Selected speakers will receive $500 for their sessions. Roundtable speakers will be paid $250.
Your session must be "unique":
Your session must be "unique" meaning you own the IP BUT its title and recording will be different from any you may have already used. Plus, you agree to record using the TestGuild slide deck (will be shared with selected speakers). Each session is ~25 min pre-recorded to ensure amazing video quality followed by a ~20 min LIVE Q&A.
We prioritize fun
We prioritize fun. So, please NO boring sessions. The TestGuild community prefers real-world challenges & examples. So, practical stuff over theoretical is always preferred. FYI the theme for this Guild is Automation Enlightenment
The Guild has a preference for genuine content,
The Guild has a preference for genuine content, craftsmanship workshops, and practical sessions over vendor-specific content. They would appreciate less promotion and more genuine insights.
Submissions will close on 8th Oct, 2026. Community voting to select sessions starts on 9th Oct, 2026.
Click on each section below to expand/collapse it.
Session Topics Wanted By Our Guild Community
• Agentic testing and AI agents in the SDLC (how an agent is allowed to run, stop, and get judged) • Evals and “LLM as a judge”: how to critique AI-generated tests, code, and claims • Test strategy when developers use AI: what QA still guarantees when output goes up and headcount does not • Playwright in real pipelines (plus Claude / Cursor / skills). MCP vs CLI cost. Not a getting-started talk • Automation that survives: flakes in CI, self-heal that still fails, maintenance vs new tests • Test data and environments (domain data, dirty data, not enough envs) • API and services under faster delivery • Career and test leadership: SDET / QA lead role as agentic work arrives • Honest tool changes: why teams left Selenium, Cypress, or a paid suite, and what they actually moved to • Performance testing • Security / DevSecOps (AI + security, not a generic pentest tour) • Mobile, only as a real case • Continuous testing / CI/CD as the setting for flakes and agents, not a separate “what is CI” track
What The Guild Wants Speakers to Focus on (and Avoid)
Focus on:
• A real team, a real constraint, a number you will stand behind. Case studies and working demos beat slides. (They ranked case studies 151, deep-dive demos 140, workshops 121.) • Agentic work in the SDLC: what the agent is allowed to do, when a human stops it, how you judge the output. • Evals / “LLM as a judge.” How you critique AI-generated tests and code so a green suite is not “the implementation asserting itself.” • Test strategy when developers sped up and QA did not: what you still guarantee, risk visibility, ownership. • Playwright in CI with Claude, Cursor, or skills. MCP vs CLI and token cost if you actually measured it. • The unfinished job: flakes in CI, self-heal that still failed, test data, environments, APIs under faster delivery. • People in the trenches. Named practitioners and customers, not SMEs who mainly represent a tool. • Workshops that code along (Thu/Fri 90 min). Hands-on labs with a sample project were the #1 “besides talks” ask (114). • Materials after the talk: repo, slides, the exact command they watched.
Avoid:
• Product tours, UI walkthroughs, and “our AI writes your tests.” They already do that (247). Several called vendor generators untrustworthy. If the logo is required for the talk to make sense, it is a pitch. Rewrite it. • Theoretical AI overviews, trend roundups, and “the future of testing” with no repo and no scar. • An all-AI generator grid. AI is the backdrop, not 24 flavors of the same demo. One generation story is enough. The rest is evals, strategy, and maintenance. • Accessibility, desktop/embedded, Terraform/cloud blobs, or “basics revisited” as the point of the talk unless you have a specific trench case. Those did not show up as demand this year. • High-level sponsor keynotes. Connect the product to one customer constraint in the assigned lane, or decline the session topic and pick another lane. • Panels of vendors. One practitioner panel max. The debate slot is editorial, not sponsor.
Please submit your session idea by answering the questions below:
