taqelah! Lightning Talks 2026 FREE Online Conference by taqelah!
What Is Lightning Talks?
Fast-Paced
15 hand-picked speakers sharing their most powerful ideas in sharp 10-minute bursts
High-Energy
220 minutes of pure distilled knowledge for busy testers and SDETs
Not Your Typical Conference
Built for QA professionals across Singapore and Southeast Asia who want cutting-edge insights on AI, automation, and the future of testing — without the fluff.
Test Beyond Tomorrow:
Skills, Tools & Mindsets
for the Next Decade of QA
Artificial Intelligence isn't just changing our tools—it's fundamentally reshaping what quality means, how we validate software, and what role testers play in modern delivery.
In 2026, testing teams face dual transformation: AI-powered applications that demand new validation approaches, and AI-augmented testing practices that redefine our workflows. This isn't about choosing between human expertise and machine intelligence—it's about understanding how they combine to deliver unparalleled quality at unprecedented speed.
The Questions That Define 2026
How do we validate non-deterministic AI outputs?
Which testing tasks should we delegate to AI versus keep human-led?
How do we ensure fairness and prevent bias in AI-driven features?
What new skills do testers need to thrive in an AI-augmented world?
How do we test models that continuously learn from production data?
What does "quality" mean when AI personalizes experiences for each user?
This isn't theory. This is happening now.
Join us for 220 minutes of real-world insights, practical frameworks, and strategic thinking from QA leaders navigating this transformation firsthand.
Join the MovementWhat We'll Explore
Twelve key areas shaping the future of testing and quality engineering
AI in Testing
Leveraging artificial intelligence to revolutionize test creation, execution, and analysis
Modern Test Engineering
Contemporary approaches, tools, and frameworks driving quality at scale
Practical Automation Techniques
Battle-tested strategies and patterns you can implement immediately
Future Skills for Testers
Competencies and knowledge areas critical for tomorrow's QA professionals
Evolving QA Roles
How testing roles are transforming in response to AI, DevOps, and modern software delivery
Performance Testing
Techniques and tools for ensuring application speed, scalability, and reliability under load
Security Testing
Identifying vulnerabilities and ensuring robust security practices throughout the development lifecycle
Test Analytics
Leveraging data and metrics to optimize testing strategies and demonstrate quality impact
Testing AI Applications
Specialized approaches for validating machine learning models and AI-powered systems
Shift Right
Production monitoring, observability, and testing in live environments for continuous quality
Blockchain & Web3
Testing distributed ledger systems, smart contracts, decentralized applications, NFTs, and the decentralized web
Why Attend?
Regional Reach
15 perspectives from across Singapore, Southeast Asia, and global QA communities
Future-Ready Skills
Insights on AI in testing you can apply immediately
Practical Frameworks
Actionable takeaways you can use right away
Engaged Community
Join regional QA leaders in one powerful session
Recordings + Slides
Access all content after the conference
Southeast Asia Focus
Perspectives relevant to our region's challenges
Lightning Talk Format
Each speaker gets:
= 100% Actionable Insights
Meet Our Keynote Speakers
World-renowned testing experts sharing their insights on the future of QA
Pradeep Soundararajan
Founder & CEO, Moolya
🎯 De-fragmenting AI in Testing
You are in the beginning of 2026. 2025 has been brutal on you in terms of keeping you on the edge of trying to make you learn everything possible about AI. Your brain CPU overclocked and disk has been fragmented quite a lot by hearing and learning multiple things about AI. You are confused how to bring all of this accumulation of knowledge and skills to use in practicality. Should you fail to bring this defragmentation - too many bad sectors get created in your mind and hampers your ability to learn in the future and wonder why despite all the skills and knowledge you fail to grow and frustration sets in.
In this talk, Pradeep Soundararajan, who sees the world from the moon and observes himself and others as a tiny spec on a beautiful ball with the drama of AI that has been happening - will present simple, coherent thoughts on de-fragmenting AI in Testing.
As an example - he will speak about the difference between learning AI to build something versus learning AI to operate it to solving a problem. Knowing this difference will free up a lot of people. He wishes a lot more people get this message because there are immensely talented people in this world of testing but they all seem to roam around like zombies heading (learning) in all directions (whatever it thrown at them to learn) without a clarity as to why they are heading that way. At least that's how it looks from the moon.
Pradeep has 20 minutes to say this. After that the moon moves to a different constellation. Would you be there to catch a glimpse of the view from the moon?
Renowned testing thought leader and consultant with over two decades of experience revolutionizing software testing practices globally. He is the author of Buddha in Testing and Growth Driven Testing.
Known for innovative approaches to testing and quality, Pradeep has mentored countless testers worldwide and shaped the future of the testing community.
Unmesh Gundecha
Head, Cloud Platform Engineering, Standard Chartered
🎯 The Next-Gen Tester: Navigating the Era of Artificial Intelligence
As AI becomes embedded across software development, testers are no longer grappling with what the technology can do, but with how their role should evolve alongside it. Code, tests, and workflows can now be generated at scale, making execution faster and cheaper than ever. Yet higher automation has not automatically translated into higher confidence. The real challenge has shifted from running tests to interpreting signals, framing risk, and deciding what truly matters.
This talk introduces a practical operating model for testers in the AI era, clarifying which responsibilities must remain human-owned, where AI can effectively amplify thinking, and what work should be fully delegated. Rather than focusing on tools or trends, it helps experienced testers re-anchor their value around judgment, intent, and decision-making. In an environment where AI is widely available, sustained relevance comes from applying it deliberately—and knowing where human accountability cannot be automated.
Author of "Selenium Testing Tools Cookbook" and leading expert in test automation and quality engineering with global impact.
Currently leads Cloud Platform Engineering at Standard Chartered, helping organizations implement effective test automation strategies and build high-performing QA teams for the AI era.
Meet Our Speakers
15 experts sharing powerful ideas in 10-minute bursts
Priyank Shah
Lead Software Engineer
Carousell
LinkedInRAG + n8n: The Powerhouse for Context-Aware Test Case Generation
Chitransh Shrivastava
QA Engineer
Metacube Software
LinkedInWeb3 & Blockchain Testing: What QA Needs to Rethink
Mesut Durukal
Senior QA Automation Engineer
Indeed
LinkedInUsing Mutation Testing to Expose Your Tests' Hidden Weaknesses
Srinivasan
Sai Krishna
Srinivasan Sekar & Sai Krishna
Directors of Engineering
LambdaTest
Supercharging Appium with MCP: Context-Aware Mobile Test Automation
Rahul Parwal
Specialist
ifm group of companies
LinkedInProductize Yourself as a Tester - Your Authenticity Is the Only Moat
Santhosh Tuppad
Test Advocate
ElevenXN Technologies
LinkedInShift Everywhere: When Testers, Hackers & GPTs Team Up
Nikhil Bhandari
VP - Quality Engineering
Moniepoint Inc.
LinkedInBeyond the Script - Practical Software Test Automation Techniques
Ashutosh Bhatawadekar
Engagement Director | CIO Advisory
Tata Consultancy Services
LinkedInFuture of QA in an AI World
Sparsh Shrivastava
QA Automation Specialist
One Click LCA
LinkedInShift-Right Testing: When Production Becomes Your Test Environment
Tran Thuy Nha Truc
Senior Quality Engineer
TMA Solutions
LinkedInTesting AI-based Systems: Why Traditional QA Fails and What Comes Next
Goh Chun Lin
Senior Cloud Software Engineer
.NET Foundation
LinkedInPerformance Testing via Simulation
Jency Stella
Quality Engineering Associate Manager
Accenture
LinkedInTesting Reimagined: The Age of Intelligence
Full Agenda
3 hours 40 minutes of pure testing knowledge
28 February 2026 | 12:00 PM - 3:40 PM SGT (GMT+8)
Welcome & Housekeeping
Hosts: Gana & Prachi
Anand Bagmar
Quality Evangelist & Sr. Solution Architect, Applitools
Quality Without Compromise: AI-Powered Testing from Figma to Production
Problem Statement:
Modern teams ship fast, but UI quality doesn't scale.
