TestCon Europe 2026
October 20-23
Vilnius & Online
Viktoria Neva
About
Viktoria Nesterenko is a Senior QA Engineer at Mylio Photos, where she works with complex systems across web, desktop, and cloud environments. Her work often involves investigating non-obvious issues, exploring system behavior, and understanding how different components interact in real-world scenarios.
She focuses on exploratory testing, debugging, and making sense of complex problems where standard test cases are not enough. She uses large language models (LLMs) as a thinking partner in investigation and debugging.
Viktoria Neva | LLM as a Thinking Partner in Software Testing
In this session, Viktoria Nesterenko explores how LLMs can serve as a thinking partner in software testing, especially when an investigation stalls and the next step is unclear.
Drawing from real QA work with complex, hard-to-reproduce bugs, she shows how describing symptoms, tested hypotheses, failed attempts, and system context to a language model can help expand the hypothesis space and surface directions that experienced testers may not have considered.
The session also examines the risks of LLM hallucinations, false confidence, and poorly grounded assumptions. Viktoria explains practical grounding techniques: what context to provide, how to structure prompts around evidence, how to separate model suggestions from verified facts, and how connected tools or agents can support more reliable investigation workflows.