MAIN TRACK TALK

Classical QE + Agentic Principles: Building Bridges, Not Burning Them

Throughout his 15-year career in quality engineering, Dragan observed a troubling pattern: organisations treating AI testing as a replacement strategy rather than an evolution. While leading QE transformation at Alchemy Cloud, he evaluated AI testing vendors and implemented a hybrid approach combining classical practices (TDD, exploratory testing, context-driven methods) with agentic principles. The results—60% faster test generation with 40% fewer false positives. This bridge-building approach is crucial now because the industry faces a critical decision point: either evolve existing quality practices or discard them for unproven autonomous solutions.

Dragan will demonstrate how to extend classical QE practices with agentic principles through production examples. Attendees will see real implementation patterns, including agents generating test variations while humans maintain strategic oversight, encoding testing oracles into agent evaluation criteria, and determining where to place human-in-the-loop checkpoints. Dragan will share concrete metrics from his experience (60% faster generation, 85% of agent tests requiring no modification) and provide a five-step evolution playbook. The talk includes examples of what failed when classical foundations were ignored, proving why bridge-building outperforms replacement strategies.

What you’ll learn

Session details

Dragan Spiridonov

Dragan Spiridonov is the founder of Quantum Quality Engineering and a former VP of Quality Engineering at Alchemy Cloud, where he led AI testing implementation, achieving 60% improvement in test generation. With over 15 years of experience practicing TDD, context-driven testing, exploratory testing, and the Holistic Testing Model, he now helps organisations evolve their traditional practices with agile principles. He’s establishing the Serbian chapter of the Agentics Foundation. His perspective: Classical QE taught him what good testing looks like; AI gave him tools to scale it-both matter.