- Designs approved in Figma often don't match what reaches production.
- Selector-based UI tests are fragile, slow to maintain, and flaky.
- Manual visual checks don't scale across web, mobile, native apps, and PDFs.
The result: more test code, less coverage, late feedback, and missed UI defects.
Solution:
You—the living, breathing, thinking human—are more important than ever. AI scales visual validation across the SDLC, removing repetitive, error-prone work so you can focus on judgment, risk, and delivering real UI quality—faster and with confidence.
Pradeep Soundararajan
Founder & CEO, Moolya
De-fragmenting AI in Testing
You are in the beginning of 2026. 2025 has been brutal on you in terms of keeping you on the edge of trying to make you learn everything possible about AI. Your brain CPU overclocked and disk has been fragmented quite a lot by hearing and learning multiple things about AI.
In this talk, Pradeep Soundararajan, who sees the world from the moon and observes himself and others as a tiny spec on a beautiful ball with the drama of AI that has been happening - will present simple, coherent thoughts on de-fragmenting AI in Testing.
As an example - he will speak about the difference between learning AI to build something versus learning AI to operate it to solving a problem. Knowing this difference will free up a lot of people.
Pradeep has 20 minutes to say this. After that the moon moves to a different constellation. Would you be there to catch a glimpse of the view from the moon?
Unmesh Gundecha
Head, Cloud Platform Engineering, Standard Chartered
The Next-Gen Tester: Navigating the Era of AI
As AI becomes embedded across software development, testers are no longer grappling with what the technology can do, but with how their role should evolve alongside it. Code, tests, and workflows can now be generated at scale, making execution faster and cheaper than ever. Yet higher automation has not automatically translated into higher confidence.
This talk introduces a practical operating model for testers in the AI era, clarifying which responsibilities must remain human-owned, where AI can effectively amplify thinking, and what work should be fully delegated.
In an environment where AI is widely available, sustained relevance comes from applying it deliberately—and knowing where human accountability cannot be automated.
Priyank Shah
RAG + n8n: Context-Aware Test Case Generation
Discover how combining Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with n8n workflow automation can revolutionize your test case generation process. This session demonstrates how to build context-aware testing pipelines that understand your application's domain.
Key Takeaways:
• Learn to integrate RAG for intelligent, context-driven test case creation
• Build automated workflows with n8n to streamline QA processes
• Balance speed and quality without compromising test coverage
• See a live demo of the RAG + n8n pipeline in action
Chitransh Shrivastava
Web3 & Blockchain Testing: What QA Needs to Rethink
Web3 and blockchain apps sound exciting but when it comes to testing them, many QAs feel a bit lost. The usual test cases don't feel enough while testing wallets, smart contracts, decentralised flows and irreversible transactions.
You'll walk away with:
• What Web3 apps are from a tester's point of view
• What new risks and questions QAs should think about
• How testers can start preparing without feeling lost
Mesut Durukal
Using Mutation Testing to Expose Your Tests' Hidden Weaknesses
I have been in several projects where we had high test coverage yet still suffered from flaky tests and missed defects. In this talk, I introduce mutation testing as a practical way to assess how effective your tests truly are—by deliberately breaking your code and checking whether your tests catch the damage.
This talk challenges the underlying assumption that test suites are trustworthy simply because they are large or have high coverage. Instead, it provides a concrete, evidence-based technique to measure the actual effectiveness of tests.
Srinivasan Sekar & Sai Krishna
Supercharging Appium with MCP
Discover how the Model Context Protocol (MCP) is transforming mobile test automation by bringing AI-powered context awareness to Appium.
