SOFTECAsia

SOFTECAsia SQA Without Boundaries. The 17th edition of Southeast Asia's leading software testing conference. 12–15 September 2026 | KL Convention Centre, Malaysia.

Organised by MSTB. softecasia.org About SoftecAsia:
MSTB has been organising SOFTECAsia annually since 2008 as national-level event in Malaysia. By intent, the conference features a wealth of international speakers who are well-known in the global arena of software testing. Today, SOFTECAsia has grown to become premier software testing event in the Asian region through support from software profes

sionals in Malaysia and other Asian countries. In 2013, the event went regional with SOFTECAsia 2013. It was a natural expansion of geographical coverage for the conference. SOFTECAsia 2023:
Digital Transformation, accelerated by the recent COVID-19 pandemic, continues to reshape how businesses operate. It prescribes that technologies be incorporated across organisations to drive fundamental changes in corporate strategies. The advent of advanced technology applications such as Internet of Thing (IoT), Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents new ways of doings things and new business opportunities. Simultaneously it increases the complexity and sophistication of support systems for corporate strategy development and decision-making processes. Indeed software-enabled solutions are fast becoming a crucial element in corporate transformation and, to a certain extent, governance. Consequently, risks associated with software quality have now become the responsibility of the corporate level. Reliance on poor quality software-enabled systems may result in failure of the transformation programmes, misdirected strategies, or misaligned ex*****on of strategic plans. MSTB thus strongly advocates that organisations incorporate Software Quality Assurance (SQA) in their Digital Transformation programmes from the onset. Based on this perspective, “SQA-Driven Transformation” is chosen as the theme for SOFTECAsia 2023, the 14th edition of Asia’s premier conference on SQA and software testing.

One week remaining for TDC registration | Registration closes Friday, 15 May 2026. Most computer science graduates have ...
08/05/2026

One week remaining for TDC registration | Registration closes Friday, 15 May 2026.

Most computer science graduates have never tested a real production system. They’ve written test cases for examples, sure. But a live black-box, with no SRS, judged by people who do this for a living? That’s TDC 2.0.

For lecturers: if your university hasn’t entered a team yet, this is the week. For students: ask your lecturer to register one.

→ RM 648 per team — SST inclusive (4–5 students + 1 supervising lecturer)

→ Open to any Malaysian university

→ Prize-giving at SOFTECAsia 2026 · 14 September

Registration link is pinned in the first comment below.

Two more speakers confirmed for SOFTECAsia 2026, and both are veterans returning to the SOFTECAsia stage.Joining us at K...
06/05/2026

Two more speakers confirmed for SOFTECAsia 2026, and both are veterans returning to the SOFTECAsia stage.

Joining us at KLCC on 12–15 September under the theme SQA Without Boundaries:

Lalitkumar Bhamare | EMEA Lead for Quality Engineering Thought Leadership at Accenture Song and CEO of Tea-time with Testers. Creator of the QCSD (Quality Conscious Software Delivery) framework and PractiTest's Emerging QA Leader of the Year 2025. Last with us in 2024.

Pricilla Bilavendran | Team Leader at Billennium IT Services Malaysia and one of Agile Testing Days' "100 Women in Tech to Follow and Learn From." Fifteen years spanning functional, EDI, ETL, automation, and API testing, and a long-standing advocate for diversity in QA. Last with us in 2023.

More speakers coming soon.

🎟 Early-bird Conference Pass: RM 2,850 (before 30 June) 📋 Group and Full Experience passes also available Register your interest → https://mstb.org/register-2026/

MSTB's Test Design Competition is back — and it's been completely redesigned.TDC 2.0 challenges university teams to test...
30/04/2026

MSTB's Test Design Competition is back — and it's been completely redesigned.

TDC 2.0 challenges university teams to test a real-world IT system running in production, with poor or no Software Requirements Specification. No hand-holding. Teams must analyse, strategise, design, implement, and automate their testing approach from scratch.

