| 9.20 Keynote, Auditorium A Tester's Search for Value Phil Royston After a bit of a journeyman IT career starting in the late 1980s, I fell into the software testing world in 2002 and haven't looked back since. I've worked as a developer, team leader, tester, test manager, consultant, and eventually co-founded Tesena | Smart Testing with the slightly ambitious - but very seriously intended - goal of changing the software testing world. I have a soft spot for personal and professional challenges. I am drawn towards IT projects where good people have ambitious goals to deliver great business value. I enjoy helping them solve their testing and quality challenges by bringing a more human and pragmatic perspective. Over the years I've learned that teams rarely need miracles. They need clarity, context, trust, consistency and a few sensible ideas. A Tester's Search for Value During a coffee break at EuroSTAR 2023, I asked another attendee about software testing in her organisation. She answered, "We don't have software testers." "Aha, so I guess quality is terrible, right?" "No," she answered. "Quality is really good. So good that the developers decided that they didn't need the software testers anymore." To understand why this hit me so hard, you need to know that after initially working as a developer for many years, I accidentally became a test manager in 2001. In the next 20+ years testing became my career, my business, and part of my identity. So, I was genuinely shocked to hear that a team could create quality software without dedicated testers. I stood there with my coffee, thinking, "So it's over: my profession, my business, my ability to make my mortgage payments." Later, the conversation helped me surface some deeply buried personal doubts. Before I crossed the line into software testing I had myself worked for many years in software development. Working usually in small, compact teams we had delivered software solutions to complex business problems. Those teams did not have a dedicated tester function, and yet the quality of what we delivered was generally good. My own personal experience supported that what I'd heard in this conversation was not some sort of fantasy. I started to ask myself a fundamental question. If it was possible to deliver valuable software without lots of "formal" testing by testing experts, then what value do we bring to the team and process? Then came an even scarier thought. Do we actually make things better or worse, overall? For a long time, to keep up with my mortgage payments, I quietly ignored these doubts. But my life experience has taught me that you need to challenge your beliefs, your mental models. You need to be open to the possibility that you could be wrong about something. This is quite an uncomfortable thing to do. In this talk, I want to do what testers do best. Test the hypothesis. |  |
| 10.15 - 10.30 COFFEE BREAK | |
| 10.30 Auditorium From specs to codeless test automation Lassi Niemistö, Wapice Lassi Niemistö leads a technology unit specializing in test automation, DevOps, and cybersecurity services at Wapice. With a background in real-time embedded systems development, he has built his career around solving complex testability challenges through unconventional and forward-thinking approaches. Passionate about the transformative potential of AI in software engineering, Lassi explores how emerging technologies are reshaping testing and development practices — ideas once considered too time-consuming or impractical may now become reality. Known for his energetic stage presence, creative mindset, and widely followed short-form video content, Lassi is ready to inspire his audience with new ideas and interesting arguments. |  |
| 10.30 Track 2 Case study Apotti: Versiopäivityksen regressiotestauksen kehittäminen (FIN) Katja Rajaniemi, Apotti Petra Palovaara, Apotti Katja is an experienced software testing professional with over two decades of experience in ensuring the quality of various systems. Her career began in telecommunications, where she built a strong technical foundation for evaluating and assuring system functionality and reliability. In her current role, she works in testing patient and customer information systems, where quality and accuracy are critical factors. Petra specializes in improving ways of working, developing processes, and leading projects that deliver results. With a background in nursing, her passion for improvement has led her first to developing patient and customer information systems and then to improving how developers and teams operate. She currently works as Head of Maintenance Services, ensuring that services in her area run smoothly and continue to improve. |   |
| 10.30 Track 3 The Self-Testing Pipeline: AI Agents for End-to-End Test Automation Sonal Yadav, Kone Sunny Bharne, OP Financial Group Sonal Yadav is an Automation Test Engineer at KONE with more than ten years of experience across manual and automated testing, particularly in financial-services environments. She has hands-on experience with Robot Framework, Selenium, API testing, Jira, and CI/CD practices, and is expanding her engineering expertise across Azure and cloud architecture. Her current interests include AI-assisted quality engineering, reliable test automation, and practical human oversight for autonomous testing workflows. Sunny Bharne is a Senior Azure Developer at OP Financial Group with a decade of software-development and platform-engineering experience. He specialises in Azure platform infrastructure as code using Bicep and Terraform, Azure landing zones, policy and subscription provisioning, Azure DevOps pipelines, and platform test automation. He is passionate about cloud automation, developer tooling, and practical AI-assisted engineering. |   |
