Speakers & sessions

Debugging the Past to Engineer the Future – A Quality Revolution

The pace of change in the software industry is relentless. New tools, methodologies, and technologies emerge every week, making it difficult to keep up. For testers and quality engineers, this rapid evolution can feel overwhelming. Just as we adapt to one change or technology, another appears in our feed. With AI, automation, cloud, low-code, no-code, AI agents, and more, it’s easy to feel like we’re in a constant race to stay relevant, or worse, like we’re falling behind.
But is everything we’re seeing truly new? While the landscape we work in continues to change, many of the challenges we face today, or will face in the future have parallels in the past. The core thinking, skills, and principles that have shaped software testing for decades remain critical: risk management, test design, oracles and modelling. Instead of discarding past lessons, skills, and experiences, what if we reshaped them to meet the demands of the future, and make the leap feel less daunting.
In this talk I’m going to share my own journey of getting to grips with the latest technologies, especially AI, and how my past testing skills made the transition easier than expected. For example, writing tasks for AI agents is remarkably similar to writing test cases, the same skills and techniques are at play. Quality engineers and testers are perfectly positioned to thrive with these changes, but we must take lessons from the past, reshape them, and lead a quality revolution to build better software.

Key takeaways:

• Identify key core skills and principles in software testing that remain relevant today.
• Describe how core testing concepts apply to modern technologies like AI and automation.
• Recognise similarities between traditional testing tasks and emerging AI-driven workflows.
• Explain how reflecting on your current testing skills can reduce the learning curve when working with new tools and methodologies.
• Assess your own testing skills and experiences to build confidence when adopting new technologies

The Future of Test Strategy: A Proven Method for Effective and Adaptive Approaches

"The Future of Test Strategy: A Proven Method for Effective and Adaptive Approaches"
As the demands on software testing grow more complex, the need for a robust, adaptable test strategy has never been greater. In this session, I’ll share my unique Q.A.R.E method—Quality, Analysis, Risk, Execute—for creating test strategies that don’t just work—they drive measurable results.
The talk will focus on four core principles:

• Quality: Ensuring the product meets high standards.
• Analysis: Deep understanding of what and how to test.
• Risk: Prioritizing based on impact and probability.
• Execution: Turning the plan into action.

WCAG testing

Software that is supposed to be available for the majority of the population is (often) developed by able-bodied, linguistically competent, young-ish groups of people. This leads to unknown biases sneaking into the shaping of said software, and can lead those biases to work against groups of people who might be dependent on the software we create. The Web Content Accessibility guidelines are meant to point out the most common overlooked issues in web development that hinders groups of people to interact with web solutions. In this talk, I demonstrate how to get started with the guidelines, what tools can be helpful to use, and what mindset to have when testing your software for usability issues.

 The Connective Tissue of Tech: Why Glue Work Deserves Your Attention

In the tech world, we celebrate breakthrough features and transformative code. Yet beneath these visible achievements lies a critical but often invisible foundation: glue work. This talk explores how testing, integration and cross-functional coordination serve as the connective tissue that holds our technical organisations together. Drawing from real-world examples and data, I'll examine why this work—typically undervalued and disproportionately shouldered by testers and other perceived non-technical professionals—is essential for sustained organisational success.

Key takeaways

• Why the most crucial work often goes unrecognised in performance reviews and promotion cycles

• How the invisibility of glue work creates both technical debt and organisational debt

• The true cost of neglecting integration, testing and cross-team coordination

• Practical strategies for making glue work visible and valued at all levels

• Creating career paths that recognise and reward this essential contribution

Automate. Serverless and event-driven approach to DevOps

In today’s fast-paced development environments, reducing manual tasks is crucial for productivity and developer experience. This talk will explore how a fintech market leader in Sweden, created a serverless and event-driven integration with Slack on AWS. Creating a solution, to automate tasks across a multi-account setup. Learn how this journey optimized cost, enhanced productivity and security by eliminating repetitive tasks, by minimizing human error. A key aspect was integrating alarms and notifications directly into Slack, enabling developers to take immediate action on system alerts. We will look at the problems, deep dive into implementation, and the challenges we faced. Join us to gain valuable insights and practical tips for transforming your workflows. Audience will learn how we integrated our DevOps way of working and tooling with Slack to automate tasks, boosting productivity, creating better developer experience and at the same time reducing cost.

Key takeaways

• How to automate task to increase developer experience

• How to create an serverless and event-driven solution across multiple AWS accounts

• Using automated scheduling to save cost

Where Quality Meets Delivery: Navigating the Overlap Between QA and Release Lead

At first glance, the roles of a QA Lead and a Release Lead might seem like distinct entities, one focused on ensuring the product works flawlessly and the other on getting it into users’ hands seamlessly. But when you wear both hats, the overlap between the two roles becomes a dynamic dance – one that’s equal parts challenging and rewarding.

