When stepping into a QA Lead or Head of QA role, it is often unclear how to act — and many people end up choosing one of two extremes. Either they continue working as before: micromanagement, hands-on work as used to do, to be the solver for everyone, or they delegate everything to the team and step back completely. In both cases, this eventually leads to chaos.

Based on my own experience of going through these extremes, I came to a systemic approach as a way of managing people and teams.

The topic of artificial intelligence is no longer just a media buzzword, but it has firmly established itself in the minds of top management. Today, companies are taking different paths: some adopt a wait-and-see approach, while others implement AI in radical ways — even to the extent of setting hiring requirements such as “if you don’t use AI, we won’t hire you”. There are also softer approaches, such as introducing AI through competitions and incentive systems.

But how should organisations deal with those who resist?

In this talk, we will explore real-world examples of effective AI adoption, with tangible outcomes, case studies, and practical methods. We will also look ahead and consider how AI is set to transform teamwork and business processes in the future.

Testing is not just about endless bug reports and polished Jira dashboards. It is about value — how a product generates revenue, how users make decisions, and why even 100% test coverage won’t always prevent failure.

QA professionals often get stuck in a familiar cycle of tasks: test plans, regression testing, automation, and metrics. But if you want to grow in your career, it’s time to look beyond the technical scope.

In this talk, we’ll explore why understanding business makes a tester stronger, how the approach to quality shifts at different company stages—from fast-moving startups to well-structured corporations. We’ll discuss which metrics truly matter to business, why speed can sometimes be more important than stability, and how QA can go beyond finding bugs to helping the company succeed financially.

This talk is for those who want to stop being just executors and start seeing the real impact of their work.

QA metrics might seem like a straightforward topic, but they remain relevant year after year, sparking new questions and discussions.

Over time, approaches, tools, and the understanding and importance of metrics evolve.

In this talk, I will share various approaches to building metrics, discuss the challenges you might face, and offer guidance on where to start, even if you're the only tester in the team and lack experience.

As a bonus, I'll provide useful tips for creating user-friendly and informative dashboards.

Tech Support weekdays:

— “Hello, my internet is down, can you send someone to fix it?”

— “Please go to your router and check if the lights are flashing.”

— “No, they're not flashing, there's no electricity in the house.”

The same way, QA can get in a ridiculous, and even sad situation for the product if it always trusts development.

And if there is no trust at all — how will this complicate the tester's life, and how many pitfalls will we miss?

And how to trust each other when they don't believe each other? (that's why code-review was invented)

Join the X5 Tech roundtable during the final hour of the 1st day of the conference, and you'll have the chance to participate in an epic debate.

The agenda includes:

• Unlimited mutual trust — beneficial or harmful?
• How is development responsible for quality?
• How does development see testing?
• Should QA conduct code-review?
• Can a developer think like a tester?
• To be friends or not to be friends?
• Is a QA and Dev interaction protocol necessary?

Working in a company, one way or another, the specifics of the job are narrowed down. Processes, technologies, products. And to avoid stagnation and continue developing, it's essential to reach out: conferences, education, articles, and a new environment. It's also important to keep track of what's happening in the world. Study, be inspired, and create something new.

  

Let's talk about the QA career path outside QA. How to move from testing to neighbouring areas of IT and not only IT. Let's consider the development models and why the T-shape is no longer fashionable. 

How QA knowledge and skills help in other roles, and vice versa, what knowledge and skills in other areas can we already use in our current QA work. 

I will show the ways – through practice and real cases, not the theory of transitions.

In this talk, the author will cover the topic of a QA Lead role: 

• Using the example of his own experience will be demonstrated how and when the role appears.
• How it fits into the company's structure.
• What is the area of responsibility of the QA Lead?
• What are the expectations of other team members?
• How to become the QA Lead and what skills are needed.
• What is the QA Lead like ("task shifter"/small head, etc.)?
  

In the talk, we will consider the QA Lead's role.

I will use my experience as an example to break down what types of QA Leads are encountered.

I will show what other team members expect from the QA Lead's role.

I will give an example of our structure, the QA lead's role and area of responsibility.

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Let's talk about the specifics of a distributed team, from "classic" hiring problems to process adaptation. I have been interacting with a distributed team for more than 5 years. There is not a single tester in the office!

Let's talk about the features of a distributed team, from the "classic" hiring problems to the adaptation of processes.

I have been interacting with a distributed team for more than 5 years, there are no testers in the office!

Muda is one of the Japanese words that means waste, waste, that is, any activity that consumes resources but does not create value.

If you look at the work of QA, then very quickly there are things that are the very Muda, for example:

• losses of time due to waiting;
• losses due to unnecessary actions;
• losses due to erroneous actions;
• losses due to unnecessary stages.

Instead of effective work, it turns out that people are just waiting for something or setting up their hands for a very long time.

This is especially noticeable when new employees work.

We try to automate all things where:

• the human factor is possible (mistakes, inattention, inexperience);
• all that is not pleasant and not interesting to do;
• everything that takes too much time in manual mode.

In the talk, I will tell you what things we have automated, why and how. The talk is not about test automation, it’s about work automation.

The HR process is critical in the selection of people, especially when it is necessary to recruit a lot and efficiently. I'll tell you how we started recruiting and how the process was transformed at the moment when it was required to hire 3-4 people per month, and the resources for this were 1 HR and 1 QA head.

CI / CD is a process that must be fast and stable. But, what to do if UI tests take 10 hours in one thread, and to this still add stress tests, unit, API and others. In my report, I will share the history of the transformation of UI tests, how we learned to run them in 5 minutes and keep stability.

I'll tell about testing metrics, how to collect them in one place, to see where we're fliying daily and how good is our testing. I will cut out our problems of collecting and viewing of separate reports for each service. Let's consider the tool for creation of a dashbord. 

• How to speed up testing without losing quality 
• Remote control commands 
• How to improve the transparency of testing for development and to help them to give better quality tasks
• Effective use Jira and TestRail - bunch and automation