Many people confuse continuous testing with test automation. That makes sense, because you cannot do continuous testing without automated tests. But it is much more. Continuous testing has a higher-level maturity that could require a totally different way of working—but it also gives a faster path to production.

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.

Keywords have become a popular way of writing tests. Hans Buwalda used keywords to devise the Action Based Testing method in which tests are written as sequences of “actions” represented with keywords. However, keywords are just a physical representation of actions, and there are other ways to do this.