Quality in Small Startups by Sam Connelly & 2026 Job Market by Andrea McHutchon

For our September in-person event generously hosted and supported by Salt Solutions Group, there are two great speakers offering diverse and prescient topics that people have asked us to cover for a while.

Sam Connelly, the popular tester and public speaker and former chair of Sydney Testers, will be reprising her talk at Equal Experts: "Small Team, Big Stack", to talk about how she brought in quality practice into a small fintech startup. Andrea McHutchon (Regional Director at Salt) will be giving us the facts and intelligence on the current 2026 tech job market including salary trends and in-demand skills!

Sam Connelly: Small Team, Big Stack: A Quality Toolkit Built from the Ground Up

Most talks about quality assume you've got a QA team, a test framework someone already built, and headcount to spare.
This one's for when you don't.

Sam Connelly a.k.a. BugHunterSam, Principal Quality Consultant within the Equal Experts network in Australia, walks through how a small startup team builds and maintains confidence in what they ship — for a predominantly JavaScript web app — without any of that safety net.

What we'll cover:

• Unit testing — what we actually test (and, just as importantly, what we don't)
• BDD, pragmatically — the test framework we built, and how we've kept it extensible as our underlying model evolves
• Debugging from the outside in — using analytics frameworks to reconstruct what a user did right before something broke
• Where we're headed — early experiments including a self-healing UI E2E agent, and using Claude Code as an exploratory testing partner rather than just a coding tool

Andrea McHutchon: An Update on the Sydney Tech Hiring Market and In-Demand Skills in 2026

As part of the event, we will provide an overview of the current technology talent and hiring market, sharing -

• Real-time insights into candidate availability
• Salary trends
• In-demand skills
• What we are seeing from businesses hiring across the sector.

We will also be giving out prizes along with our usual chances for networking and socialisation! Not to be missed