| 11.15 Auditorium Names Matter! The Holy Trinity: QA, QE & Testing Bryan Jones, 2i Limited (Scotland) Bryan has been in testing for over 39 years, working in most of the industry sectors and having done every job in testing from machine code reviews to being the Director of Quality Engineering & Testing for a top 5 European Digital Transformation company. He is now a Senior QAT Architect for 2i, a quality and testing consultancy. He regularly presents at conferences and IT community events. He is on the committee of BCS Edinburgh, the Scottish Testing Group and he hosts the Quality Blether podcast. In Summary, he is a career testing professional with a lifetime obsession with testing and quality, not to mention an insatiable curiosity and learning addiction. When not talking about quality, Bryan is a certified Psychotherapist and Hypnotherapist. He has also done impromptu street hypnosis. He used to play bass in several bands, including an Irish Folk band and a Trash Metal band. Bryan takes part in off-road motorcycle rallies on his 1200cc BMW that weighs 250kg – not a practical rally bike! He also used to train and ride horses (a lot!), but his horse is now retired. |  |
| 11.15 Track 2 Rethinking Environment Issues – A practical model beyond “it’s an environment problem” (FIN) Ulla-Mari Schroderus, LähiTapiola I am a Quality and Service Leader with over 15 years of experience in financial services in Finland, Nordics and EMEA environments. I have led multi-disciplinary QA teams, owned enterprise-level test environments and data capabilities, driven quality transformation in large-scale programs, built QA learning communities, grown QA teams and capabilities. My work focuses on elevating Quality from operation control to strategic business enablement. I have a strong people first mindset. I am particularly interested in how leadership, language and human factors shape quality and long-term performance. I believe that sustainable quality outcomes are built on ownership, transparency and psychologically safe environments. On top of these we are able to build an environment where we have fun too. In my history I have worked as a tester, analyst, test manager, release manager, agile coach, service manager, team lead, project manager, owner of testing services. These multiple roles have helped me to understand quality from different perspectives. |  |
| 11.15 Track 3 Here's what working on the Olympics taught me about B2B QA Marin Ivanov, Enetpulse (Bulgaria) With 12+ years of working with sports data and 5+ years in software testing, Marin is well-versed in handling problems in an industry where literally "every second counts". Having established a skilled QA team at his company, dedicated to testing sports solutions in a dynamic environment, Marin wants to share some of that experience while learning new things in the process. Outside of work, he enjoys traveling, volunteering, and challenging his problem-solving skills with language puzzles and escape rooms. |  |
| 12.00 - 13.00 LUNCH BREAK | |
| 13.00 Auditorium Utilizing CI/CD pipeline with VS Code, github to create a testing syllabus Kari Kakkonen, Gofore Rik Marselis, Sogeti Mr. Kari Kakkonen is the Service Owner of Customer Expertise Development at Gofore, co-author of ACT 2 LEAD Software Testing Leadership Handbook, and author of the Dragons Out books. Kari is the 2025 ICT Influencer of the Year, 2021 EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award winner, Tester of the Year in Finland Award 2021 winner, and DASA Exemplary DevOps Instructor Award 2023 winner. Rik Marselis is principal quality consultant at Sogeti in the Netherlands. He is a highly regarded presenter, trainer, author, consultant and coach who supported many organizations and people in improving their quality engineering & testing practice by providing useful tools & checklists, practical support and having in-depth discussions. |   |
| 13.00 Track 2 Working through uncertainty: collaborative learning of AI Aryadevi Neelakantabhattathiri Maaret Pyhäjärvi, CGI Arya is a software tester. She started her career in 2017 in IT and 2020 in testing. She relocated to Finland 2012 in FinTech. While in between jobs, she has been actively learning new areas of testing like AI in testing, with particular curiosity towards vibe coding. Maaret Pyhäjärvi is Director of Testing Services at CGI Finland. Regardless of fancy titles, she is just a tester, if anyone ever is just anything. To support her testing, she is a polyglot programmer, conference designer and community facilitator. She has delivered 700 talks and trainings in 28 countries on the side of her hands-on job in changing testing from within, and made it to top-100 ICT list in Finland for six consecutive years, as well as been awarded by two major testing communities: Agile Testing Days Most Influential Testing Professional and EuroSTAR Testing Excellence Award. |   |