Two Roles, One Goal

Both QA and Release Leads are united by a shared purpose: delivering a product that works as intended, on time. The QA Lead ensures every line of code is tested, every bug is squashed, and the product stands up to scrutiny. Meanwhile, the Release Lead takes the baton, orchestrating the final steps to ensure a flawless launch. The intersection? That delicate balance between perfecting quality and meeting deadlines.

I'll discuss The Overlap: Where Roles Blur and The Creative Edge of Overlap

Navigating these overlapping roles requires a shift in perspective – from seeing them as separate functions to embracing their symbiosis. Think of it as being both the architect and the conductor: designing the blueprint for quality while orchestrating the seamless delivery of the final masterpiece.

Key takeaways:
In this overlap lies the opportunity to shape a unique leadership approach. You’re not just ensuring quality or managing releases; you’re creating a unified pipeline where testing and deployment flow seamlessly together. By embracing this overlap, you become a bridge, transforming complex development cycles into smooth, predictable, and high-quality outcomes.

The Result? A product that reflects your dual vision – flawless in quality and delivered with precision.

Playwright component tests - a sane middle ground?

As new kinds of test automation tools emerge, the traditional classification of automated tests into unit, integration, and end-to-end tests is being challenged, blurring their boundaries. Playwright component tests (CT) provide a way to render UI elements using a real browser but within a limited scope: the tester doesn't have to render the entire UI but can instead choose to render only a
single component or a component within a constrained context. These tests can be particularly useful when full-blown end-to-end (e2e) tests would be overkill, but using a real browser remains a requirement—for example, when testing the rendering
of canvas elements.

In this demo, I showcase real-world applications of CT in different scenarios and compare them to testing with either a more complete UI or a mocked environment like JSDOM. I also address some pain points encountered when using CT in actual projects and discuss
whether the approach has been worth the effort. Some alternatives like using  Vitest's browser mode are also touched on.

Key takeaways:
Real-world applications of this testing approach, discusses implementation challenges, and considers whether the benefits outweigh the difficulties compared to alternative testing methods.

TestStorming - a collaborative, energetic and structured approach to Test design

Track and time: TBA

Session type: Workshop

Recommended: 

A basic understanding of different layers of testing such as unit, component, contract, API, e2e, etc. Also, please bring a laptop for hands-on exercises, although if you don’t have one you’ll still be able to participate by sharing.

About the session:

We talk a lot about ‘whole team approach to (agile) testing’ which sounds great but we don’t talk about how to actually do it. How do we make this change happen? What are the steps to take? How many people in the team can actually discuss testing? Design a test? In many teams while somebody may write unit tests and somebody may write an integration test and somebody executes exploratory testing the design of these are not carried out collaboratively. Duplication can occur, testing at the wrong layer and misunderstandings about what is actually tested (and how). With all this testing and mis-testing occurring it can be difficult to pull the team together and focus on powerful, targeted tests with test design input from everybody. In this interactive tutorial you will learn how to have your team brainstorm, challenge and develop test (design) ideas together and work out the most effective testing layer/level at which the test could be implemented. This method has been tried and tested and has been so successful it starts in one team and spreads across the organisation. We’ll do this through various exercises and examples and along the way we’ll share some techniques, war stories and possible bumps you may run into.

Key takeaways:

• Learn techniques and strategies for collaborating on test design - Our interactive tutorial teaches you how to involve everyone on your team in the test design process, resulting in more effective and powerful tests across different layers
• Say goodbye to duplication and misunderstandings leading to more efficient and accurate tests and better coverage.
• Elevate your team's test design skills and more importantly learn how to increase visibility of testing and drive the quality culture in the team

Why guts and vulnerability matter in team dynamics

Being vulnerable is not easy. It can be painful and uncomfortable however, after attending this presentation, I hope you will approach the daunting feeling of vulnerability with a fresh perspective. You will learn how to embrace vulnerable while feeling proud and valuing your courage and bravery, just like a superhero.

In this presentation you will discover what makes teams successful and how everyone can contribute to a team dynamic where all team members can thrive and be happy.

Key takeaways:

• Understand what psychological safety, trust and vulnerability is and isn’t.
• Hands-on examples of how you can build and contribute to a successful team.
• How to handle some of the most common challenges.

Failing with Grace – Learn from your mistakes

I will talk about failing. At conferences people usually talk about how to execute tests in the best way possible, how well a certain project went or how this or that went really well and what the success factors were. But what happens when things go wrong, and you feel all other than successful? I will talk about a project I got kicked out from and what lessons I learned from that experience. I will talk about the project on an overall level, what we accomplished within test, how the project changed over time, what I did, what I achieved and what I could have done better or differently.

Key takeaways:

• Where is the balance in terms of how hard you can push to get the conditions you need to succeed?

• Sometimes it might be more important to ”walk the talk” than to actually deliver something.

• How do you act professionally in a situation where someone tells you that they don’t want you to stay, since they are not satisfied with your work?