Event At a Glance

Event: Test Automation Summit Sydney 2026
Date: 22 May 2026
Time: 09:00 AM – 05:00 PM
Venue: Rydges World Square Sydney
Format: 1 Day | 1 Track | 10+ Speakers
Audience: QA leaders, automation specialists, test engineers, developers, consultants, engineering teams, and technology decision-makers
Core themes: AI in testing, agentic testing, LLM observability, scalable automation, human-centric design, continuous delivery, quality engineering, and the future of QA

The Sydney edition brought together conversations around how testing teams can move faster without losing control of quality. Across the agenda, the event explored AI agents, observability, automation at scale, human-centric testing, agentic workflows, and the changing role of QA in an AI-driven software world.

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There’s a version of a tech conference where AI feels like a big promise, but the real testing problems still feel untouched.

The Test Automation Summit in Sydney was not that conference.

On 22 May 2026, Sydney brought together QA leaders, automation engineers, software testers, engineering teams, consultants, and technology professionals to talk about what quality looks like when AI agents, observability, automation, and human-centric design are all becoming part of the same conversation.

The central question was simple:

How do we make testing faster, smarter, and more scalable — while still keeping quality visible, controlled, and human-led?

Across the day, the conversations focused on agentic testing, LLM observability, scalable automation, human-centric test design, continuous delivery, AI safety, and the evolving role of QA in modern software teams.

Who Were in the Room

The Sydney Summit brought together a strong mix of QA, quality engineering, software testing, software development, release management, technology leadership, business leadership, and academic professionals — making the room both deeply technical and strategically diverse.

Attendee roles included:

• QA, QC, and Quality Engineering Roles — QA Engineer, QA Lead, QA Manager, Principal QA Engineer, Senior QA Engineer, Quality Engineer, Senior Quality Engineer, Quality Lead, Quality Group Manager, Quality Assurance Specialist, Enterprise Finance Quality Assurance Specialist, Quality Assurance Analyst, Senior QA Analyst, QC Analyst, QC Automation Engineer
• Software Testing and Test Leadership Roles — Test Lead, Test Analyst, Senior Test Engineer, Program Test Manager, Tester
• Software Engineering and Development Roles — Software Engineer, Senior Software Engineer, Developer, Development Team Manager, Engineering Manager
• Release, Technology, and Practice Leadership Roles — Lead Release Manager, Technical Director, Practice Lead – Quality Engineering
• Business, Founder, Academic, and People Leadership Roles — Founder, Senior Vice President, Professor, People & Culture

This mix made the Sydney Summit especially valuable because it brought together hands-on testers, QA leaders, engineering teams, release owners, and business voices who all influence how quality is built, delivered, and trusted.

Companies Represented at the Summit

The Sydney summit saw participation from professionals across retail, digital platforms, risk and data solutions, education, healthcare, legal services, financial services, gaming, workforce technology, developer tools, and QA-related technology.

The strongest participation came from retail and consumer digital platforms, led by Woolworths Group and Gumtree Group. The summit also saw strong representation from risk, data, and legal services through LNRS and Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer, along with education and EdTech participation from Universities Admissions Centre, Flexischools, and Kyoto University. Healthcare and care technology were also represented through Sonic Healthcare and The Lookout Way.

Industry Breakdown

This mix gave the Sydney summit a strong cross-industry audience. It brought together companies where software quality directly affects customer experience, digital trust, operational reliability, compliance, payments, data accuracy, and release confidence.

Speakers That Shaped the Day

The Sydney summit brought together speakers from AI, observability, automation, quality engineering, enterprise testing, healthcare technology, insurance, consulting, entertainment, and testing platforms — giving the day a strong mix of technical depth, leadership perspective, and real-world QA experience.

