A significant part of remaining relevant in the software industry is keeping up with development and testing trends. But organizations don’t always have a big training budget, so sometimes it falls to us to manage our own continuing education. Luckily, that can be as easy as discovering fresh ideas in a new book.

Since the inception of load testing, the approach has been mostly the same: simulate the traffic of an application by creating load at the API level. But there have been market shifts that make load testing with browser-level users more feasible—allowing us to test with real load and measure true user performance.

With a week full of sessions, tutorials, training classes, and events, the STARCANADA software testing conference had plenty of takeaways. Some highlights: what jobs will look like in the future with AI, why testers should lead efforts to make quality everyone's responsibility, and the importance of unlearning.