You'll learn how MCP enables Claude and other AI assistants to directly interact with your Appium test infrastructure, accessing real-time device states, test results, and application logs.
We'll explore practical use cases including:
• Intelligent test debugging
• Natural language test generation
• Automated root cause analysis of test failures
Rahul Parwal
Productize Yourself as a Tester
AI is rewriting how testing is done, but it's also rewriting how testers are seen. Skills alone don't stand out anymore. What stands out is how you package those skills, how you tell your story, and how you productize yourself.
By the end of this session, you will:
• Explore various dimensions of testing portfolios
• Learn to leverage a Portfolio as a stepping stone for career success
• Understand why portfolios might be the new work resumes
Santhosh Tuppad
Shift Everywhere: Testers, Hackers & GPTs Team Up
The future of QA is no longer about shifting left or right—it's about shifting everywhere. As AI and GPTs reshape how we learn, test, and think, testers, developers, and security professionals have an unprecedented opportunity to go deeper, faster, and wider.
This is about collusion between humans and AI, not collision—where GPTs act as thinking partners that help us ask sharper questions and reason deeper.
Because in the age of AI: WYPIWYG—What You Prompt Is What You Get. Ask better. Don't be stingy.
Nikhil Bhandari
Beyond the Script - Practical Test Automation
In the race for continuous delivery, many teams fall into the "Automation Trap": building brittle, over-engineered suites that cost more to maintain than the value they deliver.
Key Takeaways:
• Strategic Frameworks: Implementing the Test Pyramid and data-driven methodologies
• Decoupling & Observability: Contract Testing for microservices
• The Three Pillars: Test Data Management, Modular Design, Environment Stability
• Seamless CI/CD Integration
Ashutosh Bhatawadekar
Future of QA in an AI World
Software testing is undergoing a seismic shift. Automation, AI, Agile and DevOps have accelerated delivery, yet many organizations continue to measure testing through archaic lenses.
In this talk, I bring out a new Testing Value Equation that redefines quality as a multiplier of trust, speed and business acumen.
The RISE framework (Reimagine, Integrate, Shift, Elevate) can help teams embed quality earlier, smarter and collaboratively.
Sparsh Shrivastava
Shift-Right Testing: Production as Test Environment
Most teams work hard to test before release, yet many real problems still appear only after users start using the product. Performance drops, unexpected behavior and reliability issues often show up in production, not in test environments.
Attendees will gain:
• A clear understanding of shift-right testing in practice
• Ways to use production insights to improve quality
• A future-ready mindset for evolving QA roles
Ujjwal Kumar Singh
Test Analytics Without Decisions Is Just Reporting
Most test analytics efforts work backwards. Teams measure what is easy—pass rates, coverage, execution time—and hope the data leads to better decisions. The problem is not a lack of data, but analytics disconnected from decisions.
Three Key Takeaways:
• Common ways test analytics fail to support real testing decisions
• A practical, three-step decision-first approach to designing test metrics
• Real examples of minimal analytics that inform release readiness
Tran Thuy Nha Truc
Testing AI-based Systems: Why Traditional QA Fails
As AI becomes embedded in every product, traditional QA approaches are no longer enough. AI-based systems behave probabilistically, learn from imperfect data, and degrade over time.
This talk explores three core challenges:
• Non-determinism (same input, different output)
• Bias (models inheriting human and data flaws)
• Model drift (performance decay over time)
Solution: The AI testing 4R framework (Reliability, Robustness, Responsibility, Resilience)
Goh Chun Lin
Performance Testing via Simulation
Traditional performance testing often feels like a brute-force attack: We spin up expensive infrastructure, write complex load scripts (k6/JMeter), and hammer the system until it breaks. This process is reactive, costly, and frequently happens too late.
In this lightning talk, I will demonstrate a radical approach to shift-left testing using Discrete Event Simulation.
