Many teams treat Quality Assurance as a checklist: Does the feature work? Are there any functional bugs? But often, a technically flawless product still delivers a frustrating user experience—full of friction, confusion, and subtle design flaws that drive customers away. These are pain points, and they are the bugs QA is missing.

This session introduces the Empathy-Driven Test Plan (EDTP), a practical framework for integrating user-centric design principles directly into the QA process. We will move beyond writing tests based on requirements documents and instead show you how to design tests around user personas, empathy maps, and user journey mapping. You’ll learn how to proactively identify and prioritize the usability, clarity, and emotional impact of your software, ensuring your testing efforts focus on uncovering critical friction points, not just checking boxes, and using AI as a tool, not as a replacement.