With a week full of sessions, tutorials, training classes, and events, the STARWEST software testing conference had plenty of takeaways useful for your professional and personal life. Here are four lessons distilled from the conference’s keynote presentations on testing, communication, and directing your career.

At our modern pace of rapid software delivery, manual testing alone is simply inadequate. AI will soon be a necessity to keep pace and equip QA and test teams with augmented efficiencies. But don't fear the future; just like automation tools already have, AI is going to complement—not replace—your testing efforts.

Docker has several advantages over virtual machines: It’s easier to deal with, starts up faster, and requires fewer resources. Using Docker also can give testers more confidence in their releases. Developers use the same environment that will be used in production, which streamlines code delivery and shifts QA left.