| 13.00 Track 3 Quality Culture - 404 : Not Automated Ramya Sriram, Konecranes Ramya Sriram is a Quality Assurance Manager at Konecranes Global Oy with 15+ years of experience driving quality transformation, agile delivery, and continuous improvement. Lean Six Sigma Black Belt, ISO 9001 Lead Auditor, SAFe Program Consultant, and Agile Coach, known for combining quality excellence with a “fail fast, learn faster” mindset. Chairperson of Indian Women in Finland Ry (IWF Ry) and published author of the Cowstein series, passionate about empowering people, building communities, and shaping the future of Quality in the age of AI. |  |
| 13.45 Auditorium Requirements and Validation in the Age of AI Martin Karsberg, Test Scouts Sweden AB (Sweden) Martin is an experienced tester and test manager who frequently shares his expertise as a speaker at national and international conferences. Passionate about human collaboration during organizational and process improvements, he thrives in leadership and knowledge-sharing roles. Curiosity and enthusiasm define his unpretentious work style and personality. Martin actively engages in forums on testing, requirements, and software development practices. Outside of work, he enjoys spending time with family and friends, preferably accompanied by great music |  |
| 13.45 Track 2 LLMs for Software Testing in Research Literature Mika Mäntylä, The University of Helsinki Mika Mäntylä is a Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He earned his D.Sc. degree in Software Engineering from Aalto University in 2009. His research interests span software testing, maintenance, and operations. He also works on secondary studies, including systematic literature reviews, as well as the automation of these methods. In the early 2000s, he worked at Netseal Technologies, which was recognized as one of Europe’s most promising startups. He has also served as an Assistant Professor at Aalto University and as a Postdoctoral Researcher at Lund University, Sweden. He is an Associate Editor for IEEE Software and Empirical Software Engineering. More information is available at https://mmantyla.github.io. |  |
| 13.45 Track 3 Beyond Logs: Elevating Test Analysis with Data Visualization Aleksi Simell, Eficode Aleksi is a Senior DevOps consultant Eficode, specializing in test automation and CI/CD. Ever since he was introduced to test automation in 2015, he has actively participated in various test automation-related open source projects, especially ones related to Robot Framework. He helps organizations adopt better test automation and CI/CD practices and is constantly looking for opportunities to broaden the use cases of test automation. He is also the creator of the DuckOps comics, which introduces DevOps practices in a world without computers. |  |
| 14.30 - 15.00 COFFEE BREAK | |
| 15.00 Auditorium Panel on Quality Engineering - where is testing going? Panelists - Bryan Jones, 2i Limited (Scotland) - Phil Royston, Tesena (Czechia) - Rik Marselis, Sogeti (Netherlands) - Ramy Sriram, Konecranes - Ulla-Mari Schroderus, LähiTapiola Panel hosted by Kari Kakkonen, Gofore | |
| 15.00 Track 2 Näkymättömästä vaikuttavaksi (FIN) Jamina Pöllänen Jamina Pöllänen is a Finnish QA and test automation professional known for her hands-on approach to quality, active knowledge sharing and strong voice in the testing community. She has built her career through curiosity, persistence, mentoring and practical automation work, while helping make testing and quality more visible both within teams and beyond them. In 2026, she received the Tester of the Year 2025 recognition in Finland. Her interests include test automation, quality culture and professional growth in QA. |  |
| 15.00 Track 3 Who Tests the Machines That Build the Machines? Jonas Hermansson, IT-HUSET (Sweden) AI is everywhere, but real business impact is not. Many organizations are stuck in “pilot purgatory” or chasing hype without a clear direction, and that’s where Jonas Hermansson helps leaders turn noise into practical, scalable, and trusted AI strategies. His approach is grounded in 30 years of experience, starting in Quality Engineering, leading transformations, and scaling organizations. He believes that if you can’t trust the output, you can’t scale the impact. Jonas bridges the gap between visionary AI strategy and disciplined execution. He supports organizations with strategic advisory, governance frameworks for trust, and capability building to make AI a core competence. As a keynote speaker, he translates complex AI shifts into actionable insights. With a background as CEO, transformation lead, and engineer, he connects boardroom priorities with technical reality. |  |
| 15.40 - 15.50 COFFEE BREAK | |
| 15.50 Keynote, Auditorium Winning Team - A Fighter Pilot's Perspective Heikki Mansikka Heikki “Hessu” Mansikka is a former Finnish Air Force F/A-18 fighter pilot (Lieutenant Colonel, ret.) who holds a PhD from Coventry University, UK. He is currently an Adjunct Professor at the National Defence University, Finland. For the past ten years, Heikki has worked full-time in the field of human and team performance, publishing his research in numerous international scientific journals. He is also the author of two books: Hornet Pilot (Hornet-lentäjä, WSOY) and Winning Team (Voittava joukkue, WSOY). Drawing on his unique combination of operational military experience and scientific research, Heikki delivers engaging keynote presentation on decision-making, human performance, leadership, and teamwork under pressure. |  |
