ISTA 2026 adds Nikolay Avramov, who works on the test suites that still have to run in a year
Four frameworks built in-house at Telerik, a podcast episode about performance testing infrastructure, and a consultancy whose stated aim is to train its clients out of needing it. A useful counterweight to a programme full of agents.
The interesting question about test automation was never whether you can make a suite pass. It is whether the suite still earns its keep eighteen months later, after the UI has been redesigned twice and the person who wrote it has left.
Nikolay Avramov has spent his career on that side of the problem. He joins the ISTA 2026 line-up as Technical Director and co-owner of Automate The Planet — his profile is at Nikolay Avramov.
Up from the ground floor
The route is a specifically Bulgarian one. By the account given on the TestGuild podcast, he started from zero through Telerik Academy and worked up to Principal QA Engineer, trainer and consultant, with around a decade in quality assurance at the time of that recording. His current LinkedIn profile lists the Technical Director and co-owner role; the podcast, being older, describes him as Team Lead and Developer in Test, and a lecturer at Telerik Academy Alpha QA. Both are accurate to their moment, and together they show the shape of the career rather than a single title.
Four frameworks, built rather than bought
The detail worth pausing on is what he built during the Telerik years. Not a configuration of someone else’s tool — four in-house frameworks:
- a custom load and performance testing framework
- a system testing framework
- a web service testing framework
- a visual verification framework
Plus, per the same account, an assortment of productivity tools around them.
That list dates from a period when building your own harness was often the only option. It also explains the register he speaks in. Someone who has written a visual verification framework has personally met every reason image comparison betrays you: anti-aliasing, font rendering, a scrollbar that appears on one CI agent and not another.
His podcast appearance was on performance testing infrastructure — not writing load scripts, but planning and standing up the infrastructure that runs them, and where that fits in a test strategy. It is among the least glamorous topics in the field and one of the most frequently skipped.
A consultancy designed to leave
Automate The Planet describes its model plainly: embed into a company, define and execute an enterprise test automation strategy, provide hands-on leadership and project management — and upskill the internal team to take it over long-term.
The last clause is the unusual one. A consultancy that states its goal as making itself unnecessary is making a claim about what quality work is: a capability the client keeps, not a service they rent. Whether firms live up to that is a fair question to put to someone in person.
He also presents on the firm’s own framework, BELLATRIX — created by Automate The Planet’s CTO and co-founder Anton Angelov — including a talk titled Surviving UI Automation Armageddon with BELLATRIX. He has spoken at DevTalks Romania and on the regional conference circuit.
The counterweight
ISTA 2026 already has agentic quality engineering on the bill, including Dragan Spiridonov and his fleet of test agents. That makes Avramov’s presence more valuable, not less.
Someone has to ask what happens to the generated suite in month eighteen: who owns it, what it costs to run, and whether the team can still read it. That question is older than agents, and it has not been retired by them.
No session has been announced yet — the agenda will carry the detail once the programme is confirmed.
