PNSQC Pulse - August 5, 2026
PNSQC 2026 Program Preview | New Sponsor: Lynqa | Speaker Spotlight: Kristine O’Connor
PNSQC 2026 Program Preview
The PNSQC 2026 program is nearly set! Join us October 12–14 in Portland. Here is what the week looks like:
Four Tracks:
Quality Engineering and Tools: The technical work of testing in an AI-assisted environment.
Emerging Technologies and AI: What agentic systems mean for quality, accountability, and trust.
Organizational Quality and Leadership: Building and leading QA teams through disruption.
Hardware, Safety, and Physical Systems: Quality in aerospace, defense, and safety-critical environments.
A few sessions worth knowing about that we have not mentioned before:
Nikhil Bhandari | Principal Engineer
Governing Autonomous Test Automation: From Reactive to Proactive Quality Assurance
AI-generated tests are fast, but they can be wrong in ways that compound quietly. Nikhil is building governance frameworks to catch those errors before they become costly.
Swati Seela | Director of Quality Engineering
Leading Testing in the Age of AI: Strategies for QA Teams
Addressing the management layer most conference programs skip: what does it actually mean to lead a QA team when half your tooling is being rewritten?
Yunhao Jiao | Senior Software Engineer
From Autopilot to Autonomous: Rethinking Software Quality in the Age of AI Agents
The shift from deterministic to probabilistic systems isn’t just a tooling issue—it’s a fundamental quality philosophy problem. Yunhao explores what that transition truly requires.
With 44 peer-reviewed sessions total, keynotes from Jonathon Wright, Maaret Pyhäjärvi, and Anna Sharpe, PNSQC remains nonprofit, all-volunteer, and driven by no vendor agenda.
Explore the full schedule at pnsqc.org/conference/2026/at-a-glance.
AI-Powered Testing with Lynqa
Sponsored Content | From our Community Partner: Lynqa
Lynqa is a powerful agentic test execution solution developed by Smartesting. Its specialized AI agent executes manual and Gherkin test cases directly on web applications—without requiring scripts, code, no-code maintenance, or a separate automated test suite.
Lynqa precisely follows test instructions, validates expected results, and generates detailed, step-by-step reports complete with clear execution evidence. By taking over repetitive execution tasks, it helps QA teams accelerate testing cycles, scale execution capacity, and redirect their expertise toward higher-value quality activities.
Natively integrated with Xray in Jira, Lynqa also works seamlessly with XQual, Squash, or as a standalone solution with no external test management tool required.
Speaker Spotlight: Kristine O’Connor
We are thrilled to welcome back Kristine O’Connor, Sr. Agile Transformation Consultant at Agile Rising and PNSQC 2025 Top Presenter Award winner, as an invited speaker for PNSQC 2026!
Session: Signal Before the Storm: How Quality Intelligence Can Stop Harm Before it Becomes Irreversible
When Kristine’s 86-year-old Aunt Cathy was scammed online, every warning sign was present, from a rapid password reset to an unexpected cash advance request. The system failed to recognize that the wrong person was at the controls. In this session, Kristine introduces Quality Intelligence (QI), a framework connecting behavioral, biometric, and transactional signals to prevent harm before it happens.
About Kristine:
With 25+ years in quality, systems thinking, and organizational change, Kristine is a U.S. Navy veteran whose career ranges from hands-on QA to driving enterprise DevOps transformations—saving over $2 million at CVS Health and Aetna. Today, as an SPC, ICP-ACC, and PMI-ACP certified consultant, she supports clients like NASA, Bank of America, Northrop Grumman, IBM, and PetSmart.