Keynote Speaker

Joel Deutscher
Chief AI and Innovation Officer, Robotfood

Featured Speakers

Steven Wong
Senior Solutions Engineer, UiPath

Libin Lu
Software Test Analyst, Australian Medical Council

Nishat Ara Alam
Full Stack Developer, Australian Medical Council

Alejandro Sanchez-Giraldo
Head of Observability and Engineering Quality, DX1

Karunakar Haniyamballi Venkatesh
Senior Test Analyst, Rest

Tutorial Speaker

Manju Janarthanan
Lead Quality Engineer, Zurich Insurance

Fireside Speakers

Kate Graham
Head of Enterprise Testing, Endeavour Group

Kerry “KG” Butler
General Manager, Australia, TTC Global

Panel Discussion Speakers

Asma Sikandar Gulbaz
Director, Slalom

Mandy Khosla
QA & Testing Practice Manager, MinterEllison

Prakasha Reddy
Vice President – Testing Business Unit Head | Driving QA Excellence & Digital Transformation, Test Yantra Global

Paul Maxwell-Walters
Senior QA Engineer, Droneshield

Ross Piggott
Head of Quality Engineering, The Star Entertainment Group

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Key Themes Discussed 

1. Testing is moving into the agentic era

The Sydney summit made it clear that QA is moving beyond traditional automation and even beyond simple AI-assisted testing. Steven Wong’s session on Agentic Testing positioned the next phase of testing as one where AI agents can plan, learn, act, and reason across the testing lifecycle. The real insight for QA teams is that the future is not just about generating more tests faster. It is about building testing systems that can understand context, adapt to change, and support smarter quality decisions while still staying under human direction.

2. Traditional testing models are struggling to keep up

A recurring message across the Sydney decks was that modern delivery has outgrown many older testing models. Steven’s deck showed how testing has remained a bottleneck across waterfall, agile, and now AI-driven delivery environments. Sandeep Kumar’s deck added to this by showing what happens when teams either lack automation or rely on automation that cannot scale: delayed feedback, release bottlenecks, unreliable releases, and loss of confidence in the test suite. For readers, the takeaway is practical: testing has to evolve because software delivery has already evolved.

3. AI agents need Zero Trust, not blind trust

Alejandro Sanchez-Giraldo’s session brought one of the strongest governance themes of the summit. His deck showed that AI agents are already creating real risks in production, from unsafe responses to data exposure and failed escalation paths. The key idea was simple: QA teams should not assume AI agents will behave correctly. Every output needs validation, monitoring, and guardrails. This shifts QA from testing only whether a feature works to continuously checking whether an AI system can be trusted.

4. LLM observability is becoming part of QA

One of the most important insights from Sydney was that quality can no longer stop at pre-release testing. Alejandro’s deck connected LLM quality with observability, automated validators, semantic regression, test harnesses, CI/CD gates, kill switches, SLOs, incident playbooks, and real-time monitoring. For AI-driven systems, teams need to see what the system is doing, how it is responding, where it is failing, and when human intervention is needed. In that sense, observability is becoming a core QA capability, not just an operations concern.

5. Automation only creates value when it scales reliably

Sandeep Kumar’s session made a very grounded point: having automation is not enough. If the automation is slow, fragile, hard to maintain, or difficult to integrate into CI/CD, it can still create bottlenecks. His deck showed how non-scalable automation leads to delayed feedback, higher long-term costs, poor reliability, and teams losing confidence in their tests. The insight for QA teams is clear: automation should not be measured only by coverage. It should be measured by whether it helps teams release faster, with confidence.

6. Human-centric design improves automation outcomes

Libin Lu and Nishat Ara Alam’s session brought a strong people-and-process lens to the summit. Their deck showed that automation works better when it is designed around real workflows, stakeholder needs, visibility, and usability. One of the clearest messages from the session was that automation cannot fix a broken process. If teams automate around confusion, fragmented sources, or unclear ownership, they simply make the wrong process faster. Better automation starts with better design, better collaboration, and a clearer understanding of how people actually work.

7. QA is becoming more connected to the engineering ecosystem

The Sydney conversations showed that quality is no longer a separate checkpoint at the end of delivery. It now connects deeply with CI/CD, observability, DevOps, test infrastructure, production monitoring, and incident response. Steven’s deck connected agentic testing with the broader testing lifecycle, while Sandeep’s deck emphasized scalable infrastructure, shared quality ownership, and CI/CD integration. The bigger insight is that QA teams now need to think in systems, not just test cases.

