Speaking & Conferences

Speaking since 2011. 40+ conference appearances. 6 keynotes across Europe and the US.

Confirmed 2026 Engagements

All four 2026 engagements below are confirmed. The talks centre on AI accountability, testing in the AI era, and what it actually takes to build with AI and stay responsible for what you've shipped.

In 2025 I stepped back from the conference circuit to focus on building: the AI-assisted systems and the writing that the 2026 talks now draw on.

Keynote Confirmed HUSTEF 2026 · Budapest

October 6–8, 2026 · Keynote + half-day workshop

Beyond Vibe Coding: What It Actually Takes to Build with AI and Stay Accountable

I've built several AI-assisted systems I use daily, and what I did wasn't vibing. It was active architecture: hundreds of decisions about what to build, what to keep, and what to remove. The prompting was the easy part. Knowing what to ask for was the hard part. Three concrete moments where AI alone would have failed me.

Workshop: Testing Your AI: A Hands-On Workshop Building Evaluation Frameworks for LLM Systems. A half-day, hands-on tutorial.

Confirmed Quality Beacon 2026 · Copenhagen

October 21, 2026 · Talk

Being a Test Developer Allows Me to Build in Testability

Testability isn't a feature you bolt on at the end. It's a design property that gets decided long before any test gets written. An updated version of the EuroSTAR 2024 talk, now with AI-assisted systems in scope.

Confirmed Øredev 2026 · Malmö

November 4–6, 2026 · Talk (working title)

Responsibility Without Authorship: A Tester's Superpower in the AI Era

When AI writes the code, who is responsible for what it does? Testers have always been accountable for systems they didn't craft. The tester mindset isn't obsolete in the AI era. It's the missing piece. Framed for a mixed developer and tester audience.

Confirmed Agile Testing Days 2026 · Potsdam

November 16–19, 2026 · 25-minute talk

Responsibility Without Authorship: A Tester's Superpower in the AI Era

The tester's job was never "I wrote this, so I trust it." It was always "I didn't build this, and I'm still accountable for it." AI just made that the mainstream problem.

Programme Chair

EuroSTAR 2023 · Antwerp

Programme Chair for Europe's largest software testing conference. I shaped the programme around the theme "Software Development is a Social Activity", the same thesis that now anchors the advisory work: technical problems are almost always people problems in disguise, and AI doesn't change that.

