Nordic Testing Days 2026

People who practice test-driven development (TDD) often describe it as a powerful approach. And while they make a convincing case, nothing beats experiencing it for yourself. So that's exactly what we'll do in this workshop.

We'll start with a brief explanation of TDD's red-green-refactor cycle. Red: write a test for the next bit of functionality you want to add. Green: write the code needed to make the test pass. Refactor: improve the code and the tests. Next, it's time to put that cycle into practice implementing a fairly simple algorithm. There's very little setup needed, so you can do this in any programming language you like.

In the last part of the workshop you'll share you experiences and your code. We'll reflect on those as a group, drawing lessons from it. And we'll discuss how the red-green-refactor cycle applies, even when you're writing something that's not unit testable, like test automation.

Prerequisites for Attending:
Please complete the setup of this workshop beforehand, by following the instructions in the "Setup for the kata"-section of the workshop repo: https://codeberg.org/joeposaurus/counterstring-codekata#setup-for-the-kata. The absolute minimum setup you need to do, is make sure you're able to write code and tests in a programming languague of your choice.

Key takeaways:

• TDD lets you take small steps with feedback at every step. 
• TDD lets you discover the right implementation as you go.    
• The ideas of TDD still apply when you're writing test automation.

Problem Context

• Brittle selectors: We spend hours fixing fragile XPaths and CSS selectors just to verify if a button is visible or a chart is correct
• Release changes: Automation code that is stable "now" suddenly becomes flaky after the release. The reason is the ever-changing platform. And automation is not always able to cope with it
• Code volume: Code analysis in our company showed us that assertion logic is typically five times (5x) larger in code size than action logic, consuming up to three months of dedicated maintenance effort every year

Solution
In this session, I introduce ViTO (Visual Testing Oracle), a production-deployed framework that leverages multimodal Generative AI (GenAI). ViTO "sees" the application exactly like a human does. The best part is that, in the end, it's just another block of code that can be embedded inside any framework.

Summary of what's in the talk
I will share:

1. The logic and algorithm of how we used GenAI to decouple verification from the underlying code resulted in a 50% reduction in our assertion codebase.
2. How we replaced thousands of lines of brittle verification logic with resilient, prompt-driven visual oracles that can handle complex data visualisations and unseen UI faults with zero extra effort. If you are tired of your tests breaking because a div changed, it's time to shift from structural selectors to a visual AI oracle.
3. The lessons learned from our initiative, and above all, where NOT to use GenAI
4. Access to the boilerplate code that you can implement within your repo
5. If time permits, a demo of the framework in action. If short on time, the link to the boilerplate is provided in the slides :)

Who is this for?

• QA Architects, Senior SDETs, Automation Engineers, Manual testers looking to transition to GenAI-based testing;
• Managers/architects looking for a language-agnostic framework to build GenAI-based assertions
• Anyone who wishes to know where to and where NOT to use GenAI in testing
• QA professionals looking for a starting point (boilerplate) code to embed GenAI in their automation

Key takeaways:

• In-code GenAI: How to implement GenAI directly "in-code" using any programming language
• Prompt Engineering for Testers: How to write resilient "Assertion Prompts" that replace complex conditional code and handle visual regression automatically.
• Real-World ROI: Evidence-based results from a production environment, showing a 50% reduction in code maintenance and expanded coverage for rich UI components.
• Deterministic AI: Practical strategies to control GenAI hallucinations using "concentrated screenshots"
• A sneak peek into what's coming in the future in GenAI for test automation

The security impact of missing input validation is usually underestimated.

The presentation explains and gives examples of how missing logical limits may lead to denial of service attacks on the application that seems quite secure - no injection or execution vulnerabilities needed.

As the presenter is a co-lead of the OWASP ASVS project, related security requirements are also pointed out.

Not a single word about AI.

How do you test an application that relies heavily on cloud services? Do you have a specific strategy for testing it, or do you simply run your tests regardless of the infrastructure costs?

Nowadays, many applications rely on different cloud services, such as databases, message queues, and file storage offered by cloud providers. Those cloud services bring considerable infrastructure costs and complexity in terms of testing cloud applications. The challenges include teams relying on mocks to test the application locally and in CI/CD, as well as extra costs to create test environments that use real services. However, a good alternative to deal with that is to use emulation tools to simulate those cloud services, providing good confidence and saving a lot of costs.

In this talk, we’ll explore how Testcontainers and LocalStack offer an affordable and scalable solution to cloud application testing without compromising on quality. This session will demonstrate (including a live showcase) how to use Testcontainers in combination with LocalStack to spin up containerized services to emulate all the AWS cloud services that your application depends on, enabling you to have your own cloud running locally on your machine or CI/CD. Together, those two tools can provide an efficient, cost-saving alternative to traditional cloud testing strategies.


Key takeaways:

• Learn how to create and run tests for cloud applications using free and open-source tools while reducing the costs of infrastructure and cloud services.
• Discover some common challenges when testing cloud applications and how to deal with them.
• Understand how to use real containerized cloud services instead of mocks to make your tests more closely mimic the production environment setup.