What's new in Version 2.0:
— Practice Requirements Engineering
— Adopt & Integrate Technologies using real tools
— Define Organization & Processes (DevOps, Agile)
— Develop Hard & Soft Skills (critical thinking, innovation, presentation)

How it works:
On Campus Challenge (Jun–Aug):
Part 1 — Strategize, Analyze & Design: develop SQA strategy, test analysis & design, plan test implementation and select test tools.
Part 2 — Execute The Automation Test: implement and execute the test using tools selected.
Online submission deadline: 21 Aug.
Over-the-Weekend Challenge (22–23 Aug, Klang Valley):
Teams present and defend their work products and test outcomes to a panel of industry practitioner judges, followed by a knowledge sharing session.

Who can participate:
— Teams from any Malaysian university
— 1 lecturer + 4–5 undergraduate students per team
— Max 1 international student per team
— Multiple teams per university (subject to approval)

Prizes:
Champion: RM 3,000 + Plaque
Runner Up 1: RM 1,000
Runner Up 2: RM 1,000
Prize-giving at SOFTECAsia 2026, 14 September.

Registration: 1–15 May 2026
Fee: RM 648 per team (inclusive of SST)
In strategic partnership with the Ministry of Higher Education.
Register at https://mstb.org/tdc-2026/
Questions? Email [email protected]

Salam Nuzul QuranToday marks Nuzul Quran, a day of reflection and gratitude observed across Malaysia. To our Muslim coll...
29/04/2026

Salam Nuzul Quran

Today marks Nuzul Quran, a day of reflection and gratitude observed across Malaysia. To our Muslim colleagues and friends — may this occasion bring peace and blessings to you and your loved ones.

To our entire community — wishing you a peaceful weekend.

While we were debating whether the test phase still belongs in the pipeline, the tools quietly stopped caring about the ...
22/04/2026

While we were debating whether the test phase still belongs in the pipeline, the tools quietly stopped caring about the boundary altogether.

Playwright doesn't call itself a testing framework. It's a browser automation library — developers and testers use the same tool for different reasons. Observability platforms like Datadog and Grafana Labs have turned production into a verification environment, not as a fallback but by design. AI-powered test generation doesn't just automate what testers used to do manually — it's rewriting what's testable in the first place.

Maaret Pyhäjärvi, community fellow at the European Testing Conference, puts it sharply: "AI doesn't replace testing. It replaces the part of testing that was never really testing to begin with." A 2025 Tricentis report found that 73% of organisations using AI-augmented testing reported faster release cycles — but only 34% said their defect escape rate improved. The tools are faster. Whether they're smarter depends entirely on who's directing them.

That gap between speed and judgment? That's where the real conversation starts.

SOFTECAsia 2026 is built around that conversation. The theme — SQA Without Boundaries — opens with this question: what happens when the tools no longer respect the lines we drew?

But tools are only the first boundary that moved. The workflows followed. More on that tomorrow.

The SOFTECAsia 2026 lineup is building.We're pleased to share the first two confirmed speakers joining us at KLCC on 12–...
22/04/2026

The SOFTECAsia 2026 lineup is building.
We're pleased to share the first two confirmed speakers joining us at KLCC on 12–15 September under the theme SQA Without Boundaries:

Nithin SS — Head of QA at Lodgify and Founder of Synapse QA, a community making quality learning accessible across Southeast Asia.

Tomotaka Asagi — CEO of Arrangility (Malaysia) and CTO of Human Crest (Japan), with 20+ years across Selenium, Playwright, and Appium.

More speakers coming soon.

🎟 Early-bird Conference Pass: RM 2,850 (before 30 June) 📋 Group and Full Experience passes also available
Register your interest → https://mstb.org/register-2026/

What happens when you let the audience set the agenda?At SOFTECAsia 2025, we opened an online form for participants to s...
16/04/2026

What happens when you let the audience set the agenda?

At SOFTECAsia 2025, we opened an online form for participants to submit questions to our keynote panel — and the response was overwhelming. Prof Jasbir Singh chaired the session, prioritising questions by popular vote so the room itself decided what mattered most. What emerged was one of the sharpest exchanges on AI and testing we've captured on camera.

The panel didn't shy away from the uncomfortable questions. Can generative AI actually erode a tester's ability to think critically? If LLMs hallucinate under large context windows, who owns the sanity check — the tool or the human? And as AI-assisted coding accelerates delivery speed, are we about to see the developer-to-QA ratio flip entirely?

