WeTest.Athens 2026

This presentation introduces the inner workings of the ISTQB and puts it into context.

1. How does a new syllabus come about?
2. Who decides what?
3. How does this world-leading software testing certification organization really work?
4. How does one go from idea to certification exam?
5. What is the ISTQB portfolio? Was there a complete paradigm shift? How does it relate to my career path?
6. What are the hot news and what can I expect from the ISTQB in a near future?

All these questions and many more will be discussed in a transparent, de-complexed and relaxed way with a twist of humor

Have you ever had that moment when mobile automation with Appium makes you question your life choices?

You can automate the web, you understand HTML, you know your way around selectors. So you open a native app and expect the same rules to apply. Then the first swipe fails. The selector that looked perfect stops working. The test gets slow. The logs look like noise. And suddenly Appium feels flaky.

But the truth is simple. Your tests are not failing because Appium is unreliable. They fail because YOU ARE doing it wrong. Native apps are not HTML, and treating them like they are will always backfire.

We will unpack what you are really interacting with when you automate a native app, how Appium bridges the gap through platform drivers, and why things like UI hierarchies, element attributes, and locator choices behave differently on Android and iOS. You will see the most common web assumptions people bring into native automation, why they create frustration, and how to replace them with a mental model that makes your tests faster, more stable, and easier to debug.

No live coding, hopefully just clear examples, sharp insights, and a new way of thinking about mobile automation.

In 2019, the Lidl Plus app was born and cloud native hosted in webapps in Azure Cloud. In our process to maturity, we wanted to remove the vendor lock and we started  migrating to Kubernetes in 2022.
In this process, we modernized our performance testing environment as well, from master slave old friend JMeter to a K6 Kubernetes cluster using the K6 operator.
In this talk, we will be explaining how we are creating our K6 projects. How we organize and manage our projects creating a schema as a backstage project, so all the squad product teams can easily setup a new performance project.
Learn how we scaled our performance testing suite and our performance injecting system.
See how we created K6 extensions for the use case where there wasn’t an existing extension such as AzureServicebus.
Attendees will learn how to implement a project separated in a workload – user behaviour – scenarios, so the performance testing team can scale, and the code is easily maintained for the entire dev team.
You will also see how to use the performance testing in a CI/CD such as Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions, integrated with a monitoring tool such as Grafana.

What is really happening in the Greek QA and UX job market?
This session will focus on:

• The real impact of AI and automation
• Market slowdown and hiring trends
• Skills companies actually look for today
• Gaps between expectations and reality
• Fake or misleading job postings — and how professionals can spot them early

A candid, data-driven discussion on the future of QA & UX in Greece.

In recent years, we’ve seen fewer dedicated QA management roles and a shift toward placing QA under Engineering or Product. But what does this mean for QA professionals and for how quality is managed across organizations?
This round table will explore:

• Who owns the test strategy today — and with which skills
• Whether Engineering and Product leaders are prepared to make quality decisions
• How QA teams are guided and empowered under non-QA leadership

A forward-looking discussion on QA leadership, quality strategy, and team empowerment.

You have kids, and suddenly, everything changes. Life starts revolving around them, and you feel like you're losing touch with the business world. Sound familiar?
I used to think that being a mom would hold me back in my testing career. But then I realized that many of the experiences I had at home could actually help me grow in the testing world. Cooking with the kids—or leaving them unattended—has led to unpredictable situations that taught me valuable lessons. And time spent at the playground with my twins? It helped me automate some surprisingly useful parenting skills—skills that turned out to be just as effective in testing environments.
Just as parents adapt to ever-changing situations and diverse needs, testers must navigate complex requirements and evolving user expectations. In this session, I’ll share stories and parallels between family moments and testing practices, exploring qualities like patience, multitasking, and problem-solving.
Whether you’re a parent or not, you’ll walk away with practical insights and maybe a laugh or two, ready to approach testing with fresh eyes and renewed creativity. Curious how chaos can lead to better software? Join me to find out!