery of quality at speed. Maciek lives and breathes SRE and quality by continuously learning about best practices and then spreading them across our industry.
When he’s not thinking about quality, Maciek is busy finding expensive ways to improve the velocity of his sailboat, or searching the great outdoors for encounters with wildlife…while hiding the costs of his adventures from his wife.
Maciek shares his ideas and expertise at conferences and meetups across the Midwest and on his blog at https://www.mkonk.com and Twitter @MKonkolowicz.
Quality Track
Test Documentation: Why so Technical?
Speakers: Ana Duarte
Overview: As a technical documentation manager, I navigate the perennial challenge of making software documentation truly accessible. Documenting software products is always a challenge. In fact, writing any kind of instructions that will be helpful to others, is a major challenge. Because we are not them, we lack their exact experience. So context and meaning can be missing. Testing documentation often misses this mark, drowning users in technicalities without explaining the “why” behind the “how”. Testing documentation can, and should, be both technical and relatable. This talk is about breaking down the walls of abstraction, making documentation not just useful but also relatable, and easier to understand.
And what better way to try to make things easier to understand than using examples? We’ve all done it, and we’ve seen others doing it with us since we were kids. Testing documentation is often missing concrete examples, daily usage scenarios, and real-life stories. This isn’t about adding another fancy section; it’s about giving more soul to documentation. We’ll share experiences and methods that strip away the unnecessary jargon, leaving users with a clear understanding of not just how things work but why it matters to them. It’s not just about where you should click to start a testing session, but why you should use that button at all. It’s not just about saying we have a tool for exploratory testing that allows us to write a charter, but about explaining how you should write a charter, and why it’s important and helpful for you and for your team members to write it.
From exploring testing sessions to crafting charters, we’ll delve into real-life stories, daily usage scenarios, and concrete examples. Attendees can expect practical insights on transforming documentation into a user-friendly, relatable resource. The future of testing documentation lies in being technical yet relatable, and we’re here to show you how: by adding concrete examples, relatable scenarios, and an extra focus on the why.
Bio: I’m Ana Duarte, a writer, reader, and constant learner with a background in Communications and a strong drive for all things tech. I hold a BSc and a Master’s degree from Universidade da Beira Interior and Universidade do Porto, and I’ve honed my skills further with an Executive degree in Entrepreneurship, Management, and Innovation from Católica Lisbon School of Business and Economics.
My journey started in journalism, with internships at renowned publications like O Jogo and Público, where I delved into the world of quality journalism, the subject of my master’s thesis. Over time, my career has taken turns, from Communications Manager roles to Solutions Analyst positions.
Currently, I’m a Technical Documentation Manager at Xray by Xblend.
My versatility extends to different domains, from technology to sports, from cinema to literature and philosophy, among others. With a wide-ranging skill set, I’m driven by my passion for writing, media, innovation, and the intricate world of tech.
Be a User First, Then a QA Engineer
Speakers: Blay Samuel
Overview: When software fails, it is not just code that breaks; it is users. Picture a nurse frantically battling a crashing app during a code blue or a single parent locked out by a defective login flow at midnight while juggling bills. When QA prioritizes checklists over compassion, we ship software that works but fails the users it is built for.
This presentation is a rebellion against sterile testing. We will abandon the pass or fail mindset and adopt the complex emotional realities of our users. We will do this by:
- Uncovering hidden pain points, gains, vision and what our users hear using empathy maps (no UX degree required!)
- Reframing defects as human issues. (e.g., “This error isn’t a bug; it is a teacher losing hours of unpaid work.”)
- Becoming the most ardent supporter of users in boardrooms, sprint meetings, and defect triage.
Participants will depart with:
- A 3-step empathy framework to embed user stories into QA workflows.
- Real-world examples of empathy-driven testing that saved reputations.
- Useful scripts to change stakeholders’ perspectives from “Does it work?” to “Does it care
While AI is growing, our greatest strength is empathy. QA is a guardian of trust, not merely a gatekeeper of quality. Come along with me as we turn testing from a technical task into a movement that unites compassion and code.
Bio: An SQA Lead on a mission to prove that exceptional software isn’t just functional; it’s human. With nearly a decade of experience, Blay’s unconventional journey from front-end developer to product manager, scrum master, and product designer has forged a singular philosophy: quality is born from empathy.
Today, he manages QA strategy for a multinational healthcare and risk management leader with operations across North America, Europe, South Africa, and Asia-Pacific where he champions empathy-driven testing to safeguard millions of users.
In addition to leading QA efforts, Blay mentors teams to ask, Who are we building for, and what happens if this fails?
A little less testing, a little more quality
Speakers: João Proença
Overview: I’ve done testing in various forms throughout my career. Automated, exploratory, scripted, you name it! Over the years though, I’ve been through situations where even with all the testing in the world we couldn’t quite avoid serious quality problems with the software we were releasing. Have you ever been in such a situation as well? Or is it something you haven’t considered before?
If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that software testing is an integral part of our pursuit for quality but is often not enough. I have several personal stories to tell! Like the time I realised that we needed shorter release cycles for faster feedback loops. Ultimately, that required a change in the architecture of the product.
There was also the time we changed our release strategy to progressively roll out new features to customers, so that we could increase our confidence on the software we were shipping. Or even the time I had to redirect my attention to the way developers were working and behaving, rather than just looking at how testing was being done.
With all of them, I learned how quality is a byproduct of various disciplines and not just necessarily of extensive testing. And in retrospect, this made me think of myself as more than an expert in testing, but as a quality engineer.
In this talk, I’ll go deeper into this topic and share some of those stories. I will tell you how I reason about quality risks and how to choose between doing some form of testing or something completely different. Rest assured though, this talk is not in any way against testing. It’s about how testing should be done at the right places and at the right time, and how sometimes what your team needs isn’t testing at all!
Bio: João Proença comes from Lisbon, Portugal, and is a Quality Engineer at Ada Health. He has assumed various roles throughout his career in the past 17 years, including quality assurance, development, customer support and marketing. Finding innovative solutions for difficult problems is what drives him the most, so he is always eager to talk about how professionals are overcoming testing challenges around the world. Outside of IT, João is passionate about songwriting, movies and football.
Become an Assertive Quality Advocate: Manage strong personalities while promoting Quality and Testing throughout the SDLC.
Speakers: Steven Ronson
Overview: Being a Quality Advocate, while building a Quality Culture, requires more than skills and knowledge. We need the tools to stand up to strong personalities who can put quality at risk. Many QA and Testing professionals avoid confrontation. But standing up for quality and mitigating risks is part of the job. Let’s discuss how to be an effective and persuasive Quality Advocate, even if that means going out of your comfort zone occasionally. Personalities such as project managers, tech leaders, and other stakeholders have their own priorities which may impact quality. By being calm, assertive, and respectful, we can keep quality objectives on track.
Bio: For over 30 years, Steve has worked in Software QA and Testing as a Tester, Automation Developer, and QA Lead, with experience in the Insurance, Automotive, Retail Software, and Heavy Equipment areas. Steve has several certifications through ISTQB and QAI, with a special interest in Agile Scrum. In addition to test design and implementing data-driven automated tests, he enjoys the outdoors and canoeing.
Lean Coffee
Facilitator: Erik Davis
Overview: Join in a Lean Coffee style meeting, discussing all things in the world of software and software testing! Lean Coffee is a structured discussion technique where participants propose and then vote on topics to cover. There is no agenda defined in advance. This is a great way to connect and interact with your fellow software quality enthusiasts!.