CAST 2026 Recap

The Association for Software Testing (AST) hosted its annual conference, CAST, in Cocoa Beach, Florida last week. I went as an invited speaker, presenting a session about how to give effective feedback while building marshmallow towers. I'll come back to that later, but first, the conference overall was great! And Cocoa Beach is a lovely location for it, with the venue literally steps from the east-facing beach. Morning and evening beach walks were basically mandatory.

One overarching theme I gathered from CAST was that hope is not lost, but we do have work to do to make sure we remain relevant in the shifting landscape. The skills that we have carefully built over the last many years still matter, some are even coming back into fashion (formal methods, anyone?), but their applications may look different. The other big theme I heard was that communication skills remain critical to our field. The need to define terms and to have a shared understanding are as important as ever, especially because of the rise of artificial intelligence.

Arrival, and the night before

The night before CAST started, we were already gathering in small groups to catch up with old friends, make new acquaintances, and get hyped up for the conference ahead. I was excited to tell people about my new role, as some of them have known me since my first steps into testing, and some people who were there had seen my very first conference appearance, also at CAST, a workshop with my partner about mobile and chatbot testing in 2018. It was lovely to catch up over drinks and good conversation, and I was so excited to start.

Day 1: Workshops

The first day held workshops, and I attended one by Katja Obring in the morning and Elisabeth Hendrickson in the afternoon. Katja presented an AI-related workshop about creating an LLM wiki that would be readable by both AI and a human. We spent a lot of time figuring out good structures for it, and the different tables came up with quite different ideas.

Elisabeth's workshop was a deep dive into systems thinking and how a well-placed lever pull can fix a thorny problem. I came away understanding that no one has all the power, no one has all the solutions, and separating the signal from the noise is the first big step towards figuring out what the problem is and how to potentially solve it. We got to play with a simulation Elisabeth had built about software development teams, and that was a fun challenge as well. The workshop was based on the book she has coming out with Joel Tosi in September, Signals and Levers.

Day 1 evening: The dice game

At dinner that night, each table had some game options on it, and I taught the dice game to some lovely new friends. The dice game is a classic in the context-driven testing community, and it's a bit of a rite of passage to learn the game at CAST. The idea is that you roll some dice and try to figure out the algorithm. That's it! The person teaching the game knows the algorithm, the uninitiated is learning it. You can continue on with new algorithms after the first one has been discerned, but it can take a bit for the first round.

Day 2: Opening keynote

The next morning, Dr. Jen Fry gave a rousing opening keynote about conflict in the workplace and how to embrace it. Two lines stuck out to me so much that I had to write them down:

Anxiety overestimates the moment and underestimates the ability to deal with it.

Undiscussed expectations are premeditated resentments.

She talked about the importance of boundaries, understanding yourself, and speaking up. She wrapped this in terms of bug advocacy, but the content was so much broader than the wrapper.

Day 2: Talks

Completely enamored with Elisabeth, I went to her talk about what "context" means. She has developed a new framework for how to think about it and talk about it, so that we can really get to the root of a problem. It's all systems thinking all the time, isn't it?

Jenna Charlton gave two talks, stepping in on the fly for their first one, which was a talk about the user experience and why it matters. They used the "think, feel, say, do" UX framework to frame their whole talk about their glucose monitor and its unreliability. It was a personal, deep talk about how we treat people on the worst day of their lives, and I appreciated so much that they have this talk. Their second talk was about bringing quantitative measures into the inherently qualitative nature of exploratory testing. Jenna used autoethnography and the disciplines surrounding that research to encourage us to be better exploratory testers. And I learned about the benefit from charter session debriefs, something I haven't, well, ever done.

I also attended a talk by Matt Simons about how the UI we're working with for AI-created applications will vastly change over the next year. UI will no longer really be a thing that is a reliable testing object (has it ever been, though?), and his thesis is that the testing will move much more to the API layer. Matt's talk was full of great insights, included a demo, and was over far too quickly.

Day 3: My session and closing keynote

The final day of CAST started with my own session, a short workshop about giving effective feedback. We built marshmallow towers! My partner and I prepared this together, and it was lovely to be presenting together again. People seemed to get a lot out of it, not just a sugar rush, and I have ideas of how to tighten it, clarify some things, and make it better for the next time. I introduced some communication frameworks from the relationship world and also one of my own, all of which can apply heavily to the workplace.

I also gave a talk after lunch, an experience report about setting up a new line of business at my last company. It drove home (for me, and I hope for others) that context really matters, and what worked really really well for me would not work for someone else in a different situation. I love hearing and giving experience reports, because there is stuff to be learned regardless, and hearing what people tried is valuable to generate my own ideas of what may work.

Rob Sabourin gave the closing keynote about possibilities for the future of testing, calling us to return to our roots and explore how we can expand our skills into a modern context. He left me with lots to think about where it comes to how our field is changing and will need to change to keep up, but also about how much stays the same.

Wrapping up

I heard people talk about their fears, their crises, their hopes for the future. It's hard out there, there's no use denying that. But the testing skills are not going away, even if they are being distributed, and we have an opportunity to make ourselves even more valuable when we communicate effectively about what we do, how we excel at it, and why it matters. This is a community that cares deeply about the practice and the art of testing, and it's inspiring to be around them in a concentrated manner at a conference. There's still so much to do, so let's get to it!

See you next year at CAST!