Instead of testing software against hardware, we simulate the physics of the infrastructure itself. I will walk through a case study involving Amazon RDS T3 throttling, showing how we can predict the system breaking point without sending a single HTTP request.
Jency Stella
Testing Reimagined: The Age of Intelligence
Let's explore the evolution of testing, highlighting its past, present, and future in the ever-changing digital landscape.
The Past – The Age of Reactive Testing
Testing was treated as a separate and final phase, rendering defect detection costly.
The Present – Agile and Intelligent Testing
The shift-left model indicates that testing begins early, catching defects quickly.
The Future – AI as a Tool, Humans as Decision-Makers
AI enhances, humans decide. The future is for adaptive testers who run AI-powered tools with human intelligence.
Pavan Teja
The Human Edge in Testing AI Models
Testing AI applications demands a paradigm shift from traditional software testing. Unlike deterministic code, AI apps rely on data-driven models with unpredictable behaviors.
Challenges include:
• Validating accuracy and ensuring data quality
• Detecting bias and interpreting black-box decisions
Leveraging domain knowledge and exploratory skills, manual testers bring key assets to AI output testing. The path forward blends traditional QA rigor with AI expertise for reliable, fair, and robust AI applications.
Shashwat Nagayach
Future Skills for Testers
As AI transforms the QA landscape, testers must evolve their skillsets to stay relevant. This talk explores how different QA roles can adapt and thrive by embracing AI as a powerful ally rather than a threat.
Key Takeaways - Modern QA Team Composition:
• Domain Expert QAs: Leverage AI to reduce repetitive work and focus on high-value testing
• Automation Testers: Use AI for intelligent script generation and coverage analysis
• ETL/Data Testers: Ensure clean, structured data pipelines and prevent test data loss
• QA Leaders: Champion AI adoption, measure time savings, and build resilient, self-sufficient teams
Thanks & Slack Q&A Reminder
Gana & Prachi - Wrap up & community engagement
Reserve Your Free Spot
100% free event. Register now to secure your spot!
Claim your free spot — limited to 500 attendees
"Built by testers, for testers — a taqelah! signature event to shape the future of our craft."
Meet the Committee
Expert leaders curating world-class content for the testing community
Frequently Asked Questions
Everything you need to know about the event
What is taqelah! and what is the Lightning Talks Conference?
taqelah! (Test Automation & Quality Engineering, Lah!) is Singapore's most vibrant testing community, connecting QA professionals through meetups, workshops, and knowledge sharing since 2018.
The Lightning Talks Conference is our flagship online event where 17 speakers share powerful insights in short, focused talks — 2 keynotes and 15 lightning talks of 10 minutes each. It's designed for busy testers who want maximum value in minimum time!
Is the event free?
Yes, this is a 100% free online conference. No registration fees, no hidden costs - just pure knowledge sharing!
What is the date and time?
February 28, 2026 at 12:00 PM (GMT+8) - Singapore Time.
How long is the event?
Approximately 3 hours 40 minutes (220 minutes) featuring 2 keynote sessions and 15 lightning talks.
What platform will it be on?
The event will be hosted on Zoom. Registered attendees will receive the Zoom link 1 week before the event via email confirmation and calendar invitation.
Will the event be recorded?
Yes! The recording will be available on the taqelah! YouTube channel. Please subscribe if you haven't already!
Is there a Q&A session?
Since these are 10-minute packed talks, we won't have live Q&A during the event. Instead, we'll have dedicated Slack channels for each speaker where you can ask your questions. Join the taqelah! Slack community to participate!
How do I join the taqelah! community?
Join our Slack community to connect with speakers and fellow attendees:
Join taqelah! SlackHow can I become a speaker at future events?
We'd love to hear from you! Connect with us via our contact page and let us know about your topic ideas.
The Next Decade of QA Belongs to Those Who Leverage AI
Let's explore it together.