Kristoffer Nordström – EuroSTAR 2023 Programme Chair

Conference History

2024
Keynote Odin (Oslo) — "Cultivating Culture in the Code Trenches"
PyCon Sweden — "Boring Releases - How We Ship Every Week Without Drama"
HUSTEF (Budapest) — "Boring Releases - How We Ship Every Week Without Drama"
ExpoQA (Madrid) — "Cultivating Culture in the Code Trenches" + "Lego and Kanban" + Python tutorial
EuroSTAR — "Being a Test Developer Allows me to Build in Testability"
StarEAST — Tutorial: "Python for Testers" (via Coveros)
2023
EuroSTAR (Antwerp) — Programme Chair (theme: "Software Development is a Social Activity")
Keynote StarWEST — "How My Testing Skills Served My Personal Life"
StarEAST (Orlando) — Tutorial: "Testing in the Cloud" (Rated 10/10) + Lightning Keynote
2022
EuroSTAR — "Toolsmithing – A Live Coding Session Crafting Test Tools on Stage"
ExpoQA (Madrid) — "Toolsmithing" (40 min) + Workshop: Testing in the Cloud (Advanced)
Lightning Keynote StarWEST — "The Importance of Slack"
2021
Keynote StarWEST — + Workshop: "Testing in the Cloud from all four corners of the world!"
EuroSTAR — Workshop: "Testing in the Cloud from all four corners of the world!"
2020
ExpoQA — Programme Committee (conference cancelled due to COVID-19)
EuroSTAR (Online) — "Importance of Accessibility from the Start"
2019
Keynote StarWEST (Anaheim) — "Fun as a Productivity Tool"
EuroSTAR (Prague) — Training: "PFT: Testing RESTful APIs" + Lightning talk: "Humanistic Software Development Manifesto"
TestIt (Estonia) — "The importance of having fun at work"
ExpoQA (Madrid) — Training: "REST API testing using Python"
2018
Agile Testing Days (Potsdam) — "My Little Stable"
Agile Testing Days USA (Boston) — Tutorial: "Python for Testers"
StarEAST (Orlando) — Tutorial: "Python for Testers" (via Coveros)
2017
StarWEST (Anaheim) — Tutorial: "Python for Testers"
EuroSTAR — Programme Committee + Linnea fundraiser/awareness talk (community fundraising for DIPG treatment)
StarEAST (Florida) — "Lego & Kanban" / "Technically Aware"
2016
Keynote TestNet (Netherlands) — "Can't we just ignore communication and culture? We're doing tech!" + Tutorial
StarEAST (Orlando) — Tutorial: "Python for Testers"
EuroSTAR — "Team Culture & Self-Empowerment"
TestIt (Estonia) — "Lego and Kanban"
Let's Test (Sweden) — Tutorial: "Taming Terminal Based Applications"
2015
Keynote EuroSTAR (Maastricht) — "Lego and Kanban"
Nordic Testing Days (Tallinn) — "Gamification" + Tutorial: "Taming Terminal Based Applications"
Copenhagen Context — Full-day tutorial: "Python For Testers"
2014
EuroSTAR (Dublin) — "Gamification - How to engage your end users"
Agile Testing Days (Potsdam) — "The struggles of my identity"
Belgian Testing Days — "Taming the Terminal" + "Why every sys test dept should have a test developer"
DEWT — Peer conference: "Learning and change in a dysfunctional organisation"
2011–2013
EuroSTAR 2013 (Gothenburg) — Open Space: "Python for Testers"
Let's Test 2013 (Runö, Sweden) — Workshop: "Python for Testers - A Live Session"
DEWT4 2013 — Dutch Exploratory Workshop on Testing
EuroSTAR 2012 — "Why every system test dept should have a test developer" (3rd best speaker)
DevCon 2012 (Gothenburg) — "Why every system test dept should have a test developer"
BTH 2012 — "Why do we test software?"
Electric Cloud Summit 2011 (Stockholm) — Speaker on continuous integration
Scandinavian Developer Conference 2011 (Gothenburg) — "Agile Testing"

Booking & Speaker Bio

Interested in having me speak at your conference or event? Get in touch.

Bio (150 words)

Kristoffer Nordström is an AI Accountability Advisor based in Karlskrona, Sweden, and the founder of Northern Test Consulting. He helps engineering leaders build AI-assisted systems they can explain, defend, and stand behind.

His background is over two decades in software testing (since 2005), spanning telecoms, distributed compilers, cloud, smartphone OS, and embedded systems. He still builds hands-on every day, and the advisory work is grounded in that practice rather than commentary on it.

A conference speaker since 2011, Kristoffer has made 40+ international appearances at EuroSTAR, StarWEST, StarEAST, Agile Testing Days, ExpoQA, Nordic Testing Days, and HUSTEF, including six keynotes. He served as Programme Chair for EuroSTAR 2023, shaping the programme around the theme "Software Development is a Social Activity", which is also the thesis behind his current work on AI accountability.

Bio (100 words)

Kristoffer Nordström is an AI Accountability Advisor and founder of Northern Test Consulting in Karlskrona, Sweden. He helps engineering leaders build AI-assisted systems they can explain, defend, and stand behind, grounded in over two decades of hands-on software testing (since 2005) across telecoms, cloud, and embedded systems. A conference speaker since 2011 with 40+ international appearances and six keynotes across EuroSTAR, StarWEST, Agile Testing Days, and HUSTEF, he served as Programme Chair for EuroSTAR 2023 (theme: "Software Development is a Social Activity"), the thesis that now anchors his advisory work.

Bio (50 words)

Kristoffer Nordström is an AI Accountability Advisor and founder of Northern Test Consulting. He helps engineering leaders build AI-assisted systems they can explain, defend, and stand behind. A testing practitioner since 2005 with 40+ conference appearances and six keynotes. EuroSTAR 2023 Programme Chair.

Get in Touch