8. Human-in-the-loop governance is becoming essential

Even though Sydney had strong themes around AI agents, automation, and observability, the sessions did not remove the human role from quality. Instead, they made it more important. Alejandro’s deck emphasized escalation paths, guardrails, and incident playbooks, while Steven’s agentic testing framework pointed toward adaptive autonomy supported by human judgement. For QA teams, the message is that AI can support and accelerate testing, but humans still need to define risk, review edge cases, and decide what is safe enough to release.

9. API, codeless, and intelligent automation are becoming part of the future stack

The Sydney agenda also showed that the future of test automation is becoming broader and more practical. Sessions on API Test Automation at Scale, AI-Powered, Codeless and Intelligent Test Automation, and Agentic Testing pointed to a testing future where teams reduce manual scripting effort, scale test coverage, and make automation more accessible across roles. This theme matters because QA teams are being asked to move faster, but with fewer bottlenecks and more reliable quality signals.

10. The future of QA is AI-powered, observable, and human-led

The overall message from Sydney was that QA is becoming more technical, more observable, and more closely connected to how software behaves in the real world. Whether the discussion was about agentic testing, LLM observability, scalable automation, human-centric design, API automation, or codeless testing, the same idea kept coming through: AI can make testing faster and more intelligent, but trust remains the real measure of quality. Future QA teams will need to automate at scale, observe continuously, design around humans, and still keep judgement at the center of every release.

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What Hit Home for Attendees

“The introduction, keynotes and panel discussion.”
— Prateek Bajaj, Quality Engineer, Woolworths Group

“I really enjoyed the presentations by Karunakar and Steven.”
— Peter Herring, Quality Group Manager, Sonic Healthcare

“As a first-time conference attendee, the vibe in the room was very easy and light and welcoming.”
— Rachel Densing, Development Team Manager, Orchard Marketing

“The topics are very much up to date. The talk about Agentic testing is the one I enjoyed the most.”
— Donna Reyes, Test Analyst, Herbert Smith Freehills

“All speakers were great, however Joel Deutscher’s presentation was most relevant to me.”
— CR

“The topics about AI were very interesting and insightful.”
— Moie Panga, Test Lead, Herbert Smith Freehills

“I enjoyed the variety of content it touched on all streams of quality and automation. I’m not sure if intentional, but there were a few common themes throughout each presentation so it was a great way to come away with some headline takeaways, and then have deeper dives. I really enjoyed the day. Thank you!”
— Aimee Cowie, Lead Release Manager, The Lookout Way

What Attendees Thought of the Event

Based on the Sydney feedback, attendees saw the summit as a timely, relevant, and valuable event for understanding how AI, automation, and quality engineering are shaping the future of software testing.

• They found the AI and QA themes highly relevant.
  Attendees appreciated that the summit focused on current conversations around AI in automation, agentic testing, quality engineering, and the evolving role of QA teams.
• They valued the practical direction of the sessions.
  The audience showed strong interest in real-world AI use cases, AI model usage, testing tools, and examples that connect directly to how teams are adopting AI in testing.
• They appreciated the technical depth.
  Sessions with demos, automation examples, and AI-driven testing discussions gave attendees a closer look at how modern QA practices are being applied in real delivery environments.
• They wanted more opportunities to engage.
  Feedback showed that attendees were keen to participate more through live Q&A, audience discussions, group activities, workshops, and interactive formats.
• They saw value in both hands-on and leadership-level conversations.
  Attendees were interested in practical demos as well as more strategic content for test leads, QA managers, and quality leaders around best practices, team upskilling, and quality transformation.
• They responded well to the direction of the summit.
  The feedback showed that Sydney’s focus on AI, automation, and quality was aligned with what the testing community wants to explore further.
• They left with clear interest in deeper practical learning.
  Attendees asked for more hands-on demos, more time for panel discussions, more real examples, and more audience-led conversations — showing strong engagement with the topics covered.