CAST 2025 in Salt Lake City

This year's conference season continues late summer in the beautiful Salt Lake City of Utah.

This is my second time visiting this place, and my first time attending the CAST conference.

I've been told that the CAST is different from the other testing events. So I was eager to find out what that differentiators were.

For me, the following stood out:

• People are actively participating in sessions, and asking interesting questions, or bring up counter arguments to your statements. This resulted in really interesting and fruitful conversations.

• People were excited to hear relevant experiences about GenAI adoptions, failure and success stories alike.

• The end-of-the-day activities were fun!

• Everybody was able to make meaningful connections, that I'm sure will last! I already have 3 new buddies who promised me to ping me when they are in town for a bbq or a beer. :-)

  
  

For this year, I brought the following sessions:

• Advocate for Quality Within Your Company (50 min talk)

• Learn how to Implement a Test Automation Framework in Java (half day workshop)

My QA focused talk sparked some interesting 1on1 conversations for the next 2 days, I liked hearing how it resonated to some of my fellow testers, and how they've been trying to advocate for quality within their companies.

The workshop was a super cool experience for me, as it was a smaller group of people that attended, and I was able to customize the content on the fly, based on what they really wanted to learn. I spent more time on explaining GenAI in testing, the different levels of GenAI adoption, what are AI Agents and the Agentic Workflow, and lastly what is the MCP and how it brings it all to a new level. Also spent more time on test automation architecture, and how those different concepts look in practice, i.e. actual code.

There were several interesting talks that I attended, and the one I'd like to highlight was Olivia Gambelin's keynote on Responsible Quality Testing in the Age of AI.

Most of us have an engineering background, and hence an engineering approach to GenAI adoption. The focus is on technical solutions. But the primary key in a successful adoption is the human aspect. How do you understand what people need, and how can you provide the right adoption program that will make them interested in it, and picking it up. Really insightful, I liked this different point of view.

Talking about view. Let me switch from the testing topic, to the additional aspects of this event. The mountain views are just crazy! I'd love to travel to the West a little more often. We just don't have this view in Missouri somehow. :D

The evening activities were fun. We went to a Bavarian brewery for the Speakers' dinner before the opening day. There were several cool old timer scooters. And they had two Hungarian dishes! One of them was a chicken paprikash (csirke paprikás), the other one was a beef gulash (marha gulyás), which actually more of a pörkölt. Yeah, a Hungarian tester nitpicking about everything, right? :D

I did enjoy the food and the beer, so no complaints! :-)

After the second conference day, we went to the Eight Settlers Distillery. I must say, it was a pleasant surprise. I tried three cocktails from American whiskey, bourbon and gin, and all three of those were nice. The food was good quality, which again feels good after all the low quality food you can find in Missourian restaurants. And yes, we had lots of fun, great topics about testing and outside our profession.

Overall, this conference was absolutely worth attending, so the only question that remains: where's the location for CAST 2026? :-)