Some highlights worth your time:
The case for "prompt debt" replacing traditional test automation maintenance. Why forcing AI into a mature framework that already works is a solution looking for a problem. The prediction that within a decade, intelligent agents will map risk areas in your IDE before code even compiles. And a forceful reminder that emotional intelligence and face-to-face collaboration remain irreplaceable — no matter how sophisticated the tooling gets.

The full panel discussion is now on our YouTube channel. Watch the video: https://youtu.be/_vHFZXVOZbs

The panel discussion returns at SOFTECAsia 2026 this September at KLCC. If last year's session is anything to go by, you'll want to be there when the questions start rolling in.

Over the past two days, we've traced how technology and processes dissolved the boundaries around testing. Tools stopped...
31/03/2026

Over the past two days, we've traced how technology and processes dissolved the boundaries around testing. Tools stopped respecting the line between "testing" and "development." Workflows compressed until the test phase consumed the entire pipeline.

But neither of those shifts is the hard one. The hard one is personal. Across Southeast Asia, thousands of professionals built meaningful careers as QA Engineers, Test Leads, and Test Managers — roles defined by a world where quality was a gate, not a thread. Where your value was measured in test cases executed and defects logged.

That world is expanding. And expansion means your role has to expand with it.Janet Gregory, co-author of Agile Testing, frames it well: "Quality is not a role. It's a responsibility shared by the whole team. But that doesn't mean testers disappear — it means they have to show up differently." Showing up differently is harder than learning a new tool or adopting a new process. It means moving from gatekeeping to enabling. From catching what the team missed to making the whole team better at quality.

The World Quality Report 2025–26 found that 63% of QA leaders now rank GenAI skills as the top capability for quality engineers — above core testing skills. That's not the profession shrinking. That's the territory expanding into places that didn't exist five years ago.

Three boundaries. Three shifts. One conversation that ties them together. SOFTECAsia 2026 — SQA Without Boundaries — is where that conversation happens in person. September 14–15 at KL Convention Centre, with pre-conference tutorials on September 12–13.

If you've felt the ground shifting under your role, your process, or your tools — this is the room to be in.
Details and registration interest: softecasia dot org

For years, these were separate strategies. Shift-left said: test earlier, catch defects before they compound. Shift-righ...
30/03/2026

For years, these were separate strategies. Shift-left said: test earlier, catch defects before they compound. Shift-right said: test in production, because some failures only surface under real conditions. Both made sense on their own.

Then they converged — and the test phase disappeared into the pipeline. Dave Farley, co-author of Continuous Delivery, has been saying this for over a decade: "If you have a separate test phase, you're doing it wrong. Testing is not a phase. It's a continuous activity." The data backs him up. The 2025 World Quality Report found that 67% of DevOps teams now practise shift-left testing. Elite performers deploy multiple times per day with lead times in minutes. When your feedback loop compresses that far, the distinction between "building" and "verifying" stops meaning anything.

And then July 2024 happened. CrowdStrike. 8.5 million systems down — not from a software bug, but from a quality failure in the update pipeline itself. It wasn't a testing problem in any traditional sense. It was a process boundary that nobody was watching.

That incident didn't just expose a gap. It redrew the map.
So shift-left met shift-right. Now what? Now testing doesn't have a phase. It has the whole pipeline. And the people working in it need to rethink not just their workflows, but something harder.
Their roles. Their titles. Their identity.
That's where this goes next.

Rendang dihidang dengan ketupat,Harum semerbak ke hujung desa,Setiawalk kini kami bertempat,Azam tercetus penuh perkasa....
20/03/2026

Rendang dihidang dengan ketupat,
Harum semerbak ke hujung desa,
Setiawalk kini kami bertempat,
Azam tercetus penuh perkasa.

Ziarah sahabat di rumah terbuka,
Ikatan dierat seikhlas hati,
Keluarga MSTB segak bersama,
Indahnya menyambut Lebaran Aidilfitri.

Selamat Hari Raya, Maaf Zahir dan Batin from the board of directors, management, and the MSTB community at large.

Address

Lot 1-G, Jalan Kenari 13a, Bandar Puchong Jaya
Puchong
47170

Opening Hours

Monday 09:00 - 18:00
Tuesday 09:00 - 18:00
Wednesday 09:00 - 18:00
Thursday 09:00 - 18:00
Friday 09:00 - 18:00

Website

http://www.softecasia.org/

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