STAREAST 2025 in Orlando
- Péter Földházi Jr.
- May 6
- 3 min read
Finally, the conference season has started. And what a vibe!
This was my 5th STAREAST, and I only stayed for the tutorial days, but I still had lots of fun, met with my fellow speaker friends, and delivered 2 tutorials.
After delivering a full keynote session last year, it was nice to just focus on my workshops. As usual, I brought the consulting one called Become Your Company's Quality Consultant. The focus in this one is around:
How to become a QA Consultant
QA career paths and how to help your testers grow
Typical challenges in software quality processes, and how to address those
QA assessments, how to assertively communicate findings and recommendations
The session itself is a consulting one, where the slideware drives the conversation in one direction, and the attendees can ask their related questions at anytime. I like to let them have a conversation as well, it's not only me who is answering questions. Essentially, when there are 20 people in the room with an average 10 years of experience in QA, that sums up to 200 years of knowledge!
A more practical oriented session, and back to my roots of test automation, I taught my students on Test Automation Architecture design principles, patterns and concepts. Then together we put it into code and implemented a base Java Test Automation Framework.
The idea is to have something in hand when you wish to start working on a new project, or if you wish to improve your current solution, enabling scalability or improving maintainability.
I like to revisit my tutorials every 6-12 months and make changes according to feedback I receive or new approaches that I learn myself. I believe that it's a key element in making sure that what I teach is still relevant and is per the expectation of my attendees.
Now back to the fun part!
We had a dinner at an Irish restaurant in Disney Springs with my colleagues, Adam Auerbach, Tariq King and Srinivas Labhani. Essentially, a mini EPAM QA leadership summit. :-) Adam is our VP of Testing, Tariq is Head of TestIO, while Srini is Head of QA in India, and myself have recently started leading Game Testing Consulting. We were missing Dmitriy Gumeniuk, who is the Head of Testing Products, and arrived only a day later.
First of all, the food was amazing, especially compared to the selection we have here in the St. Louis area. Second, there were live Irish dance performances! I just love Irish dancing, and I used to do it as well for a couple of years, so I really appreciated the vibe.
And talk about vibe... vibe coding! Yes, the the focus of the conference is still on GenAI and how it is impacting our industry. Compared to 2024, I see that many more people have started investing time into learning about AI, GenAI, LLMs, prompt engineering and how to apply these learnings at their job. This is not just a hype anymore, people are actually putting into practice what they learn from us at these conferences, and I hear stories how they are having an edge over those who completely refuse to adopt AI.
So yeah, hype or not, GenAI is here to stay, and I don't need to be a Nostradamus to tell, that we're going to have a ton of related content at these conference, with better and better quality.
And what's next? I'll keep posting general testing and GenAI in testing entries in my blog, so subscribe or keep your eyes on my LinkedIn announcements. :-)
Cheers / Sláinte!
